Castelion’s ‘Project Ranger’ Solid Rocket Motor Plant
Resistance builds against New Mexico’s new toxic nightmare
By Pat Elder
November 10, 2025
Castelion Corporation plans to produce and test rocket engines near Rio Rancho, New Mexico.
- Photo: Castelion Corp.
The citizens of Sandoval County, New Mexico face a defining and dangerous moment. Castelion Corporation’s plan to build a solid rocket motor and missile assembly plant on the West Mesa near Rio Rancho - if allowed to proceed - will likely endanger the community with highly mobile, persistent, and health-damaging chemicals for generations.
Solid-propellant manufacture and testing commonly involve powerful oxidizers, substances that help fuels burn, such as ammonium perchlorate (AP) and powdered aluminum and aluminum oxides. A range of toxic volatile organic solvents will also be used.
Routine firefighting at similar facilities have used extraordinarily toxic PFAS in firefighting foams, although it would be a great travesty and miscarriage of justice if Castelion used PFAS-based aqueous film-forming foams, (AFFF) at Rio Rancho. We must be cognizant of the state’s horrible experiences at Cannon AFB, Holloman AFB, Kirtland AFB, and the White Sands Missile Range. These facilities have severely poisoned local communities with PFAS and a host of toxins.
This is a great concern because under the DOD’s implementation of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), the military or its contractors can request waivers for “mission-critical” applications until October 2028. If Castelion’s facility conducts testing under a DOD contract it could claim that AFFF use remains authorized for specific security or national-defense functions.
The Rio Rancho community must know that combustion and improper disposal can generate hydrogen chloride, acid gases, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), dioxins/furans, and leave residues of energetic explosives or propellant breakdown products like RDX/HMX traces where munitions are handled.
Heavy metals such as lead, chromium, and cadmium may also be present in equipment, primers, or waste streams. It is a deadly communal cocktail.
Hexavalent chromium (Chromium VI) would likely be present at Castelion’s solid rocket motor manufacturing and testing facility - in plating, coating, or corrosion-control processes. It is indispensable for high-stress parts such as rocket-motor casings, turbine shafts, pistons, and hydraulic components.
Pacific Gas and Electric Company used Chromium VI at its natural-gas compressor station in Hinkley, California. PG&E allowed it to seep into the groundwater. By the late 1980s, the contamination plume of Chromium VI had spread for miles beneath the town, poisoning domestic wells. People reported cancers, miscarriages, nosebleeds, and chronic respiratory and skin problems.
In 1993, Erin Brockovich, a legal clerk for attorney Ed Masry, investigated the case on behalf of affected residents. Their lawsuit against PG&E led to a $333 million settlement in 1996.
The story was later dramatized in the 2000 film Erin Brockovich starring Julia Roberts.
See the following chart of toxins and their associated health impacts. that will likely impact the community if the project is allowed to proceed.
If the project moves forward - before any permits are granted - the public must demand full, independent baseline sampling of soil, shallow and deep groundwater, air, and dust.
The public must demand continuous monitoring of wells, strict pollutant-specific cleanup and containment requirements, and legally binding financial assurances for long-term remediation.
This is an urgent public-health and environmental issue. Rio Rancho must quickly learn from the suffering endured by other communities throughout the United and and around the world. Rio Rancho must not allow this to become a future problem to be managed after grave environmental damage and human suffering has been endured.
Hundreds of concerned residents packed an elementary school cafeteria on October 21, 2025 to question representatives from Castelion Corporation about the hypersonic missile manufacturing facility planned to be built just outside of Rio Rancho. Sandoval Signpost
Among the myriad of toxins, the principal risk arises from ammonium perchlorate, the oxidizer used in most solid rocket propellants. Once released, perchlorate is highly soluble, persistent, and capable of traveling miles through groundwater. It’s a killer.
