00:07:53 · Soren Monroe-Anderson, Ty Morse
I think two to three years, we're gonna start to be able to deliver that, and the country's gonna start to be able to deliver that, and we're gonna push to go as fast as possible. But it's, you know, the the government is is trying to provide some amount of demand signal, industry is is responding. I would say we are out ahead in terms of FPV drone manufacturers, just in terms of our actual like proven production scale. And now with, you know, with this facility, again, it's just a big empty box right now, but it will be the largest the largest small drone factory in America, and yeah, it's gonna it's gonna allow us to the way we think about it is it's going to allow us to create credible deterrence. I think under sort of under this scale and without having the blueprint for factories like this, America does not have credible deterrence. And so that's what we were trying to build to put it most simply. [00:08:51] S1: If there's not a blueprint that exists on how to spin up some sort of supply chain and factory like you're trying to do here, how are you kind of coming up with that, you know, from first principles?
00:08:51 · Ty Morse, Soren Monroe-Anderson
[00:08:51] S1: If there's not a blueprint that exists on how to spin up some sort of supply chain and factory like you're trying to do here, how are you kind of coming up with that, you know, from first principles? [00:09:02] S0: There are things to look at outside of drones. So I've given this example a few times, but of course the SpaceX Starlink user terminal factory is a really great example. I mean, the best example of modern consumer electronics manufacturing in America. Incredibly high rate, actually a lot of similarities between the products in terms of, you know, the the like core processes that make up the the product and, you know, being a very electronics and RF heavy system, and and then you have sort of this more simple structure that your your main electronics go into, and basically, the, you know, the way you build Starlink user terminals and the way you build drones are not that far away from each other, And SpaceX has been able to do that at the, you know, millions per year, and the full assembled product in that vertically integrated factory is cheaper than what they could do in China, which is unbelievable. And that's that's the bar. So... [00:10:05] S1: And that's like a first for America. Right?
00:10:07 · Soren Monroe-Anderson
[00:10:07] S0: It's a first for America in the last ten years. You know, we used to own a lot more manufacturing like that, and there's still some companies, you know, really big CMs that operate in America, but now they also, you know, they operate in a ton of countries and most of them have pretty strong ties into China now, and it was like America taught China how to do all the stuff that they're doing, then China went and realized the advantage of that and and made a concerted effort to be better at it and to scale it way beyond anybody else. So the the thing, like, the limitations, you know, we run into is is like electronics in America are so expensive, and the lead time is much longer, and the quality is much lower, and and I believe SpaceX is the largest PCB manufacturer in America now. It's not one of the, you know, large board houses because... And there aren't that many. It's it's SpaceX. I'm I'm pretty sure. So that's sort of the blueprint, but a lot of what we need to do is look at China and understand how their drone factories are operating. A lot of stuff is not wildly complex on its own, but building an entire factory that operates efficiently and then produces a high performance system, that's where the that's where the the magic is. It's it's the like tying the, you know, performance of the product and every single little design detail that goes into that back into something that is manufacturable, and then iterating, you know, being able to iterate quickly while producing at high volume. So that's why it is such an advantage to own the factory and own the product. It's like there there's this iteration loop that you do not get without that, and you need to have engineers who are responsible for, you know, their part being both performance and manufacturable, and understanding the impacts to the customer when they change something, but also understanding the impacts to the line when they change something. So this is why at SpaceX, when an engineer is designing a part, they're owning everything through all the way through manufacturing, and that's the same mindset that we take. It's it's, you know, not just like the responsible engineering mindset, but having people who own the entire life cycle of the of the part design.
00:12:38 · Ty Morse, Soren Monroe-Anderson
[00:12:38] S1: And for the evolution of your own technology over the past, you know, couple years, what have been the biggest step function improvements and capability? [00:12:47] S0: So we've spent a lot of time on radios and making jamming resistant radios, so it's one of the number one things that you deal with in FPV drones on the battlefield is is electronic warfare. So we've gone through a ton of different iterations on that. We've made our the efficiency of our drone really second to none, like every size category that we have a drone in, I've never seen a more efficient drone. So how [00:13:19] S1: do you do that?
00:13:20 · Soren Monroe-Anderson
[00:13:20] S0: We're really good at flight performance, and we I think test in a very unique way. We're super analytical in our testing. We care a lot about the performance of the system. So there's a there's a lot of drone companies and FPV companies that sort of either care about building components or care about building drones. They don't... A lot of them don't really like build the most performant components to build the most performant drones. We do, and we we try to make a very high performance integrated product, because we own basically all the component design as well. And then there are, you know, we we've heard very very frequently from the actual end users that they really appreciate the way our drone flies, the amount of precision it gives them, and just how well it's built. We've had units in Ukraine tell us that this is the first actual like military spec drone they've ever used, and they've used, you know, all the FPVs. So that's pretty cool. And and that's been a good bit of work to get there. And in the past, you know, we've definitely shipped products that are not up to like the spec that I want for a for a military system. And even on the current product, there's tons of stuff that needs to be improved, and we're working on we're working on new revisions of of everything and a lot of new products right now. So over the next few months, there'll be a lot of really cool stuff coming out and being visible publicly, that's gonna be pretty significant changes in the way our our system can operate. So I'm really excited about those as well. I can't talk about most of the the biggest step changes that we've had because a lot of those have been recent and not announced yet. But I'll say that our... The sort of cohesiveness and performance of our entire system across the ground station to the drone and the way the operator interfaces with all that, it's gonna get a a really big level up soon.
00:15:25 · Ty Morse
[00:15:25] S1: You're scaling up production, but you also have to basically be improving the product as fast as possible. What's going through your mind when you know something can be improved, but you also have to ship at the same time, so you gotta make that trade off?