SpaceX purchased a Carroll County, Maryland manufacturer of a critical rocket component.
Carroll County has been doing precision aerospace manufacturing for decades, building Composite Overwrapped Pressure Vessels — COPVs — filament-wound cylinders, carbon fiber wrapped under precise tension, engineered to hold compressed gas at extreme pressure without failing. They are in rockets. They are also in the evacuation slides that deploy when a commercial flight makes an emergency landing — the compressed gas that inflates those slides in seconds comes from tanks built to the same principle.
This production happens in Carroll County. It happened in Taneytown, under the name MasterWorks. In 2014, Norwegian company Hexagon Purus acquired MasterWorks, describing the deal as securing key technology and enhanced engineering capacity. This team built fuel storage solutions for the NASA Commercial Crew Program, which supported every U.S.-based manned space mission from 2018 forward.
Under Hexagon’s ownership, the facility took on a second ambition. Hexagon Purus bet on hydrogen as the next major energy transition in heavy transport, and Westminster became part of that infrastructure. Their customer list for hydrogen storage solutions for heavy duty trucking and transit bus OEMs included New Flyer, Hino, and Nikola.
In January 2022, Hexagon Purus opened a new facility at 1221 Independence Way in the Westminster Technology Park. The entire operation moved from Taneytown over eight weeks — machines, tooling, institutional memory — all of it relocated and operational by January. According to a CompositesWorld profile published in 2023, Jim Harris, who had run MasterWorks before and through the Hexagon acquisition, described deciding on Westminster as “an easy choice” — that Maryland continued to evolve in ways that let them attract top talent across the organization. Harris had built over 25 years of experience in composite cylinders by the time of the acquisition. The head of operations, Levi Haines, had the same — both had started at Pressure Technologies Inc., and both eventually landed at MasterWorks.
In February 2025, Hexagon Purus divested its aerospace business to SpaceX, selling all shares of Masterworks. In their divestment statement, they reasoned “The aerospace business has developed well in recent years and has now reached a stage where an industrial owner with a dedicated aerospace focus is deemed to best support its future.”
At the same time, the Company noted it did not expect the hydrogen mobility market in North America to represent significant potential in the near-to-medium term. They had built out manufacturing capacity in Westminster, in Kelowna, in Germany, in China, betting on a hydrogen transport future that is arriving more slowly than the investment required.
Perhaps this is due to one of the key hang-ups around hydrogen: corrosion. The hydrogen molecule is smaller than the lattice structure of most metals, which means it migrates through container walls over time, impregnating the material and creating corrosion from within. Long-term data on hydrogen motors at scale does not yet exist, which is complicating investments and industry prioritization.
The hydrogen customer contracts — the buses, the trucks, the transit applications — stayed with Hexagon Purus. The aerospace piece, Hexagon Masterworks Inc., went to SpaceX for $12.5 million in cash and up to $2.5 million in contingent earn-out. Fifteen million dollars total for a precision manufacturing operation with decades of institutional knowledge, an existing SpaceX supplier relationship*, and a workforce that already knows how to build components for rockets.
The work at 1221 Independence Way was already part of the Starship supply chain. SpaceX just removed the intermediary — and they had specific reasons to want direct control. In June 2025, a COPV failure caused the loss of Ship 36 during a static fire test. In November 2025, another COPV failure during cryogenic loading destroyed Booster 18. According to reporting by engineer and analyst Chris Prophet, SpaceX responded by purchasing the COPV supplier directly, amending the component design, and instituting more rigorous non-destructive testing under cryogenic conditions before fitting any vessel to Starship.
On April 21, 2026, two building permit applications appeared in Carroll County’s public portal. Both permits describe new concrete masonry construction at the same address. The open job postings — welders, NDE inspectors, a Quality Inspector specifically for Starship, an office manager familiar with International Traffic in Arms Regulations compliance — point to an operation that is actively staffing up. The Starship program has a growing appetite for what Westminster makes.
The acquisition also brings a name with considerable notoriety. Economists use the term agglomeration to describe what happens when firms in related industries begin clustering in the same geography — drawn by proximity to suppliers, to specialized labor, to the kind of technical knowledge that doesn’t transfer easily through a job posting. It is how Huntsville, Alabama became an aerospace hub without ever announcing it was becoming one. A government installation arrived. Suppliers followed. Engineers moved there. The knowledge concentrated. Decades passed before anyone named what had formed.
Carroll County has more of the underlying conditions than it typically gets credit for in that kind of story. Strong fiber infrastructure. A documented history in precision manufacturing. And a deeper aerospace lineage than most people realize. An institutional ecosystem — county offices, nonprofits, workforce development organizations — with the connective tissue that most exurban counties don’t have. Proximity to Baltimore and Washington without their cost structure. Housing that is still affordable enough to be a genuine recruitment asset.
SpaceX filing construction permits in Westminster Technology Park is, at minimum, a reason to pay attention to what Carroll County has quietly been building.
1211 Independence Way has been doing serious work for a long time. MasterWorks built it. Hexagon Purus scaled it. NASA flew on it. SpaceX bought it.