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In this episode of From the Crows’ Nest, host Ken Miller sits down with the heads of two startups in the military space to get a glimpse at the cutting edge of military, warfare and EMSO operations.
Ethan Thornton of Mach Industries and Rob Sladen of Zulu Pods are both young innovators in the military space, with Mach Industries focusing on pioneering unmanned systems and Zulu Pods aiming to improve fluid delivery systems in assets that support expendable assets like drones and missiles.
Both entrepreneurs say their technologies can be key to bridging the gaps between how technology is currently used and the mission of new, radically different systems — like with the proliferation of expendable, unmanned drones — but also to ensure military dominance regardless of theater.
To learn more about today’s topics or to stay updated on EMSO and EW developments, visit our homepage.
Creators and Guests
What is From the Crows' Nest?
Featuring interviews, analysis, and discussions covering leading issues of the day related to electromagnetic spectrum operations (EMSO). Topics include current events and news worldwide, US Congress and the annual defense budget, and military news from the US and allied countries. We also bring you closer to Association of Old Crow events and provide a forum to dive deeper into policy issues impacting our community.
Ethan Thornton [00:00:02]:
If we imagine a war happening three decades from now, there's no question that it'll be fought with hundreds of thousands, likely millions of unmanned autonomous systems. And so, yeah, we're experiencing sort of a complete revolution in military affairs. The open question was how quickly does that happen? And I think what Ukraine proved is just how quickly you can iterate and field these capabilities.
Ken Miller [00:00:32]:
Welcome to From the Crows' Nest. I'm your host, Ken Miller from the Association of Old Crows. Today we are going to have a conversation with two up and coming businesses to introduce our community to innovators throughout the defense sector so we can continue to push the envelope and discuss issues that matter most to war fighters on the front lines. Up first is Ethan Thornton. He is the founder and CEO of Mach Industries. It's a defense technology company building next generation unmanned systems. Ethan, thanks for joining me here on From the Crows' Nest.
Ken Miller [00:01:05]:
It's great to have you on the show.
Ethan Thornton [00:01:07]:
Yeah, thanks for having me. Excited to be here.
Ken Miller [00:01:09]:
Can you give the our listeners just a little bit about yourself, a great story here. Obviously I learned a little bit about your company reading up on recent defense contracts and you got a contract with the army and it kind of piqued our interest. So could you tell a little bit about yourself and how you got started with Mach Industries?
Ethan Thornton [00:01:29]:
For sure, yeah. So I've been, I've been working on Mach, I guess since kind of mid high school. Around then became pretty obsessed with how important unmanned systems would be, especially in light of competition with China. I was working actually as an auto tech at the time and used that to save money to start like a knife making business and then use that to save money to start prototyping different things that eventually sort of became our platforms. And so started working high school, didn't have a ton of money to prototype different things, but obsessing about the space and then went to, went to MIT to study aerospace engineering. I actually wanted to join the Air Force. So I was on a, a scholarship, planning on going and flying. But then in my first semester, this is about six months after stuff was really heating up in, in Ukraine.
Ethan Thornton [00:02:15]:
It became how obvious, it became very obvious just how urgent unmanned systems were and so took Mach off the back burner and, and dropped out. And that was about I guess, two, two and a half years ago now. Yeah, dropped out to do everything we could to build the best possible unmanned systems for the country.
Ken Miller [00:02:33]:
It's interesting how you had a vision in your mind for a few years of getting into defense, aerospace sector, working on defense Technology. Russia, Ukraine, war heats up. I want to kind of dive into that a little bit because I think that, you know, this is something from the electromagnetic spectrum operations community as well. When that war started a few years ago, it instantly changed the way that we were thinking about how future wars would be fought. Russians capabilities, European NATO capabilities, how US is integrating all that. And the cascading effects are still setting in. After hearing a few months later, I. Earlier today, now that we're going to record, we're releasing this later, but earlier today I was interviewing someone talking about the latest developments in the Russia Ukraine war.
Ken Miller [00:03:20]:
And we're talking about the recent drone incursion, Russian drone incursion into Poland. And so we know that these efforts are going to continue on with no end in sight at this point. But what was it about the Russian Ukraine war that really drove home that, yeah, you know, you might have an interest in getting in the sector, but it can't wait until the right time, like, now was the time to do it. What was. What really kind of gave you that sense that now was the time to push for mock industries?
