00:00:00 · Ty Morse
[00:00:00] S0: Today, I'm sitting down with Ethan Thornton, the founder and CEO of Mach Industries. You work on a whole bunch of different things, and you're gonna be working on a whole bunch of different programs. But I think one of the most interesting things to start on is you're gonna scale one of the biggest factories in The United States or maybe the biggest factory in The United States for producing solid rocket motors. So how do you go from not building any rockets to producing like thousands a year?
00:00:23 · Ethan Thornton
[00:00:23] S1: Yes. We're doing that. We're very early in that particular journey. So we're we're very good on the airframe side right now. We're very early in that in that journey. We we have designs that are working today. So Pike that you'll see behind me actually uses a solid rocket motor to take off. So we've flown that design now. Now we're basically in the process of having to industrialize to mass produce those things. It's very challenging because you're manufacturing millions of pounds of explosives, essentially. That's what solid rocket motors are. Right? Like, you you mix them, and then you're trying to operate them right between getting enough thrust and exploding. Explosives. Which all rocket engines are. But especially with solid rocket motors, by the time you light them, you don't have really any control, at least with conventional designs. So we're working on stuff to be able to throttle them and other things. We basically just light it, and it either works or it doesn't work. And it... When it doesn't work, it is usually quite kinetic. So, yeah, we're firing them today. I think the the big steps, one, we're talking... We're building out basically a large storage area for solid rocket motors. So one of the things that's hard is you're getting all this precursor shipped to you. At scale, millions, tens of millions of pounds of explosives, and then at the end of the process, it's arguably more explosive. So right now, we're retrofitting about 200 bunkers that we're renting out to be able to store this stuff. There's a lot of work going in on the machining side for the casings and other things. So this factory is about a 117,000 square feet, aiming to open one about twice that size over the next four months, specifically for energetics. So starting with solid rocket motors, we'll eventually do warheads over time. So you gotta make the casing. And then the the pouring and curing is the most interesting part. I like to say... I... It's not actually my saying. So the company... The way we got here, we actually acquired a company called X Squadron. I generally hate doing acquisitions. In this specific case, one, just the licensing to do this sort of stuff would have taken, like, five years. Two, this company was excellent at the design side.
00:02:16 · Ethan Thornton
So they're basically a lab that for two decades, was the guys who used to run solid rocket motors for the Air Force, had started this company, and for two decades had won hundreds of contracts, basically designing the most cutting edge stuff for Air Force, for NASA, for DARPA, and for SOCOM. And so I guess all that being said, his saying, which I quite like, is jet engines are plumbing, solid rocket motors are baking. And it's actually very similar. You're, like, mixing this sort of dough. You you pour it into the casing. You got a cured at temp. It's like a very, very, very specific arduous kinda arts and craftsy process. So I've been making solid rocket motors since high school. So actually in my garage in high school, used to make them simple stuff like rocket candy. I'm sure a bunch of folks have done that. They're listening right now. But I'm familiar with the process, but it's it's gonna be this really interesting thing of how do you fully automate that, like, baking process. Because one of the big things is how do you get is... Like, how do you get every human out of the loop that you possibly can? And then for us, yeah, we're aiming to be able to do hundreds of thousands a year in the coming two years or so. It's very necessary. Right? Like, these single biggest rate limiting factor on production production of systems like this will be warheads, and it will be solid rocket motors. I deeply believe, after jet engines, which I feel good about. And so that's the next thing to jump on super aggressively. If you're gonna do it, you might as well do it all the way. And half our revenue comes from selling stuff to other companies as well, so a lot of this actually won't be for our products. But it'll be this really interesting process of securing the supply lines for precursor coming in. Right now, all the precursor for a lot of the stuff is made at one facility in The US that's bought out, like, three years. So this isn't a build thing. This is a supply chain effort, but finding an excellent partner to... That can build their own sites, potentially actually on-site for us, to redo the precursor process. You get it shipped. You store it all. You machine hundreds of thousands of these casings.
