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Royal Ordnance Rocket Motors was a former division of Royal Ordnance, previously ICI, in Worcestershire that made small rocket motors for missiles.
The site was set up in 1951 for ICI by Sir St John Elstub CBE; he had been a bomber pilot in the Second World War, being knighted in the 1970 Birthday Honours. [1]
The site made cast doublebase solid propellant rocket motors.
The site was later run by Imperial Metal Industries (IMI), on behalf of the Ministry of Technology. The 200-acre site was later owned by the Ministry of Defence. It was a high-security site; local firemen had been prevented from attending incidents at the site.
On 4 March 1980 there was an explosion at the Worcestershire site, that severely damaged local houses, making them uninhabitable. The body of one of the dead workers was thrown 40 metres from the blast, landing in the garden of one of the damaged houses. It was the first accident in 28 years of the site. [2]
By the 1980s, Royal Ordnance was Europe's largest producer of ammunition. [3]
The Propellants, Explosives and Rocket Motor Establishment, in south-west Essex, was also bought by Royal Ordnance.
The Worcestershire site is now owned by Roxel Group, an Anglo-French company, and a main employer in Worcestershire.
It was at a site in Worcestershire. In the 1980s the site had around 600 workers, with around 560 in the 1990s. Rocket propellants were tested nearby.
Missiles that it made rocket motors for include
The site also made solid-propellant rockets for satellites.
A solid-propellant rocket or solid rocket is a rocket with a rocket engine that uses solid propellants (fuel/oxidizer). The earliest rockets were solid-fuel rockets powered by gunpowder; they were used in warfare by the Chinese, Indians, Mongols and Persians, as early as the 13th century.
Cordite is a family of smokeless propellants developed and produced in the United Kingdom since 1889 to replace gunpowder as a military propellant. Like gunpowder, cordite is classified as a low explosive because of its slow burning rates and consequently low brisance. These produce a subsonic deflagration wave rather than the supersonic detonation wave produced by brisants, or high explosives. The hot gases produced by burning gunpowder or cordite generate sufficient pressure to propel a bullet or shell to its target, but not so quickly as to routinely destroy the barrel of the gun.
Titan was a family of United States expendable rockets used between 1959 and 2005. Titan I and Titan II were part of the US Air Force's intercontinental ballistic missile fleet until 1987. The space launch vehicle versions contributed the majority of the 368 Titan launches, including all the Project Gemini crewed flights of the mid-1960s. Titan vehicles were also used to lift US military payloads as well as civilian agency intelligence-gathering satellites and to send highly successful interplanetary scientific probes throughout the Solar System.
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Royal Ordnance Factory (ROF) Bridgwater was a factory between the villages of Puriton and Woolavington in the Sedgemoor district of Somerset, UK that produced high explosives for munitions. It was slightly above sea level, between the 5 and 10 metre contour lines on Ordnance Survey maps. BAE Systems closed it when decommissioning was completed in July 2008.
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Royal Ordnance Factories (ROFs) was the collective name of the UK government's munitions factories during and after the Second World War. Until privatisation, in 1987, they were the responsibility of the Ministry of Supply, and later the Ministry of Defence.
The Royal Ordnance Factory was a WW2 Ministry of Supply Explosive Factory. It is sited adjacent to the village of Bishopton in Renfrewshire, Scotland. The factory was built to manufacture the propellant cordite for the British Army and the Royal Air Force. It also later produced cordite for the Royal Navy. The Ministry of Works were responsible for the site. It was the biggest munitions factory the MOD had, with up to 20,000 workers.
The Royal Navy Propellant Factory, Caerwent, Monmouthshire, Wales, UK, was dedicated to the manufacture of explosives or the storage of ammunition from 1939 to 1993.
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Bristol Aerojet (BAJ) was a joint venture between the Bristol Aeroplane Company of the United Kingdom and Aerojet General of the US begun in 1959 using the existing factory at Banwell near Weston super Mare, England.
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The Summerfield Research Station is a development and production site for solid rocket motors in the United Kingdom officially formed on 1 September 1951 by the Ministry of Supply. It was set up on the grounds of a former World War II munitions factory just south of Kidderminster, southwest of Birmingham. It opened on 1 January 1952 and remains in use as of 2020.
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