Ethan Thornton [00:03:53]:
For sure. It's a great question. I mean, I'd say there's never been a doubt to me that the future of war fighting is largely dominated by unmanned systems. Right. Like, if we, I think if we imagine a war happening three decades from now, there's. There's no question that it'll be fought with hundreds of thousands, likely millions of unmanned autonomous systems. And so, yeah, we're experiencing sort of a complete revolution in military affairs. The open question was, how quickly does that happen? Right.
Ethan Thornton [00:04:27]:
Like the US has F35s right now. F35s are still relevant aircraft. Every, every defense platform on some timeline becomes obsolete. And I think there is, to me, this open question of, does that happen in 2035? Does it happen in 2050? Does it happen in 2027? And I think what Ukraine proved is just how quickly you can iterate and field these capabilities. Like, I, I think at the start of the war, if you would have said that at this point, I forget the exact number, but somewhere on the order of like 80% of casualties are from drones. That would have been a pretty unbelievable stat if you would have said that Ukraine would be able to, to push the Russian navy largely out of the Black Sea without having a navy of their own, and the unmanned systems would be like, the deciding factor. And what could end up being a major naval battle, I think that would have been relatively unbelievable. And so the, the surprising thing to, to me was just how quickly these things are happening.
Ethan Thornton [00:05:20]:
And that drove a ton of urgency. Because also if you, if you believe that world like the US is not going to be able to create deterrence if we, if we aren't the best at unmanned systems, and frankly right now we're very, very, very behind, it's pretty shocking to point to the fact that if you look at the war in Ukraine, US unmanned systems are not really having an impact over there. And so if you go back 30 years, if you had $100 million to spend on defense assets, you'd spend that on American tech. Now if you look at dollar to dollar impact, basically if I can spend $20 million and I'm just trying to get effect, you are likely not spending that on U.S. unmanned systems. You're either making it yourself with components coming from China or in many cases, if you look at the quadcopter industry, you're literally buying Chinese DJI's. And so we as a country obviously haven't solved this problem. It's more just like this is the urgency, like this is my job to go do, this is my team's job to go do.
Ethan Thornton [00:06:16]:
This is other companies in the space like America can't count on being the dominant military power if we don't have the best unmanned systems. And so for me, like, that is just such an existentially urgent problem.
Ken Miller [00:06:29]:
It's interesting as you were talking about that my mind was going back to the global war on terror, back in Operation Allied Force and Iraqi Freedom. And of course, you know, back then, any notion that the vast majority of our casualties would have been because of remote controlled improvised explosive devices detonated with garage door openers. I mean, I can imagine pretty much any senior leader in the military would be like, oh, that's not a threat. That's not, that's not going to be a problem. And true enough, we went to war and that was, that was what came up. And that caused a fundamental shift in how we did things. And now I think with Ukraine, we're seeing that next fundamental shift. In this one, though, the previous shift was limited to the sort of the mass that could be done produced by the an adversary that was loosely connected.
Ken Miller [00:07:16]:
It wasn't a state actor, you know, asymmetric warfare, this trend in technology with drones, unmanned systems, swarms, delivery of weapons and fires, you know, remotely through unmanned systems. It's moving at the pace of technology, it's not moving at the pace of speed and it's not moving at the pace of potential adversaries. Development of that capability. So, you know, because you can buy it in the commercial sector and a lot of different applications, I have a feeling this trend is, has a lot more staying power than the previous trends that we've seen in warfare because it's so closely integrated with commercial sector and so forth. What is your idea in terms of where we're going with drones? You know, obviously a lot of what you're working on is the drone, drone swarm being able to mass produce large numbers of unmanned systems for multiple purposes. Can you give us an idea of 10, 15, 20 years from now, what we can expect in your mind, in terms of the role that drones are playing, in terms of where we have to get to from a production standpoint versus where we're at now?
Ethan Thornton [00:08:25]:
For sure. And I think there's a lot to say on this. First off, the idea of unmanned systems isn't a new one. You can go all the way back to Kelly Johnson at Skunk Works, and even back then they were saying that the future is drones. It's more a question of how do you reach a point where your autonomy is good enough to be effective and then also explainable enough and deterministic enough to be trustworthy. And so I think that's been the thing that's taken longer than I think Kelly Johnson would have expected, but appears to be unfortunately, very rapidly approaching. That said, I mean, when we got airplanes as a species, if you look at World War I, folks were literally flying by each other trying to drop bricks or like shooting pistols at each other. Like, I would say we're, we're at a very similar state right now with unmanned warfare.