00:04:06 · Ethan Thornton
You go through this crazy automated but still arts and craftsy process because it's fundamentally baking of pouring these things, casting them, curing them, and then, again, storing them. And then you've got to figure out how to ship hundreds of thousands of these things around the country and around the world. So the the site's nice because we're, like, right on an airport. We're we're right by rail lines, but it's out in the middle of the desert, which is pretty rare. So it's out by Old George Air Force Base. It's about an hour and a half east to here. So it's as close as you can possibly be to this factory to have millions of pounds of this stuff. And that's also where we test. So we're actually sending a test vehicle, one we're not public about yet, but up past the Kármán line over the next year. So that vehicle is actually being assembled right now. That's towards a future looking program with the contract we're on. We also test up to 60,000 pound thrust, big solid rocket motors. So most of this conversation is sort of pike sized solid rocket motors. Think 150 pounds, make somewhere between five and ten thousand pounds of thrust. We're also gearing up for very, very large solid rocker motors. We unfortunately... Or fortunately, because I hope we don't need them. We won't be making hundreds of thousands of those, at least in the near term. But it's also a nice place because we can test test these giant solid rocket motors. And then we also do hypergall testing out there. So to the best of my understanding, we're one of two companies in The United States that sort of actively tests hypergolics at scale. Are you familiar with hypergolic engines? Not. So there there are a bunch of different types of rocket engines. Traditionally, liquid rocket engines are the highest performance that are throttledable. That's what you'll see on the Falcon nine on Starship. They tend to be cryogenically cooled, and then you also have to ignite them. Right? You add hydrogen and... Or oxygen and methane or or oxygen and hydrogen. You actually have to ignite it. The thing about hypergalls is they're stable at room temperature, and they auto ignite when they touch, which is fantastic for military applications. If you're putting something up on a satellite, it's great because you don't boil off over time.
00:06:01 · Ethan Thornton, Ty Morse
The downside is they auto ignite when they touch, and then they're they're quite carcinogenic and other things, mutagenic. And so we... We're also... We have, like... The number's increasing rapidly, but right now, four different test stands where we do hypergolic testing. We'll do a lot of the hypergolic testing for Golden Dome as well. That's part of our helping other companies part of the business. But anyway, so that was a lengthy answer, but that's what's happening out there. [00:06:25] S0: If you had to, like, go through the process of from scratch on the drawing board, you have nothing to, like, fully spinning up not only the design and process and supply chain and everything to where you're actually producing maybe hundreds of thousands of units a year, what does that actually look like for something like this?
00:06:42 · Ethan Thornton
[00:06:42] S1: Yeah. So solid rocket motors are a bit unique compared to the rest of our supply chain because this was actually an acquisition. I'm generally somewhat bearish on acquisition, and I'll keep saying this. It's an excellent tool that you should use on occasion. Engines, we've built ourselves, and so I can explain that one. That's been a fun one. Basically, we started at the platform level as a company with stuff like this. We're now in the process of marching very, very... Hard very down into sort of the supply chain, because a lot of the stuff we just don't make is the West. And so jet engines is an excellent example. We're ramping into production on these things. The engine quality was not what we expected from a lot of the vendors in the space. And then more importantly, right now is the West would make, like, 300 of these a month. And you've got customers trying to buy tens of thousands of these things over the next two years. And so it it becomes somewhat non optional to vertically integrate this thing. Now traditionally, a jet engine takes, like, four years to design. In the process of development, you can't start as a company by boiling the ocean. So there's always this, like, throttling function of, like, I need to ship products, but how much of the supply chain do I actually wanna bite off? It it turns out you wanna bite off as little as you possibly can while still ending up with an excellent product. So on a lot of things, if it touches automotive or consumer electronics, you generally want to buy. Now that is not... I think people view supply chain wrong. It's not like you walk up with, like, a... An RFQ and, like, say, hey, can I buy this thing now? It's like a deep relationship build. In many cases, they're building factories for you. You're investing in these companies. That's a supply chain effort. But sometimes that is just, like, physically not enough. So on jet engines, there was just not a path to doing that. So I said, okay. There's usually a four year process. We have really, like, a year, year and a half to get this done. And if we don't build our own jet engines on that timeline, our products just fundamentally won't ship. And so we actually start with two jet engine teams. So... And I I rarely do this, but this was a great kind of derisk given how existential this was. So we had one led by a guy, Jeremy Clyde.