Starting a Solid Rocket Motor Factory from Scratch | Ethan Thornton, Mach Industries

Adam Bry is the Co-Founder and CEO of Skydio – the largest drone startup in the US.

Saurav is the Founder and CEO of Starpath — a space solar and AI data satellite startup based in LA.

Casey is the Founder of Terraform Industries. He's written a bunch of great essays on Elon's Mass Driver, Starship, the economics of space compute, Starmind, and how Elon operates

Chris is the Founder and CEO of Hadrian, one of the fastest growing manufacturing startups in the United States. Hadrian has opened six factories since it was founded in 2020 with the latest being 2.2 million square feet.

Bernt Børnich is the founder and CEO of 1X, a California-based humanoid robotics company. After years of developing NEO, its first home robot, 1X is preparing to manufacture and ship 50,000 units in 2027.

Keller is Co-Founder and CEO of Zipline — the biggest drone delivery startup in the world. A few weeks ago, Uber Eats partnered with Zipline to deliver 1 million packages a day within the next 2.5 years. This was significantly more demand than Zipline was planning for, so now they’re trying to rapidly open new factories and scale drone production.

Ethan Thornton is the founder and CEO of Mach Industries. Mach is an LA based defense tech startup working on solid rocket motors, high-altitude balloons, missiles, long-range precision strike drones, low-cost kinetic interceptors and multiple other programs which are not currently announced.

Olaf is Co-Founder & CTO of Neros. They just moved into a new 250,000 sq ft factory, expect to hit a 130,000-drone annual run rate by the end of the year, and plan to scale to 1 million drones a year by 2028.

Sam Altman is the Co-Founder & CEO of OpenAI.

Isaiah Taylor is the Founder of Valar Atomics. Valar just became the first startup in history to power an NVIDIA Blackwell with a nuclear reactor.Timestamps:0:32 Manufacturing nuclear reactors is a SpaceX style problem2:58 Scaling from 1 reactor to 104:31 Why it’s so tempting to iterate on paper instead of actually building reactors7:37 Having contact with reality - modular shielding10:09 Steel is cheaper than software engineers11:09 Why the idiot index is so high in nuclear16:02 Becoming a nuclear company18:57 It's important not to lie to yourself21:55 Obsessing over critical path 24:54 Nuclear reactors are relatively simple30:35 Safety is a function of iteration speed30:55 Why Valar had to vertically integrate35:01 Designing a Toyota Camry vs a Ferrari 38:07 Running through 1-way doors41:13 Pulling rabbits out of a hat46:13 Wartime mode48:49 Being willing to do unreasonable things51:20 How Elon injects urgency into his companies56:56 Relentlessly chasing the goal of making energy 10x cheaper58:32 What’s changed over the last 3yrs1:00:51 Designing safe nuclear reactors1:13:05 Learning from SpaceX - optimizing for scale1:18:07 Having a high tolerance for looking dumb1:19:50 How Palmer Luckey handles hit pieces1:20:55 Inevitable time1:25:26 Predicting unknown bottlenecks1:28:08 Scaling1:29:45 July 4th will be a rebirth for nuclear in the United States