Ethan Thornton [00:09:16]:
Like, if you look at the level of sophistication of, of a fiber optically controlled quadcopter, not to say that's not an incredibly sort of impactful capability right now. You can, you can very clearly look at Ukraine and prove that it is. But that is not the end state. Frontman Unmanned Systems right, you've, you've got max probably 20, 30 mile range. You've got one operator only able to control one of these systems. You've got a relatively small warhead. I think there are a few big trends you'll see. So I think the first, if America wants to win, which we need to, we need to focus on strategic effects and not tactical effects, and so specifically on creating an offset.
Ethan Thornton [00:09:56]:
Like if we find ourselves in a set of proxy wars where we're trying to go toe to toe with China on production capacity, we'll lose. Like, if we're making a cruise missile and China's making the same cruise missile. If we're making a quadcopter and China's making the same quadcopter, we'll be outproduced several times over. The optimization for us, not to say scale isn't important, but the optimization needs to be dollar to dollar asymmetry. We need to be able to come up with net new tech architectures either in hardware or software, ideally both, to give us a dollar to dollar advantage. And I'm happy to talk about the way I think those things will actualize. But really for America to win against China, we have to set the edge on pushing the future of unmanned assets left as far as possible and making sure we're actually coming up with these new technologies, new architectures, new production techniques that give us that asymmetry.
Ken Miller [00:10:49]:
I appreciate what you said because I think that you said a lot that we should unpack here in terms of why we are falling behind or why we are behind or can't count on that advantage the way we used to in the past when you started to establish mock industries, obviously the entry, we, we talk about this on the show quite a bit. The barriers of entry into the defense sector, especially for startups and there's a lot of programs out there to kind of help with that but. And we've made a lot of strides. But certainly our defense manufacturing capacity doesn't always make it easy for innovation to take hold. Follow it through all the TRL levels to get it into the field quickly. And we see in Russia, Ukraine, you know, the, the battlefield is the lab, so we don't have that. But you know, generally speaking it takes way too long and you mentioned the obsolescence that that happens. You have this vision, you have this sense of urgency.
Ken Miller [00:11:47]:
You go into startup mock industries. Talk to us a little bit about the challenge of innovation and new startup in the US as a way of starting to unpack this notion of the challenge of keeping up with adversaries on production.
Ethan Thornton [00:12:05]:
For sure, maybe controversial take here. I don't think it's that hard. Like I think building any business is hard. I don't think building a business like Mach is that much harder than other businesses. Like there are certainly complexities, right? Like we're bringing several products to market that are deeply coupled hardware, software or developing jet engines. There's a lot there. But I actually don't think it's that fruitful to talk about the difficulty. One, because it's getting easier on the venture side, people are increasingly willing to place big bets on Things that they think will have positive impact.
Ethan Thornton [00:12:40]:
And then on the government side, there's a very long ways to go. But the highest levels and at the lowest levels, people are as deeply aware as industry is of how broken things are right now. And there's a lot of will to go and fix stuff. And then same on the talent side. Right. Fortunately, there are a lot of people in the country that are waking up to what a world looks like where America doesn't have the best unmanned systems and are willing to work incredibly, incredibly, incredibly hard to make sure that their kids and their grandkids have security. And so, yeah, I mean, look, it's been challenging. I'd say we had to raise a lot of capital early on.
Ethan Thornton [00:13:16]:
I'd say the products are obviously hard. Like Viper is a miniature vertical takeoff fighter jet. Developing that in like six months was challenging, but also like, very fun. And that's, that's part of why I think you do this is because those are, those are also really, really, really challenging, interesting engineering problems. And then, yeah, I think the government's hard to sell into, but culturally increasingly aligned and working very, very hard to solve these problems.
Ken Miller [00:13:44]:
I want to talk a little bit about your key products that you have currently that you're working with, working on production on. And there's three of them. The Viper, Glide and Stratus. Each of these, I think, are phenomenal products and they're all listed on your website. So I would encourage our listeners to go there and take a look at what you're offering from your. But can you go through and talk a little bit about what the potential that each of those programs has for a military advantage in future combat.
Ethan Thornton [00:14:19]:
For sure. And I'll sort of caveat all of this with saying that, like, not all of our products are public and even of products we can talk about, a lot of the most interesting capabilities are also not public for pretty obvious reasons. About the products I can talk about, I can also speak at a high level of some of the more interesting capabilities. Stratus is, I guess, the one I can probably speak the most about. And you can very clearly imagine a world where two operators can deploy a balloon system and carry tens of pounds for several months, really anywhere on Earth. Right. And the ability to hang sensors up there, the ability to hang communications up there. One of the main issues of looking at deterring a war in Taiwan, and obviously to deter war, you have to be able to fight a war.
