Submitted by Zachary Darden, Rio Rancho
Over the past few months, the Castelion Corporation has been quietly considering Sandoval County as the location for a new rocket motor manufacturing facility, which will contain several structures, with the biggest one being over 200,000 square feet, on more than 1,000 acres.
Despite the scale of the project, the Californian company has kept its plans largely under wraps, only hosting two city meetings that were open to the public before the project was pushed forward by council members of Rio Rancho, including Mayor Greg Hull, with backing from Senator Jay Block.
The secrecy around this project has sparked outrage among several council members, such as Nicole List, who expressed concerns about the lack of transparency and insufficient notice for residents to attend these meetings. As a concerned resident myself, I became aware of the public meetings only through social media platforms such as Nextdoor and Facebook, just days before they occurred. There were no flyers available to provide additional information.
Additionally, there are significant environmental issues that remain unaddressed, including the impact of the facility’s projected use of 8 million gallons of water on local aquifers and the potential for soil and water contamination from chemicals like ammonium perchlorate. To say the least, the environmental concerns aren’t just being brushed aside, they are being deliberately ignored.
The implications for existing property owners and nearby tribal lands, particularly those of the Santa Ana reservation, have also not been adequately considered and left in the dark. While Mayor Hull claims to prioritize the interests of Rio Rancho residents, he could not assure that the limited job opportunities created by Castelion would be reserved for New Mexicans rather than out-of-state workers.
Furthermore, the company has not clarified how it plans to safeguard national security in the event of a foreign threat targeting the facility, given the significant military presence in the area. New data released by WildEarth Guardians reveals that oil and gas waste spills in New Mexico jumped nearly 400% in the third quarter of 2025, and as of current times, a toxic chromium plume from Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) is continuing to spread underground onto the land of San Ildefonso Pueblo. With the current spill threats currently ongoing in New Mexico, the Castelion corporation did not conduct a toxic plume study prior to the Rio Rancho council members advancing this project further, driving more questions about the safety of this project.
All and all, the Castelion Corporation, as well as Sandoval County and the city of Rio Rancho, have failed to ensure trust from the residents of the area, resulting in a project that will more than likely have irreversible consequences. Until we have full transparency, real independent testing and iron-clad accountability, pushing this forward isn’t “innovation”, it’s reckless. It’s gambling with our health, our water, our land and our future.
As a Sandoval County resident and a business owner in Rio Rancho, I appreciate Darden’s thoughtful LTE–I couldn’t agree more. Castelion’s threat to our community’s health and safety should not be taken lightly.
This is spot on. The history of the military industrial complex in New Mexico is a history of environmental and public health disasters, from the Trinity Downwinders to the PFAS forever chemical contamination at Holloman AFB (the highest recorded levels in the world) to the chromium plume at Los Alamos National Labs mentioned in this article.
The US military and the weapons industry as a whole see this state as a dumping ground, inhabited by people who are too poor to matter. Shame on Sandoval County and the Rio Rancho City Council for pushing Project Ranger through!
Thank you for bringing this important issue forward, Zachary Darden. We all deserve to have our a say in our community’s growth and development, and it is an issue of gross negligence that this project was not brought to residents’ attention long before this recent meeting. In my Albuquerque neighborhood, we have some work being planned by an aerial fiber installer. I have already received two notices on this. One in my mailbox, another with a brightly colored door flyer hung on my front door knob. You’d have to be dead to miss hearing about the community work planned for the area. In comparison, the lack of effort made to alert residents and indeed all New Mexicans about a project with such national security and environmental ramifications is astounding. The Castilion project sounds like a train wreck waiting to happen. It’s clear Castilian is not a corporation that values community input or perspective. Mayor Greg Hull and Senator Jay Block, what on earth are you thinking?