Anduril opens robotic solid rocket motor facility in Mississippi targeting 6,000 tactical motors annually

rocket motor facility. But we'll let her break it down for us. Welcome to the stream. How are you doing? We have one minute while we get to keep clapping. John, just keep clapping. Just keep welcome to the stream. How are you doing? What's happening? Oh, it's a really good day.

Just uh just commenced or finished a ribbon cutting uh with our new facility in coastal Mississippi with uh Chairman Wicker about 10 minutes ago. So, uh it's good day so far. Fantastic. Uh tell us more about this facility. What are you making? How big is the facility? Um R&D. How big were the scissors?

You know, the scissors were not as big as I was expecting. Uh I mean, they they were big, but they weren't like the uh the comically big. No, we uh just finished the uh a full rate production facility for kind of what the 2020s can do for automated robotic full rate production of solid rocket motors.

We have a 450 acre facility in coastal Mississippi about nine buildings. And uh when we moved in here, it was a mult facility in 2020 and we we saw that the good bones it had and the ability of of what it could do. So we we took one of the buildings on the far south end of the campus uh nearly quadrupled the footprint.

um got worldclass um engineers specifically from the automotive industry to really look at what solid rock and motor production could look like in the 2020s with robotics automation and really putting um you know robotics everywhere where there's a safety critical or a quality critical component.

Speaking of robotics, what's behind you? That is one of two robots that are involved in the casting assembly. Uh so we we go through a mixing of solid rocket propellant. Um and then you have to cast it where you uh you're essentially filling a mold like you were uh solid rocket motors is a lot like making a cake.

You you mix together dry ingredients, wet ingredients and then you pour them in a mold and you cure in an oven. And so this is uh the robots that's used for the casting process. Can you give us a a view into the shape of the company?

I know uh Adronos was the rocket motor company that was acquired, but it sounds like you've hired a lot of people. How big is the organization now? So uh you you are right. We started as Adronos. I was one of the two co-founders of Adronos back in 2015 uh with my co-founder Chris Stoker.

Um and uh we grew that into about a 40 person company at the time of acquisition by Andre who was previous to that had been one of our customers. So, a little bit of a vertical acquis uh vertical integration play. Yeah. Um we have since grown that organization to just about 200 people today. Wow.

For Andor Rocket Motor Systems. Uh I sit as the uh vice president and general manager of that business line. Very cool. What did you see back in 2015 when you started the original company uh that that kind of caused you to uh take on the mission?

And it felt like broadly Silicon Valley started kind of being aware of rocket motor like supply chain challenges. I want to say like in 2022, but you clearly saw it way way ahead. Yes, this is all very much before all of the uh I guess need uh that has risen for solid rocket motor um production enhancements.

Um really back in 2015 I had developed a brand new formulation uh called Alletch that can bring more performance to the uh the industry.

I saw a need to commercialize it and naively thought that I would be able to to progress it to a spot where the two kind of incumbent providers of solid rocket motors would fight over themselves to get access to the IP.

Um but what I quickly realized is the um the desirement for them to innovate and get these new propellants was was not there. And the only way I would ever be able to see um full adoption and utilization of that product was was if I was my own customer, if I was the solid rocket motor provider.

And uh a a big piece of my PhD at Purdue was looking at innovative ways to uh process energetic materials, new ways of mixing, new ways uh of doing things. So I was able to leverage those learns uh those lessons along with taking what is state-of-the-art for kind of automation and and different manufacturing processes.

Uh put them all together to uh create what my vision was for what solid rocket motor production could look like in the 2020s. Very cool. and uh we we really were kind of ahead of you know all of the other suppliers that have that have joined into that market. Amazing.

Well, thank you so much for calling in on such a busy day. Congratulations on the massive launch and good luck with the next phase. I'm sure you're going to be making a lot of product very soon. Yeah.

and hopefully copy I don't I don't know a last question I had is this is the idea for this uh new facility to be a model that you would copy and paste to to scale production or is this going to be able to kind of take take you guys all the way? No.

Uh that that's exactly the the purpose of what we are wanting this facility to do. It's it's really looking at a manufacturing line that is agnostic to what goes through it. So, we can do anything from a small uh 2-in diameter motor to something that that's really big up to 32 in in diameter.

Um, and we are agnostic in the manufacturing process, but really focusing on kind of the one piece flow out of uh manufacturing practices. We can take this um this facility and copy paste it elsewhere. On our 450 acres, I can fit another two full rate production facilities.

each one of if you look at a midscale tactical motor like say 9 in diameter we can do about 6,000 of those a year out of one facility. So if I place another two of those here you know that's just a a linear increase in production without having to have a brand new giant explosives campus.

Then alternatively I can take this small footprint agile manufacturing process and place it strategically uh for integration purposes with our different customers both domestically and abroad.

And uh we are on the record looking at you know multiple places for that including Australia through the uh the new guided weapons enhanced ordinance program. Amazing. Uh well thank you so much for joining the update. Have a great day. We'll talk to you soon. All right. Thank you. Bye.

Up next we have Sean Henry from Stored. We ran into him in New York City. Uh got a chance to sit down. Staying at the same hotel. Yeah. Yeah. Staying at the same hotel. We just had Well, we had breakfast. He just sat there and listened to us. Yeah. He was walking by. He was busy. We said, "Hey, sit down. Sit down.

We got to talk about