Minneapolis-based Chromatic 3D Materials has established a rocket propellant test-firing capability at Camp Ripley, a 53,000-acre Minnesota National Guard training installation near Little Falls, under a five-year lease that took effect June 1, 2026. The move gives the company something few additive manufacturers in the propulsion space can claim: a print lab and a live-fire range under the same roof, with no shipping, no third-party handoff, and no weeks-long wait between fabricating a propellant grain and finding out whether it burns the way the model said it would.

Chromatic's core business is industrial 3D printing of reactive polyurethane and elastomer materials — custom rubber parts, urethane billets, printed bladders and bellows — and rocket propellant testing is a new application area for the company rather than its established line of work. Still, for a company entering the propulsion space, that print-lab-to-live-fire adjacency is the entire pitch. Chromatic's press release frames the facility as a closed loop — print, test, iterate, on one site — rather than the fragmented pipeline that typically governs solid propellant development, where fabrication happens at one facility, static testing at another, and weeks of logistics, paperwork, and cooling-off periods sit in between.

What's Actually at Camp Ripley

Camp Ripley itself is not new infrastructure — it's a long-established Minnesota Army and Air National Guard training site, and its scale (53,000 acres) gives it the standoff distance and range control that live propellant testing requires. What Chromatic has added is purpose-built: an on-site propellant print lab paired with test-firing infrastructure that the company says meets Department of War standards. That's the detail worth underlining for anyone tracking the additive-manufacturing-meets-defense space — this isn't a lab that prints parts and then trucks them somewhere else to be evaluated. The fabrication and the validation step are collocated, which is the whole point of a "closed-loop" claim.

According to Chromatic, the lab is built to support testing of advanced propellant formulations and grain geometries — the internal shape of a solid rocket motor's fuel charge, which determines how the burn surface area (and therefore thrust) changes over time — for both tactical and strategic propulsion systems. Grain geometry is exactly the kind of variable additive manufacturing is supposed to unlock: complex internal channels, gradient structures, and non-standard cross-sections that are difficult or impossible to cast conventionally. Being able to print a new geometry and put it on a test stand in the same building, rather than queuing it into an external test schedule, is the mechanism by which that advantage is supposed to translate into faster iteration.

The Partnership Stack

The facility isn't a solo Chromatic build. The company lists the Minnesota National Guard, the Defense Innovation OnRamp Hub: Minnesota, and the Minnesota National Security Ecosystem as partners, alongside expeditionary power company LEMA, which is working under a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers contract to run a forward-deployed solar power demonstration at the site. That last piece is a bit of an outlier relative to propellant testing itself, but it fits a broader pattern in defense-adjacent innovation hubs: co-locating multiple dual-use technology demonstrations at a single accessible range lowers the overhead for everyone involved, rather than each partner standing up its own isolated test infrastructure.

Chromatic CEO Cora Leibig framed the facility in speed-to-capability terms: "Development and manufacturing speed are critical in modern defense," she said, adding that the setup "allows us to rapidly demonstrate performance, validate manufacturing approaches and reduce the time required to deliver advanced propulsion solutions." Matt Hickey, managing director of the Defense Innovation OnRamp Hub: Minnesota, described the hub's role as connective tissue rather than technical: "Our role is to help make those connections, reduce barriers to testing."

That "reduce barriers to testing" language is worth taking at face value. Access to qualified test ranges — ones with the right safety certifications, standoff distances, and regulatory sign-off for energetic materials — is one of the persistent bottlenecks for smaller propulsion companies trying to move from bench-scale formulation work to anything resembling a fielded product. A National Guard training facility with a five-year committed lease is a meaningfully different proposition than borrowing range time on an ad hoc basis.

What It Means for Makers

This isn't a story about desktop printers or hobbyist propellant work — nobody should read "propellant print lab" and think of a modified FDM rig on a workbench. Energetic materials fabrication and live-fire testing sit inside a regulatory and safety envelope that's entirely separate from consumer or prosumer 3D printing, and Camp Ripley's Department of War–standard infrastructure exists precisely because that separation matters. What it does matter for is the broader trajectory of additive manufacturing as a serious tool in aerospace and defense propulsion — a trend line that's relevant background for anyone in the AM industry tracking where investment and infrastructure dollars are flowing. Solid rocket propellant, unlike a printed bracket or fixture, has historically been one of the hardest categories to move onto additive platforms, precisely because the fabrication process and the qualification process are so tightly coupled to safety testing. A dedicated print-to-test facility is a structural bet that closing that loop — rather than just improving the printer or the material chemistry in isolation — is where the next gains come from. For companies building specialty and industrial print technology generally, it's also a data point on how test infrastructure, not just print hardware, is becoming a competitive differentiator: owning the range is as strategically valuable as owning the printer.

Bottom Line

Chromatic 3D Materials has secured a five-year foothold at a 53,000-acre National Guard range specifically to pair propellant printing with live-fire validation on-site, backed by state and defense-innovation partners and a parallel expeditionary power demo from LEMA. The facility went live June 1, 2026, and the company is positioning it as a speed play: shrinking the time between printing a new propellant grain geometry and knowing, empirically, how it performs.

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