Ethan Thornton [00:15:04]:
So potentially fighting a war in the Pacific is logistics in setting up shipping routes, making sure you have fuel, making sure you have runways, like all of these things are deeply challenging. And one of the really interesting things about Stratus is that you can deploy it a long ways from the conflict, but still be able to get a large number of sensors and communications downrange in a way that is really, really challenging with conventional techniques in a way that allows you to capture better and more dense data than you can from satellites. So I mean, that's, that's Stratus. There's a lot of legwork going in on our end. I mean, we're not the first company to do high altitude balloons. We're also not the first country. I mean, China has flown a high altitude balloon several at this point over the US A lot of our work though is going into making this thing fieldable at scale. So like, I really think that that warfare is headed in the direction of having hundreds of thousands of systems deployed at any given time if an actual conflict starts, which again, my job is to make sure we have the capability that deters wars.
Ethan Thornton [00:16:07]:
And so that's very much what we direct towards as a company. But again, to deter wars, you need to be able to fight wars. And so a lot of our work with Stratus is what does it take to field hundreds of thousands or millions of these things over the next few years? I can't talk much about glide, but we have the words we say on our website that's basically high altitude gliding munition and then Viper. Viper is definitely, I'd say, technically the most interesting. It's about a 6 and a half foot long composite airframe. It uses a jet engine to take off vertically, so it actually gimbals at its exhaust to control itself on the way up and then transitions to wings level flight transonic. So similar speed that you'd get with the cruise missile. And there are a bunch of different things that you can imagine doing with that platform.
Ethan Thornton [00:16:55]:
So like our army contract is to basically use that as like a ground launch cruise missile. Essentially the mission set there that I think is really interesting is if you take like a guided 155 artillery shell. So like the Excalibur, I forget the exact number these days, but somewhere on the order of 100 to $150,000 in about a 25 mile range. Viper has the same warhead size, same or lower cost, but significantly more range, like on the order of 10 times that range. And then much more importantly, if you look at a modern fight, if you look at Ukraine, the second you start shooting shells out of an Artillery piece, you pretty immediately get detected and have assets coming back to destroy your gun, essentially. And so the interesting thing about Viper is because it launches vertically, there's no launcher to back target. So the second you launch that thing, it's not even worth sending counter battery fires. And so you can really sort of increase warfighter survivability.
Ethan Thornton [00:17:59]:
And so, yeah, I think Viper for that use case is quite interesting. That's what we're working with the army on essentially. Same warhead is like a Hellfire or an artillery shell guided significantly longer range than an artillery shell at similar cost to a guided artillery shell. And then most importantly, there's nothing to back target once you launch these sticks.
Ken Miller [00:18:21]:
The range is really interesting because you're right a lot of times when we talk the, the drone war, especially in Russia, Ukraine or other simulations that we have, the drones and, and unmanned systems are all relatively short range that we, we think about. But you're offering the ability to have long range, long loiter times long and then of course, you know, fast production so that you can do it en masse with, with a large number. Which I think is fascinating from an MSO standpoint because when I, when we think of, you know, going into future combat, I loved what you said earlier. It was in order to be able to deter war, you have to be able to fight one. And that's a critical element to understanding kind of the challenge facing us around the world when we talk about deterrence is we have to have that capability, the and we have to be able to project that advantage or that ability to our adversaries early on so they know that we can fight and then therefore we can deter. Kind of to put a bow on this, I just want to talk a little bit about your way ahead with some of the, the challenges and opportunities. Because everything that you said about your kind of flagship products, it's fascinating technology, but there's also, each of them carries almost an open door for where the technology could carry you five, ten years down the road. So what are some of the, the challenges or opportunities you see from a technical side as well as any other phase, whether it's regulatory or what have you that you feel that you mock Industries is primed to address and accomplish over the next, you know, number of years?
Ethan Thornton [00:20:06]:
Yeah, I mean, look, our company mission that we say a lot internally is basically forging the next offset, right? So giving the US sort of an unfair advantage against our adversaries and using that to deter wars the way we aim to do that as a company is to make sure that the US at any given time has the best possible unmanned systems and specifically there again systems with a dollar to dollar strategic advantage over China. So going back to your point about the range of these systems, loiter time. Like a lot of what's being deployed in Ukraine right now is deployed tactically. If the US wants to offset an adversary with a far superior industrial base, which for at least the time being, China is that adversary, we have to fight strategically. And so for mock, what that means is being super thoughtful about architectures of our products, iterating our products like crazy. Like for us right now on average it's probably three months between major vehicle redesigns like literally almost every, every component of the vehicle changing. And so being able to just sprint towards whatever that future looks like. Iterate hardware super quickly and then lower in the stack make sure you're vertically integrating components.