Perchlorate harms infants and children by disrupting thyroid function, and that can cause a handful of developmental and health problems. Perchlorate causes hypothyroidism. It has been linked to learning disabilities, attention deficit disorders, and lower IQ’s. The toxin can slow physical growth, affect motor coordination, and behavior in children.
Groundwater
Beneath the West Mesa and Rio Rancho area lies a huge underground water system called the Santa Fe Group aquifer. It consists of sand, gravel, and clay layers. In some places this aquifer is more than two miles deep, but most wells in the area reach water at depths between 200 and 1,000 feet below the surface. These layers store the region’s main supply of drinking water. Because the aquifer’s layers are connected, pollution spilled or leaked at the surface can seep downward through the soil and into deeper zones over time. Once chemicals reach the groundwater, they can travel for miles and remain there for decades or even centuries. That’s why chemical safety at industrial sites on the West Mesa is so critical: once groundwater is polluted, it’s almost impossible to clean it up.
It is impossible to fully protect the community from the dangers inherent in this project. Castelion ought to be told to go away. If the project proceeds, permits must embed clear, enforceable safeguards. They should require strict perchlorate containment and groundwater monitoring; prohibition of TCE, PCE, 1-BP, and other toxic solvents; state-of-the-art air-emission controls for motor tests; and transparent public access to all monitoring data.
The Northen Meadows housing development is located 2.8 miles east of the blast sites.
A truly independent advisory board with citizen representation should review results and confer with regulators. These measures are prudent, science-based defenses against the irreversible costs of contamination.
Static-fire tests release clouds of fine aluminum-oxide particles and acidic gases such as hydrogen chloride. Without 100% capture and neutralization, these emissions can drift downwind, acidifying soils, corroding metal surfaces, and aggravating respiratory illness. The emissions must be filtered and scrubbed to the highest practicable standard, and test schedules should be publicly disclosed so residents can anticipate and evaluate local air-quality impacts.
There is no 100% foolproof way to capture and neutralize every emission from a static-fire test. Well-designed, multi-stage engineering controls can reduce emissions and make large releases unlikely, but they cannot eliminate all risk.
Castelion’s PowerPoint slide from Rio Ranch Community Meeting, October 21, 2025
Transparency is the cornerstone of public trust. If the community allows Catelion’s plans to unfold, the company should be required to post environmental monitoring results on an easy-to-understand public website and to host monthly community briefings where Castelion managers, regulators, and citizens can discuss data openly. Independent third-party sampling, funded by the company but managed by an independent party, distinct from the county or the state, should provide verification. When information is public, rumor and fear lose their power, and accountability becomes routine rather than adversarial. Is it possible?
Lessons from Other Solid Rocket-Motor Sites
On April 16, 2025, an explosion ripped through a Northrop Grumman solid-rocket-motor ingredient facility at Promontory, Utah
The risks surrounding rocket-motor manufacture are not merely speculative. On April 16, 2025, an explosion destroyed a Northrop Grumman solid-rocket-motor ingredient facility at Promontory, Utah, sending a shock wave across Box Elder County and leveling the building where the blast occurred. Fortunately, no fatalities were reported, but the incident underscored the volatile chemistry of propellant production. This most recent disaster revealed just how little margin for error exists when oxidizers and metal powders are handled at industrial scale.
Firefighters contained the blaze without using aqueous film-forming foams (AFFF) because of very real PFAS concerns, and residents within miles felt the concussion. The event was a sober reminder that the same materials now proposed in Sandoval County have a long record of violent instability when safety systems fail.
An even more instructive lesson comes from the Naval Surface Warfare Center at Indian Head, Maryland, the Navy’s principal site for propellant and explosive research. This place is close to home! The Navy has been mixing poisonous, deadly concoctions here since 1898.
