Defense Business Brief: Tulsa’s space draw; Cadenazzi’s wish; Anduril’s $5B round

Quantum Space is building its first satellite, but the Maryland-based company is already planning its first large manufacturing facility in Tulsa. Why there? Location and propulsion testing. 

The state government is “building a hypergolic test stand in Oklahoma that will be owned and operated by Agile Space Industries—that's for in-space propulsion. And of course, those are the thrusters that we're going to use on Ranger and they're going to be tested there at the hypergolic test facility,” Quantum Space CEO Jim Bridenstine told Defense One. 

“Because if you're going to sustain maneuver, you've got to have high energy thrust to get out of the way of threats…to look at threats to get out of the way of debris. This is what Ranger, our satellite, is capable of…So all of this means we need the ability to use thrust and we're going to have thrust in levels and capabilities that others in the market don't have. And all that thrust has to be tested…in Tulsa.”

Bridenstine, who is a former NASA administrator and U.S. congressman for Oklahoma, said his company already has a government customer for the Ranger Prime satellite, which will maneuver quickly in orbit using technologies currently under development. The plan is to fly Ranger in 2027. 

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As private capital flows toward defense, Michael Cadenazzi, the Pentagon’s industrial policy chief, wants some of the funding to underpin expansions of the gritty foundation of manufacturing: critical minerals, material sciences, factories, he said last week at the Special Competitive Studies Project’s annual AI Expo. 

• "We'd love for industry to invest in the lower tiers of the supply chain. There are a lot of things that are dirty and explosive and made of metal, that are not exciting investments and aren't going to generate your 60 percent [rate of] returns. I get that's what everybody wants. But at the end of the day, we need a certain portion of the portfolio invested in these things at the lower end, supply chain, chemicals, castings, forging, kind of old school metallic things. I can't fire [software-as-a-service] rounds and fight, sorry. Maybe in 80 years or so. Right now, I still need things that are rocket propelled and explode,” Cadenazzi said. 
• “So for us, seeing continued investments into the mineral space, into the material space, that is a big thing. The more of those we see in, the more commercial capital we have and unlocks there, the better off we're going to be settled for the future.”
• AI should be used to fine-tune what’s happening on the factory floor, he said, “and not worry so much about giving me the next dashboard. I got plenty of dashboards.” 
• “We really need to get these tools deployed to the legacy factories, the organic industrial base, which have been historically under invested in,” and many of which haven’t been upgraded in decades.
• “I'm really excited about seeing a focus on these sort of dirty industrial areas,” Cadenazzi said, noting that the rare-earths challenge isn’t just China dependence, but that the process is dirty and AI could help make it cleaner.
• “It's chemicals. There's a lot of waste. And so what we need to do is actually get the next wave of science developed to go ahead and do that in a cleaner way. Which has always been the success of America is we come up with a dirty way to do something, and then we throw our brains at in our smartest minds, we use a combination of industrial potential on the commercial side, government funding, labs, universities, and we create a better, cheaper, faster way to do it, in this case, cleaner.” 

• Anduril raised $5 billion in a Series H funding round led by Thrive Capital and Andreessen Horowitz. The company is now valued at $61 billion. 
• A medical brigade in the Army’s 18th Airborne Corps tested autonomous medical resupply during a recent exercise using Soaring’s M25 drones. 
• Former Army CIO Leonel Garciga is now a senior executive advisor at Booz Allen Hamilton. Here’s his last interview with Defense One here.
• The USS Cleveland—the final Freedom-classlittoral combat ship, LCS 31—will be commissioned on May 16. Watch the livestream here.