Ethan Thornton [00:21:14]:
So again we're, we're developing our own jet engines. We, we use our own avionics like it's, it's obviously very, very, very important that you have a secure scalable supply chain. And obsessing about components is a critical part there. And then a step above that is, is also making sure you have access to the best software. So a lot of the, a lot of the issues US companies run into in Ukraine is dealing with the, the operational environment specifically from an RF standpoint. And so having autonomy that, that can deal with denied comms, that can deal with denied gps or they can basically deal with electronic warfare. That's another area we're investing very deeply in. The next is, is actually doing what we say we're going to do, proving that our our assets are capable of, we have hardware in Ukraine right now.
Ethan Thornton [00:22:00]:
We're a very new company again. We raised our Series A not, not even two years ago now. But a lot of this is, is going to be looking to directly help our allies overseas win wars. I'm going to run this company for the next 60 years. I'm going to make sure we push with insane urgency to make sure that the US has has access to, to the best technology on earth with the intent of, of deterring major wars.
Ken Miller [00:22:26]:
If any of our listeners want to reach out to Mach Industries, you can go to their website machindustries.com they have all the information there that's publicly available. But I really encourage anyone listening to this to take a look at what Mach Industries is doing. What Ethan Thornton's mission is. Fantastic story Ethan. Thank you so much for joining me here on from the Crow's Nest and I really do hope that as your company grows we will find more opportunities to work with you from an association of old crows and electromagnetic spectrum operations community in general and just, you know, collaborate with you because I think that this, what your company stands for, your mission, etc is all in line with what we're doing on a day to day basis and really enjoyed the opportunity to talk with you today.
Ethan Thornton [00:23:11]:
Yeah, thanks a ton for, for having me on. It was, it was great to be able to talk with you.
Ken Miller [00:23:19]:
Thanks again, Ethan for joining us here on from the Co Nest. Again, Ethan is the CEO of Mach Industries. Now I want to bring in Rob Sladen. He is chairman and CEO of Zulu Pods. Rob, thanks for joining me here on From the Crows' Nest. It's great to have you on.
Rob Sladen [00:23:33]:
Hey, thanks so much for joining us. We appreciate, we appreciate the invite and appreciate your time and I'm really excited to, for the episode and excited to chat here with you today.
Ken Miller [00:23:43]:
You started Zulu Pods about four or five years ago with your wife. Can you tell us a little bit about what Zulu Pods is? It's a lubrication delivery system for military hardware and it's a, it's a phenomenal concept and something that, you know, we oftentimes don't have in our minds as a requirement. You saw this need for the military and you jumped on it about five years ago. Tell us a little bit about how you got started.
Rob Sladen [00:24:07]:
Yeah, sure. So we've got a few co founders at zubopods and the team I always, always like to start with talking about how important a team is because the team has been able to, especially as it's grown, has been able to put Zulu Pods in a place where we can deliver the best capabilities to the warfighter, which is near and dear to my heart. And it's something that's important. At zubupods, we're a fluid delivery system technology company that makes components and subsystems and sometimes standalone systems that we can sell right to the end user. And we've been able to take some of our fluid delivery systems or fluid delivery skills and expand that across beyond our beachhead product. But we'll start with our beachhead product, something that you acknowledged here in the opening. And our Z Pod is a packaged oil delivery system aimed at expendable and attritable turbojets that power things like drones and missiles. We recognize a few years ago now that there was an opportunity or a gap in how technology was being matched to, I'm going to call it the mission for a turbojet Think of something that only has to travel for a half an hour, 45 minutes or an hour, you know, how you deliver that or how you design that.
Rob Sladen [00:25:14]:
That oil system should match the mission. Right? So it should match it in the sense of let's not design something that something didn't hit its target, would continue last for thousands of hours. And we saw that oftentimes these turbojets were designed with something that was somewhat analogous to a circulating oil system like the one you'd have in your car that has tanks and pumps. And if you think about why do you need an oil tank if you're never going to refill it, right. If it's a one time use thing. And so the Z Pod was born where we said we started at the first principle of thinking. So we said what if we could just deliver really small amounts of oil and provide something like an air oil mist, which is not typically done in aerospace. Normally it's solid oil that's jetted at things.