In Maryland, decades of testing, mixing, and disposal of rocket and munitions materials have left a toxic legacy in the Potomac River watershed. In documents released through a Freedom of Information Act request and reported in ProPublica’s Bombs in Your Backyard investigation, surface-water samples at Indian Head contained 620,000 parts per billion of perchlorate—over one hundred thousand times higher than levels considered safe for drinking water. Cleanup has stretched on for years and remains incomplete. The Navy now spends millions annually to monitor and feebly attempt to contain the contamination that began with operations similar to those Castelion proposes in New Mexico. Indian Head’s experience stands as a stark warning: when energetic materials meet surface water and groundwater, the damage is generational, not temporary.
Promontory and Indian Head are bad enough, but they’re the tip of the toxic iceberg. The 4th estate is beholden to national security concerns and that’s why this may be sounding so alien – so anti American to many. Castelion says they like Rio Rancho because the people there are patriotic.
See the chart below that describes environmental contamination or explosions associated with selected solid rocket motor facilities across the country, along with associated contaminants released.
No mandatory regulation of perchlorate in the U.S.
The United States government is apparently OK with people drinking perchlorate. The government doesn’t enforce standards, they only suggest them. What else can they do? Make peace with enemies and stop building ballistic missiles? The perchlorate used in the solid rocket motor and missile assembly plant is being framed as a matter of national security, much like the way the EPA has handled PFAS. Despite years of rhetoric, there are still no fully enforceable federal standards for PFAS in drinking water or any other environmental medium.
The European Union enforces a standard of .25 part per billion of perchlorate in water consumed by infants.
Even then, scientists argued zero ought to be the standard.
What the American public doesn’t know will hurt them, while Rio Rancho is the newest communal guinea pig.
(MCL is maximum contaminant level)
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The same regulatory void that protects polluters at the national level is now being mirrored in Sandoval County’s handling of Project Ranger.
The environmental catastrophe ahead is being set in motion before a single properly noticed public hearing has taken place on the financing or environmental studies that New Mexico law requires. To date, no Environmental Impact Statement, hydrology report, traffic analysis, or hazardous-waste assessment has been made available to the public, yet Sandoval County approved the Project Ranger ordinance and associated funding anyway.
The County and City of Rio Rancho have committed up to $10 million in incentives to Castelion Corporation under an Intergovernmental Agreement (IGA) and Project Participation Agreement (PPA), relying largely on company-supplied data that have not been independently vetted or released to the public.
No properly noticed LEDA public hearing or legal notice in a paper of record preceded the October 22, 2025 vote, as required under New Mexico’s Local Economic Development Act (LEDA) and Open Meetings Act (OMA).
Meanwhile, the County has moved to purchase adjoining state-lease parcels in order to lease them back to Castelion—effectively using public land to host the facility. Combined with the incentive package, this means public land and public money are being used to advance a hypersonic rocket-motor and detonation plant before any comprehensive environmental review has been released and over substantial community opposition.
Local resistance is simple and urgent: to halt Project Ranger until Sandoval County and Rio Rancho comply with open-government laws and complete an independent, transparent environmental review—before a single shovel of earth is turned.
Community Organizing
Elaine Cimino is the founder of Common Ground Rising
Elaine Cimino is a Rio Rancho-based environmental advocate and founder of Common Ground Rising, a grassroots organization committed to protecting water, air, and community health in New Mexico’s Middle Rio Grande region. Under Cimino’s leadership, Common Ground Rising has organized residents to investigate and challenge local pollution sources, from landfill contamination to industrial and defense-related projects.
The group, now at the forefront of opposition to Castelion Corporation’s Project Ranger, is part of the Anthropocene Alliance of frontline environmental organizations. Cimino and her volunteers have organized public meetings, filed information-access requests, and sought expert assistance to assess potential health and groundwater impacts.
Cimino warns the community, “Even when operators promise ‘no open-air detonations’ or ‘limited testing,’ communities near similar facilities have later faced permit expansions or ‘temporary’ variances that normalize repeated test windows. We want to ground our warnings in solid science and case studies, not just fears.” Contact Elaine Cimino to offer help: ecimino10@gmail.com
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Please help me pay the bills to continue this research. -Pat
https://worldbeyondwar.org/support-military-poisons/