Back to the future: the Gyrojet weapons

The “Gyrojet” weapons are part of these “phantasmatic” weapons, in the literal sense of the term… usually until a copy is held in one’s hands. These weapons have a very “fake” appearance: lost in a child’s toy chest, few adults would pay the slightest attention to what appears to be a dart gun! And yet, if these weapons have not met with glorious destinies, they are absolutely not without interest!

Somewhere in time and space

The purpose of this article is not to make a historical presentation, but much more to focus on the ins and outs of this concept. Also, a little historical contextualization will greatly contribute to apprehending the spirit of the time that saw the birth of these atypical weapons. The company MBAssociates (generally called MBA), creator and producer of “Gyrojet” weapons and ammunition was created in the 1960s by Robert Mainhardt (the M) and Arthur Biehl (the B). It was located in San Ramon, California, in the San Francisco Bay area. What interests us here is the time and place. The era was simply that of the conquest of space and NASA missions that would lead the Americans to walk on the Moon. The era was also that of armament research (as examples for the small arms, the SPIW program and the Salvo project) and that of a culmination of the Cold War, with the Soviet missile crisis in Cuba and of course, the Vietnam War. It was at the same time that the American state-owned small arms industry disappeared with the closure of the Springfield Armory (the original…) by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. The place is the epicenter in the United States of what we now call “the tech“: the West Coast. At the same time, and barely further south on the Pacific coast, another company would make history: it was Armalite, where Eugene Stoner, Jim Sullivan and Bob Fremont were developing the AR-15.

For the private armaments and new technologies industry, this was the place and time of all the possible. All this under the California sun in an unprecedented cultural and consumerist explosion. We can therefore understand the energy, money and enthusiasm involved in this project, which seems a few decades later as “obsolete”. But at that moment of space and time, nothing was less certain.