Ken Miller [00:25:57]:
And you had mentioned this is a really important point that I want you to hit on because I never knew this until we were talking a little bit about, but a lot of the jet engines before this, they used fuel to actually provide that lubrication versus actual oil. And that can be a game changer in terms of how that works.
Rob Sladen [00:26:13]:
Yes, yes. And so we actually learned that a little bit after sort of starting with the initial thinking. We actually stumbled on that. Just as many entrepreneurs do, you kind of learn things along the way. Right. And I wouldn't necessarily we had to pivot or anything, but think of this idea of, I'll kind of go back to how do you, how do you use a really or package a really small amount of oil? Well, you have to start with this idea of can a small amount of oil work for something? And it works because you don't care about this concept of endurance. So you don't care about designing something to last for thousands of hours. It's like if you only had to design a car to drive for a mile, it would look very different.
Rob Sladen [00:26:51]:
So that thinking launched the Z Pod product where we were able to use a really small amount of oil. And the pod actually has the functions of a tank and a pump combined into one thing. So now we only have one part. So imagine replacing a traditional oil system with a one. We call it a once through oil system. One part. That's nice value props that the customer thinks about. What we then realized to your point is that a lot of these systems, the engineers are smart Enough to say, well, I don't want to use an entire oil system for something that's only going to travel for a half an hour or 45 minutes.
Rob Sladen [00:27:25]:
Let me just divert some of the fuel that we would normally burn and use that for cooling. It's not as good as oil, but it'll do the job. The challenge in thinking like that, and this is where our, our customers really like our value prop when they decide to pivot away from that, is that you're carrying fuel in the air and you're not burning it and it's taking up volume on like a vehicle, like a drone or a missile. And that volume is really expensive real estate. So companies like Lockheed Martin have to think about how to package all these things into a small area, whether it's a missile or a drone. So we come in and from a fluid volume standpoint, we package a much smaller amount of fluid in the oil versus what they normally would carry for fuel when they diverted it for cooling. Something to the order of like, you know, 95% reduction in volume with our technology. And now imagine that the size amount or the tank that gets, you know, no longer has to carry all that fuel.
Rob Sladen [00:28:26]:
And so the engine's efficiency goes up significantly because when they normally divert that fuel for cooling, they're not burning it in the right, I'll say, stoichiometric conditions that they would be burning it and getting the same type of efficiency if they were actually, if they could actually effectively burn that fuel as good as possible.
Ken Miller [00:28:46]:
I would imagine though that prime contractors then, or whomever you're selling this to could go in one or two directions. They could either reduce the amount of fuel because they're not having to save any for the, that lubrication process, or they have, they can be more efficient with the fuel that they have, which would allow them to have a longer range for their, their system. How, whatever it is, whether it's a jet engine or a drone. You mentioned something earlier. First of all, is that a correct understanding of how your technology can aid in the development of next generation hardware?
Rob Sladen [00:29:21]:
Yes. You have it. You are 100% spot on. There's two choices. You could say I'm going to still carry that much fuel, but I'm now going to burn all of it and now my range is increased.
Ken Miller [00:29:31]:
Right.
Rob Sladen [00:29:31]:
Or I'm going to keep my range the same and I'm going to take that real estate and I'm going to do other things with it now.
Ken Miller [00:29:38]:
And so you mentioned something very interesting at the beginning. You said it was a mist that was ejected. And I can imagine that that is something that even with the fuel aspect or the fuel use probably is a new approach, because I can imagine that trying to make sure that adequate levels of lubrication to these parts is delivered, but not in excess, that can cause additional, you know, clogging or anything like that, you know, any sort of. It's more evenly distributed. So talk a little bit about that element and how that has changed the efficiency of this delivery system.
Rob Sladen [00:30:19]:
Air oil mist is a common phenomenon in many, I'll call it industrial applications and sometimes in aerospace. But it's not like a dominant method or a, the most common method of how to, I'll call it adequately lubricate or cool hearts and jet engines. Oftentimes what is done or is used is a jetted oil system. And they're delivering pretty high amounts of fluid on a like a gallons per minute or a gallons per hour type of basis into mechanical systems. And what actually can happen. This is a little bit in the weeds, but I think it's worthwhile to your kind of, to your question. What actually can happen is that we often provide, and I spent a bunch of years at Pratt Whitney in, in, in, in the jet engine space. But what actually happens is the more fluid or oil that you dump into certain things think of it like a washing machine.
