Ursa Major brings hypersonic rocket engine to TBPN: scaling from hundreds to tens of thousands of units with Palantir

rocket first rocket engine to meet you. I'm John. John, I'm Nancy. Pleasure. We're gonna have you hold this as much as you can. Um we've had uh we've had people brought bring uh fish to the show. Sushi uh that was uh extracted or the fish was killed with a robot. Shink. That was a fun.

Somebody promised us a SpaceX engine, too. Yeah. Oh, yeah. We got to follow up on that. Um but this is this is the best demo we've gotten so far. SpaceX. Fantastic. This is a good day for us. So, so explain to us what is this and what's your business and introduce yourself. Yeah, absolutely. So, I'm Nancy Cable.

I am the director of operations for Ursa Major and we are an aerospace and defense company. Uh, so we are deploying um primarily right now hypersonic rocket technology, which is what this is. Uh, this is our Hadley engine, so a 5,000lb thrust class. Uh, proven hypersonic flight capability.

So, this thing right here has uh flown Mach 5. Okay. um really critical in the defense space right now. We must field technology and we must do it faster and that's what Hadley and some of our nextg products are enabling.

Now the correct me if I'm wrong the the value of the hypersonic missile is that it has the maneuverability of a cruise missile with like the speed of an ICBM and it's not and so is maneuverability a piece of this is this like a uh maneuverability is a piece of this for our customers.

So a lot of interceptor technology is what uh current applications and for our nextg products um the maneuverability and the storeability of the fuels are also front of mind. Yeah.

And and uh help me understand where Ursa Major fits in the overall stack of like the primes and the different supply chain like uh are you developing whole weapons systems that sell directly to the DoD? Are you partnering with other companies that we might be familiar with? Uh where does Earth Major fit in?

Yeah, absolutely. So we're we're doing uh we aim to be disruptive. Uh and disruptive means that we want to break the mold of what some of the primes in the government have traditionally done which is these like years or even decades long deployment cycles of development and qualification.

Um and to do that we do want to push the industry.

So that does mean not necessarily fielding the weapon system ourselves, although that is on the horizon, but putting ourselves in the position where we're partnering with the government, partnering with the primes and forcing them to push the envelope on how fast we can get these products into the spaces that they need to be.

So, so right now, uh, huge focus on just manufacturing excellence, cost, speed, reliability. Absolutely. Yeah. And that is uh most of my role is on the manufacturing side and making sure that I can take this excellent technology that our rocket scientists have developed and scale it so it's available to market.

Right right now we're on you know looking at the order of tens to hundreds of units a year. That needs to be tens of thousands of units a year and that's really where the Palunteer partnership comes in. Yeah. How how does Palanteer fit? Yeah, absolutely.

Um you might think that engineers are great at data flow but if we were to look at this rocket engine here uh different engineers designed the turbo machinery and the injector and the chamber and all of them came up with a unique way to process their data a unique test system uh you know a different network drive a different place to store the information and different network drive that is I wasn't expecting that well and that's well and I think this and when I think about you know we have a small company here of maybe 10 people and We probably do have like six different like Google drives and uh and different folders for different data.

It's natural. It's just a natural everyone um in every industry rocket propulsion included ends up feeling like man I'm 15 years behind. How could anyone possibly store something on a C drive? But when you're focused on getting the hardware to work, you're not necessarily focused on the efficiency.

And so putting the data efficiencies front and center. Even before Palanteer, our aim was right data, right people, right time, right decisions. Um, I loved what Dr. Garp was saying about people happiness. People are not happy when they feel behind.

They are happy when they feel ahead, when they can make realtime decisions. And leveraging Palunteer out onto the shop floor and into the back end of our data structures means that we can get the information to people so they can be real time and then even predictive about how we're doing manufacturing. Yeah.

So, uh, how does how does someone at Ursa Major actually interact with Palunteer? Is it on an iPad, on a phone, on a computer while they're working on test bench? Like in every phase? Yeah, great question. So, we've been with Palunteer about 3 months now.

And right now the daily interactions are mostly with our engineering and programmatic teams. We've built some inventory modules. We've built in, you know, looking at our engineering uh line of balance, our change management systems.

