Dive Brief:
- Aerospace component startup Salient Motion has established a precision ball and roller screws manufacturing division focused on in-house production, the company announced Monday.
- The Michigan-based Saginaw Precision division will produce precision ball and roller screws for aerospace, defense, robotics and other amped-up device functions, according to the press release.
- Saginaw Precision’s 17,000-squre-foot facility is expected to reach capacity of about 50,000 ball screws per year by 2027. The plant will also serve a testing site for manufacturing intellectual property that Salient Motion plans to use at its future factories. Salient Motion declined to disclose the site’s current capacity.
Dive Insight:
Salient Motion acquired the facility on June 1, and the first ball screw assembly came off the line on Aug. 3, Vishaal Mali, founder and CEO of Salient Motion, said in an email.
The company currently has 10 employees and anticipates training and hiring 35 “highly specialized machinists,” Mali added. The startup is also adding machinery to expand production capacity “as quickly as possible.”
Precision ball screws are a critical component in missile systems such as Lockheed Martin’s Patriot Advanced Capability-3 Missile Segment Enhancement and Raytheon’s PAC‑2 Guidance Enhanced Missile‑Tactical.
“One of the key benefits of using ball screws in missile fin actuation is their high efficiency,” according to a September 2023 blog post by component maker Helix Linear Technologies. “Ball screws have a very low friction coefficient, which results in a high mechanical efficiency. This means that a relatively small amount of energy is required to drive the screw and actuate the fins.”
That small amount of energy is crucial in order to extend the missile’s range, Helix added.
Missiles also generally use four or more actuators, which means each system requires multiple precision ball screws, Salient Motion said in the press release.
“Precision ball screws sit at the heart of the systems that move aircraft, missiles, and robots, yet much of that precision manufacturing capability has moved offshore,” Mali said in a statement. “This critical part is a constraint, and bringing it in-house gives us greater control end-to-end.”
However, the ball screws are hard to come by and can take years to make, according to a Sept. 26 story by The New York Times. And with President Donald Trump and the Defense Department urging weapon-makers to ramp up production, the long precision ball screw production process can cause a bottleneck in the supply chain.
Salient Motion plans to build and grow its precision screw manufacturing platform. The company is integrating precision ball screw manufacturing with its actuator development, enabling the Saginaw Precision and Salient Motion to accelerate the full development cycle.
Saginaw Precision has developed a process that pairs ball screw expertise with modern software, standard machine tools, repurposed equipment and thread-grinding capability, according to the press release. The focus is to ramp up high-precision screw production and at greater scale without depending on “traditional purpose-built equipment.”
The process has reduced production time from years to about eight weeks.
Much of the precision ball screw production in the U.S. has been off-shored over the past few years. Still, even China has fallen short of its 2025 goal to produce 80% of the ball screws its defense companies use, despite the country dominating 90% of the market, according to a U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission report released in November 2025.