Rob Sladen [00:31:12]:
And so the fluid itself actually can create this phenomenon of churn and generates heat. That's the more common method of I'm going to dump a bunch of oil, I'm going to cool something, I'm going to take it away, and that's the circulating oil system. And so by thinking about an air oil mist system, the volume that you put into the things that you need to cool obviously goes down because there's an air component. And if you're misting droplets of oil, well, it's, it's smaller than if I'm jetting, like blowing, you know, water out of a straw. And so that is one of the main reasons why we need, why we're able to use less fluid or less oil. And then that creates that give and take that we talked about where, okay, more range or more real estate to the defense prime contractors that are making the vehicle or the missile. So it's a little different of a first principle type of thinking, I'll say that then allows for the product to be created, right? It's not actually product first, it's more the physics first. Then what do the products look like out of, out of that.
Rob Sladen [00:32:16]:
Those first principle Thinking from a physics.
Ken Miller [00:32:18]:
Standpoint, this is a podcast on electromagnetic spectrum operations. We talk about this all, you know, throughout the month. And I, I know that some of our listeners may be asking, well, what is the connection of Zulu pods to electromagnetic spectrum operations? And I think, you know, what, you know, going back to what you said earlier about how the savings in. One of the topics that we talk about all the time is size, weight, power in terms of reducing that miniaturizing systems. I had a guest on a show recording yesterday, we were talking about, you know, future combat is going to be, how do you, in a cost effective way mass produce small autonomous systems, drones, and just flood an airspace with sensors and weapons. And you know, right now when, when we produce a manned aircraft, it might take 15, 20 years, we might produce 300 of them and we put them out. Now we're talking about having to produce, you know, hundreds of thousands of drones in a few months in order to get them out. And then, and that's going to require a tremendous amount of, of advanced technology to miniaturize things, to get the range and everything.
Ken Miller [00:33:29]:
And this is where your product is going to be. I think I see it as a critical piece to getting that capability into the field quickly. How does the future of warfare and where it's going and where military technology is leading us and defense contractors, etc, how has that played into the development and the, the early years here of Zulu pods?
Rob Sladen [00:33:56]:
Yeah, so I mean, I think a big part of not, not even Zulu pods, but let's just call it the, the, the technical community and you know, the domestic United States and our allies, how do we, how do we leverage technology and then turn that into whether it's offensive or defensive weapon systems? And a lot of it starts with thinking about what a new mission could look like. And then what does that mean in terms of how you, how you develop a system? Right? So I mean, if you take the F35 for example, which is the fifth generation fighter, the world's probably baddest fighter, it's designed as a manned application. It's designed to last for tens of thousands of hours, right. At least between overhauls. And so how you go and design for something like that is very different than designing for a drone that I'm gonna, I'm gonna run it for three hours and I don't actually care if it ever comes home or something that we call attritable in our space and something that, you know, maybe has 20 cycles. So it all starts with asking yourself as an engineer or a technical Community, what is the mission here? And not so much what did we do before? Right. So a lot of times engineers at these defense primes think about things in terms of legacy system design and it works a lot. Particularly because we have never seen this new idea of affordable mass until you know, let's call it now like this decade.
Rob Sladen [00:35:38]:
We weren't really thinking about that all the time. That's where it starts. So the number one thing in Zugupods or outside of Zugupods is us asking ourselves what is the mission? And then based on that, how should we, how should we go about designing something? We have to start there as a technical community. And we can't just say well it worked over here and it worked the last 20 years, but we'll do it here. Now that's easy. It's easy to do that. And maybe you don't have to spend as much R and D. But what's going to happen if you think like that? Then you are not going to maximize those four things that you just talked about.
Rob Sladen [00:36:12]:
For example, you will leave cost on the table, you will leave margin on the table. In the sense of you over designed a system. You know, that's, that's kind of an ethos we have at Zulu Parts and it's what has allowed us to go and design products that customers and some of those defense crimes care about and that we're working with and that the Army, Navy and the Air Force all care about. And we will continue to think like that. And I think thinking like that will produce the best products for the warfighter.
Ken Miller [00:36:41]:
So you, you've been around for about four to five years. You started the company with your wife. Can you give us an idea just like looking into the future over the next few years, what are some of the milestones company that you're really excited about pursuing?