Um but like we were hearing from our our nucle you know from nuclear the people on the floor doing the work are actually the most important people in the factory. If my technicians can't build an engine we cannot deliver to our customers.

So that is the next endeavor that we are a few weeks into with amazing results so far is to actually make Palunteer a manufacturing execution system. Make it the shop floor portal.

one data source, one source of truth, one program from raw material, ordering ordering all of the parts, producing all of the parts internal through fielded data on at our customers. Yeah. Is is is you almost call it like an ERP almost. Yeah. So, we actually we have an ERP, right? This is what everyone does.

Everyone has they have an ERP for enter resource planning. Yep. Accounting accounting function, all of your work orders.

a PLM a product life cycle management and then an MEES is the traditional thing a manufacturing execution system and we have said why not use Palunteer it's already integrated I don't want one more monolithic software connect it with the ERP actually pull some of the functions out of the ERP's better I remember hearing a story I don't know how true it is but something about like SpaceX built like a ton of custom software for everything they needed to do and then eventually I think the team like spun out and and and built a business around that uh yeah yeah well SpaceX uh actually so they they have a product and it's kind of the gold standard.

Everyone who's worked at space is like I want that one. It's like I want that one and that really is the you know the magic of that software is everything in one place which is what ontology brings. Everything we need in one place. Very cool.

Um what's it so what's it going to take to go from making tens or hundreds of these to tens of thousands? Uh the physical process matters of course right we are a hardware company. You look at the complexity of this and you can understand why we're not going to be forward with a robotic automation line.

Um so making sure we have the right tools, the right fixtures, the right machines, uh you know 3D printing um is critical to what we do here. Yes. Uh 80% of the rocket, all of these metallic components are metal 3D printed. Uh yeah, developing some of our own unique alloys.

So scaling the machines is probably the longest lead time for us. and then setting up the correct tools, fixtures, um as you can imagine test and infrastructure is really big but not having the data around that in silos.

So when we need to build hundreds of these uh I need to know where every piece part is at every moment so that we can make the best real-time decisions possible for quality for the customers.

Um, so the the physical infrastructure is really what we're most familiar with and now Palanteer's helping us with that digital infrastructure side of things. Um, I've been in manufacturing my whole career. Yeah. Uh, 80% of the line down scenarios I've ever had where we stop building product.

You want to guess what they're from? Lacking inventory or it's lacking inventory. It is not having a component. And so we think about like, yeah, a rocket engine is really physically complex. That's not actually the hard part.

to build a 1200 compet I don't know I don't know if this is uh hubris but I feel like you could put this together John well that's kind of that's the point a manufacturing but it's just like so so actually putting the pieces together is the easy part but it's like making the parts and making sure you have them at the right time is the real challenge so it's like doing a puzzle over like you know, 20 days type of thing.

Yeah. I mean, we joke it's like, right, Lego, Legos for adults, but you can see it really just is a collection of fittings. Um, fittings and fasteners. I And that's kind of the point.

How can we have a system that makes it so easy and so obvious how we manufacture these that I could pull the two of you in and say, "Build a rocket engine. " And you could do it with confidence. That's got young kids. I think they would enjoy putting one of these together. Yeah. Yeah.

A couple years ago, I sat next to somebody on a plane who was uh selling it was pipe bending, pipe fitting, whatever this is. Tube bending. Tube bending. Yeah. He said, "I'm in I'm in my my business is tube bending. " And I was like, "What? " And he was like, "Yeah.

" He was going to SpaceX specifically to sell tube bending machines to them. I didn't realize it was a whole industry, but he made his money to be there in person to make sure that they don't run out. Absolutely. Because it's a rate limiting factor. If the tube isn't bent, you can't make the rocket.

If the tube isn't bent, you can't make the rocket. And tubes actually carry some risk. They're some of the thinnest walled components on the rocket, right? This this has a lot of mass to it. Tubes are often can be where failures happen.

So in an ecosystem, right, we need to test them, but also where did this tube come from? What day was it bent? What was the lot of stock material? What revision was I on in my CAD model? You know, what testing did this engine undergo? All of that currently I could find in our systems. Interesting.

