00:43:14 · Ethan Thornton
Now that will be happening here across, hopefully, a few product lines, but certainly certainly one or two within the next, like, six to nine months. So you you you don't wanna end up... You don't want the government to pull you too fast, and that's where you have to be honest. Like, they want production real bad right now. Like, give me some time because I don't wanna I don't wanna screw this up for you. But it also needs to happen because products die when they stay in that stage too long, and companies die. Your overhead just builds and builds and builds, and you wake up and your unit economics just fundamentally don't make sense. And who cares on the company level? But when your unit economics don't make sense, you're certainly not delivering asymmetry to the warfighter. And so, yeah, it's a BDF or... Is the the the way to put it. It's a trust building ex... Experiment with the government. It's getting your unit economics or your your CapEx economics and capital stack right to pre build production so the customer really, really trusts you're ready to go. This is where we kind of have an a... Unfair advantage on components because I can go and scale for companies and then bring ex Pentagon official by a factory that is actually making thousands of things, which very few people in defense do. But, yeah, I mean, that's the stage we're at today. We're, like, right in the meat of, like, 10 to 90 work right now. Across several of our product lines, we'll be wrapping that up by end of year. So that'll be likely Pike, Glide, Stratus, and then Dart. We're rearchitecting Viper, I think, to add a lot more range. We initially architected Viper around off the shelf engines. I think the Viper architected off Mach Jet will be a lot better. And so Dart Viper will be sort of mid next year is when we'll leave the 90 work. And then as soon as the government custom contracts, and ideally before, because you can sell internationally and you can sell b to b. So before on some, not before on others, we'll be entering rate. And that's where we're setting up factories. So big, big, big factory down in Texas, another big factory right next door here. That one's more development. Texas is, full automotive style production. Like, this factory is still... It's meant for flexibility. So it's it's more of a development facility. That will be full true rate.
00:45:08 · Ethan Thornton
Victorville Energetics will be full true rate. Along the way, though, I think this is where a lot of companies die. You can't forget how to do the one to 10 work when you're in 10 to 90. And in the act of doing the 90 to a 100 work, so many companies sell their soul by adding so much overhead of, like, process onto the company. And so one of the things that's controversial that I I am doing and will continue to do is to have products at every stage of that. Because excellent engineers like working on something important. And so the second... And and there's overlap here, but generally, you've got engineers that are good at, like, zero to 30. You've got engineers that are good at, like, 20 to 60. Another advantage of running a functional org is you can kinda pull those engineers throughout the process of the program at the right time. But, dude, if you're not doing a one to 10 program, why... Especially if you're not doing that for, like, a year, Your one to 10 engineers are gonna leave. And so there are so many reasons that you need to have a lot of products to build a great company in this space. I wanna be clear. I would not have this many products in any other industry. But in this space is one of the reasons that I think it's actually insanely, insanely important to do so.
00:46:11 · Ty Morse
[00:46:11] S0: When you think of like spinning up an entire new product from scratch, you may not necessarily have all the talent that's required to go from the complete from scratch, like just on the whiteboard to a finished product. So how do you basically rapidly... You know, you have some idea and then go rapidly find all the right talent to fit that mold, like the guy to spearhead it and everyone beneath him?
00:46:34 · Ethan Thornton
[00:46:34] S1: It's another good argument for a function based org. There was a really painful period of the company where we didn't have all of those talent sets. I didn't have someone who could, like, characterize the RF dynamics of the vehicle, who could go and do, like, loads and dynamics, who could go and do, like, reliability engineering. Like, I I guess we somewhat still have that guy. That's one that's being stood up right now. Thermals. The thing about building a products in any space, but I think especially in this space, is you've got, like, 40 different disciplines. And if you miss out on one discipline, the program just fails. Like, if if we improperly design the thermals on Viper, I have to restart Viper. Now, fortunately, my blocks only take three months, but that's a three month slip on, like, a six to twelve month program. And so the reason it's taken us so long to stand up an excellent engineering function is it just takes a long time to build all of those functions. We're at that point now. The nice thing is we're not verticalized. We're we're based on function. So I don't need a thermal engineer for every single one of my programs. I need a thermal engineer, and he or she will probably have one or two. They'll be the lead, and we'll have one or two people that work for them. And thermal spikes at certain portions, just to highlight thermal. This happens across the board, but thermal spikes at certain portions of the development process. It's really, really big at the beginning. There's not that much new data and, like, the prototyping phase. It's super autoflight testing, fix those issues, and then it's really, really hard as you design an envir... Environmentals for rate. And so each of these functions is, like, spiky along the process of development. Now the nice thing is they tend to spike in the same phases in each development. And so what you wanna do is you never wanna have two products in the same phase of design. It's, like, very, very painful because then those spikes overlap. But if you wanna run, one, an economically efficient org, much more importantly, an org where folks are just doing excellent work all the time and you build an excellent culture, you need to basically impedance match having a vehicle in each phase of that development so that those spikes are levelized as much as possible.
00:48:32 · Ty Morse
[00:48:32] S0: You can have the desire to ship fast and, like, iterate quickly, but how do you actually design the organization so that the iteration speed and everything is just a cut above anyone else?
00:48:43 · Ethan Thornton
[00:48:43] S1: So one, the most powerful thing is always, like, team size and the types of people you have doing it. There's not that much work to do in aerospace. Like, shipping an iPhone is, like, many orders of magnitude more work than shipping a Glide. The difference is aerospace is so so so coupled. Like, you can't make a decision in a vacuum from any other thing. And so what this means is that most of your engineering time is actually decisions and communication. The best thing you can do to minimize that is to decrease team size. The amount of people that have to communicate with each other grows as the factorial of team size. Exponential. And so the the the best thing you can do, especially in aerospace to make a program move fast, is keep a very small team. Now... And that... You see that throughout history. Like, this is why the SR 71 was something like 15 designed engineers. And I I truly believe that on these programs, like, 10 or 15 of the best people on earth will outship 300 of the top 1% people on earth. But you have to have really, really good people to pull that off, but that's the first thing you have to do. Now that that just means it is always kind of a painful process. Like, teams, they have a lot of work to get done. That's why it's a very intense place to work. That's the first thing. Second thing is deep analysis. Right? Like, you want really, really good hittle. You want excellent aerodynamic... Actually, it applies across literally every domain. Like, analysis is the way you move quickly. Third thing is the ability to cut prototypes incredibly quickly. Like, we're we're joking today watching the pike test. This is like a $2,000,000 test today. Now at rate, Pike will cost significantly less than that. And if I wanted to, today, Pike could cost a lot less than that. The reason that's so expensive is because we we had, like, really four weeks from design release to first flight on the Thay. And that means you're just surging to get the prototype built as quickly as you can. And so this is partially vertically integrating prototyping capabilities and partially, like, excellent vendor relationships, and you're willing to pay these people a lot. Because the cost is not really the pike you're flying.