Rob Sladen [00:36:56]:
So this was a really pivotal year for us. We now have three to four products that we're developing and I'll touch on those, but I'm going to, I'll stick with that beachhead product that we, that we've been talking about here. So you know, that I would say is a, a better oil system for turbojets that are expendable. We're doing ground testing this year with customers. So that's exciting. And we're on key customers and key new players in the space, their technical roadmaps with an eye towards things like altitude testing and flight testing next year. So key milestones for that product line are continue to advance the TRL levels up through TRL 8 or 9 and getting to altitude testing and flight testing. And we're very confident that it works at those different places or different altitudes, not just on the ground, but at the end of the day, you've got to prove all this right.
Rob Sladen [00:37:48]:
So we're confident on paper. We gotta now go and transition some of that proof into actual real world demonstration. So those are key technology development milestones for us is advancing through the flight envelope, I'll say, and, and expanding on the flight envelope. And then there's some unique corner points in the flight envelope. Things like cold start, so being able to start at like negative 65 degrees negative, 60 degrees negative, whatever you can imagine that oil, what happens there is like pushing molasses through tubes. And so you can't really effectively start a machine and have a lubrication system working if the oil acts like molasses. So we have to figure out how to quickly warm that up so that when a machine starts, it's being lubricated within, let's call it 30 seconds. And that's critical.
Rob Sladen [00:38:37]:
And so we'll continue to advance that technology as well, and we'll continue to hit all the different corner points. And then generally speaking, as UB pods, we very much look at ourselves like the picks and shovels of next generation weaponry. So we want to be component and subsystem. We want to go after components and subsystem technology for the next generation of weaponry. And so we're doing that with the Z pod. We have a oil system that acts as the moral equivalent of an airbag to increase safety standards in the sky after a loss of oil. Eventually you can imagine that same small footprint thinking works really well as a backup system or an auxiliary system. And we're excited about some of the partnering that's going on with Bowling, Bell, Sikorsky, Rolls Royce and Honeywell with that technology as they look to bring safer components into their, into their fold for new designs or current designs in the field.
Rob Sladen [00:39:34]:
And then we're also really focused on sustainment. So we have an anti corrosion smart pod technology that helps operators get rid of or reduce the amount of manual labor and increase fleet readiness. So sustainment is something that is really important as Ulupods and more, more broadly, something that we have to think about as a country. Just the, the Air Force is operating the oldest and the smallest fleet they've ever operated. So if you go back 30 years, the average age of the fleet was 17 years old, or the average age of, of the fleet was 17 years old. Today it's 30 years old. The fleet readiness numbers back 30 years ago were at about 72% fleet readiness. Today they're at 50% fleet readiness.
Rob Sladen [00:40:14]:
So when people talk about this idea of next generation weaponry and they talk about drones and they talk about things like loyal wingmen, there is no loyal wingman. If there is nothing actually for those wingmen to support from a man standpoint, if that F35 isn't ready to fly, if the F22 isn't ready to fly, if our cargo, larger C130 type applications are not ready to fly. So we're very focused on helping the operators in the DoD with, with asset preservation as well. And so we have products across, you can see now not just in the air, but also things or products that support the fleet on the ground. And we've just brought on a pretty key hire in a Dr. Steve Martins who comes from ONR and spent a lot of years at GE and he has some other ideas. Technology gaps hecs in the market. So we will continue to invest in R D and we will continue to go innovate around gaps and bring new technologies to the market, all in an effort to make sure that the warfighter has the best equipment and the best technology available to them at all times and frankly at a at the speed they need it.
Ken Miller [00:41:23]:
Rob it's been great to talk with you today. If any of our listeners want to get a hold of Zulu Pods, their website is zulu pods.com that's z u l u p o d s.com Zulu of course being the last phonetic letter of the military Alphabet. So Zulu pods.com Rob, thank you so much for being on the show and for telling us a little bit about your game changing technology. Really enjoy talking to innovators like yourself because you are the key to our advantage in this very chaotic global and security environment. So thank you so much for all your work and for joining me here on from the Crow's Nest.
Rob Sladen [00:42:06]:
Well, we appreciate it. Thank you for your time, thank you for the invite and look forward to the next time we can connect.
Ken Miller [00:42:13]:
Well, that would conclude this episode of From the Crows' Nest. As always, please take a moment to review and share the podcast. We always enjoy hearing from our listeners listeners. So please take a moment to let us know how we're doing. Also check us out on social media and Instagram and YouTube and Facebook. We post there regularly updates on the show as well as clips and so forth. So please check that out. That's it for today.
Ken Miller [00:42:36]:
Thanks for listening.