And it would take me hours. Yeah, but but if it's all in one place, if it's all in one place and we have a consolidated tool, it's that traceability. That's incredibly cool. Yeah. Fantastic. Anything else? Thank you so much for bringing your baby uh on the show. This is a great sign of respect. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.

I mean, what's cooler than carrying around a hypersonic rocket engine, right? Everyone loves it but the TSA. They don't That's a rough one. Rough one to travel with. Yeah. Anyway, thank you so much for coming on. Thanks for coming on. Great meeting. Thank you. Um, uh, yeah, we have our next guest ready.

Or should I talk? We have a couple minutes. Why don't you tell us about some ads? Do you have some ads you could run? I'd love to hear some ads. You want to talk about ramp. com? Ramp.

Let's go through some I did want to, while you pull that up, I did want to uh talk about Matt Hang, the Paradigm, and the Stripe team introducing a new payments first blockchain uh, called Tempo. Matt says, "As stable coins go mainstream, there's a need for optimized infrastructure.

Tempo is purpose-built for stable coins and real world payments born from Stripe's experience in global payments and paradigms expertise in crypto to ensure Tempo serves a broad array of needs.

We're excited to be working with an incredible group of initial design partners including Anthropic, Coupang, Deutsch, Deutsche Bank, Door Dash, Lead Bank, Mercury, New Bank, OpenAI, Revolute, Shopify, Standard Charter, Visa, and more.

Tempo's payment first design includes predictable low fees payments gas and any stable coin uh payments first UX opt-in privacy scale 100,000 transactions per second and EVM compatible built on wreath uh tempo eases the path to bring real world flows on chain such as global payouts payins and payroll embedded financial products uh and accounts fast and cheap remittances tokenized deposits for 247 settlement microtransactions, agentic payments, and more.

Matt says, "We're building tempo with principles of decentralization and neutrality. That includes stable coin neutrality. Anyone can issue a stable coin. We might be able to have a TBPN coin. That sounds exciting. " And any Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, that was clearly a joke. No, but I was talking about a a a USDTp.

That's just a one for one stable coin that that uh that we issue to It does not move. It does not move. You can't make it move. It won't budge. Uh independent and diverse validator set with a road map toward a permissionless model. So apparently they're already in a private test net.

And uh anyways, two two power players, Paradigm and uh and Stripe coming together. It sounds like they're they're positioning I guess Matt is running Tempo, but they're positioning this as uh they're both investors in Tempo. So I think they really do want to take a decentralized approach.

So not so this is not downstream of like the stripe acquisitions directly. Privy and bridge. No. So I have a post here from Zach Abrams uh founder of Bridge. Okay. Uh he says Bridge was one of the first companies to use blockchains to solve core payments problems.

During our journey we've seen how even the most performant blockchains struggle with basic financial services use cases. A few examples. uh a payroll transaction consistently failing when uh when Trump launched. That's interesting.

So when the Trump coin launched, apparently people that were running payroll like you know couldn't get bridge with stable coins. No, no, no.

He's not talking about he's not talking about bridge specifically, but he's saying like if you were trying to pay employees at the time that Trumpcoin launched paying employees in Trumpcoin. No, no, no. Not not in Trumpcoin.

like that that day I think it was like a Saturday or was a Friday I forget exactly but when it launched if you tried to pay there was so much activity on chain at that moment but like good luck you know paying like a a freelancer or something.

So yeah the example would be like I'm trying to pay a freelancer in stable coins like onchain because like obviously like your default payroll providers are just using like you know web two rails or whatever and and that wasn't brought down by the Trump launch. Right. Okay.

um aid dispersements taking days due to low transactions per second and projects to later cancel due to six figure upfront gas costs. Um Tempo is a new L1 built specifically for payments and so um anyways uh quite the team they've put together here.

Yeah, we got to get some of the folks on the on the show and and have them break it down because um I'm very interested in why not Salana? Why not uh Circle? You know, like it feels like there's a Why not another L? Like why not an L2 built on? Exactly.

But this is something uh unique and they must have put a lot of time and effort into it. So congrats to them on the launch but we will you know want to know more. Uh anyway I believe we have our next guest. Welcome to the show.