Here’s Chris Power, CEO of Hadrian, on the Venture Stories podcast. Hadrian is a software-defined factory that can quickly spin up new machine tools and streamline processes to dramatically lower cost and lead time of aerospace parts. Here’s a little about the background of Hadrian:
It’s a $50 to $60 billion industry split up among 3,000 or 4,000 small businesses, which are mostly mom and pops. Most of those mom and pops are run by 60 year olds. So within the next decade, in the same decade we might bump heads with China or try to win a space race, you’ll see the supply base completely collapse domestically. The purpose of Hadrian is this amazing, order of magnitude, factory as a service product for commercial space. Our mission is to build advanced manufacturing across the country as these mom and pops retire out.
And here’s Chris on supply chain speed and procurement cycle time:
We deal with procurement people in commercial companies. We have some defense primes that might be slower than the space companies, but broadly speaking compared to the government they are fast. We’re dealing with millions of dollars for a contract, not like the F-35 program of something like that’s a congressional line item that takes a hundred million dollars and five years to get something across the line. I will say, most large OEMs like Northrop Grumman are used to having this long procurement cycle. That means their supply chain planning can be very slow. When you’re waiting two years lead time and it has a 10 year delivery cycle, you can spin up your supply chain pretty slowly and carefully.
What we see in new space, there’s Starlink version two coming out, we need to change the supply chain in a two week period. Have supply chain be as agile as the customer. What I think you’ll see is, as the government moves towards a more agile procurement cycle, the OODA loop is much shorter, that’ll have this downstream effect. If Anduril is winning all these contracts because they’re super agile, how does legacy defense OEM compete? They have to speed up their supply chain as much as they speed up themselves.
We can only hope that government procurement cycle speeds up.
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