A rocket company that couldn't quite reach orbit found a second life defending it.
The wordmark of a company on its second name. The first one, ABL Space Systems, spent seven years trying to put satellites in orbit. This one points the same engineering at the things falling out of it.
Here is a fact about hardware companies that sounds like a paradox but isn't: the engineering almost never goes to waste, even when the business does. Long Wall is the proof. It started in 2017 in El Segundo, California, as ABL Space Systems, a startup with a genuinely good idea - a rocket, the RS1, that could launch small satellites from a standard shipping container, from almost anywhere, cheaply. Founders Dan Piemont and Harry O'Hanley came out of SpaceX and Morgan Stanley, raised more than $500 million, took investment from Lockheed Martin, and at one point were valued at roughly $2.4 billion. On paper, this was a very successful rocket company.
There was one problem, which is the problem every rocket company has, which is that reaching orbit is extremely hard. The RS1 failed on its first orbital attempt in January 2023 and failed again in 2024. And at some point the founders appear to have asked themselves a question that is much harder to ask than it looks: what if the rocket isn't the product? What if the actual asset here - the thing worth $500 million of accumulated learning - is the manufacturing, the propulsion, the ability to build complex flight hardware fast and cheap? And what if there were a customer who needed exactly that, in enormous quantity, and was willing to pay?
There was. In February 2025, Piemont announced that ABL Space Systems would become Long Wall, named after the fortifications that connected ancient Athens to its port and kept the city fed during siege. The company would stop trying to reach orbit and start building missile defense. This is the sort of pivot that reads as a retreat in a press release and as a strategy in hindsight.
Figures reflect publicly reported history spanning the ABL Space Systems and Long Wall eras. Employee count is approximate (~49). Defense-era funding is reported at Seed stage as of November 2025; amounts undisclosed.
The thesis is almost aggressively simple, and it is about counting. Modern missile threats - hypersonics, growing nuclear arsenals, drone-and-missile raids - now arrive in the hundreds. Legacy interceptors are exquisite: extraordinarily capable, extraordinarily expensive, and built in the dozens. Do the subtraction. If an adversary can launch more incoming missiles in a single day than you can manufacture interceptors in a year, you do not have a defense. You have a very expensive demonstration.
Long Wall's answer is to attack the price and the production line at the same time - commercial off-the-shelf components, vertical integration, and manufacturing methods borrowed from industry rather than from the traditional defense primes. The goal is interceptors cheap and plentiful enough to have thousands of them. Whether that is achievable is the open question of the whole enterprise. But it is at least a clear one.
Raid sizes have climbed into the hundreds, eclipsing in a single day our annual production capacity for entire types of interceptors.
Illustrative comparison based on Long Wall's public statements. Not to precise scale - the point is the direction of the gap, and which way the company wants to close it.
A surface-launched, exoatmospheric interceptor that defeats ballistic missiles in the midcourse phase - in space - by hitting them. No warhead; kinetic impact does the work. Designed from the start to be mass-produced for homeland and regional defense.
An affordable liquid-fueled booster for flight testing and threat replication. It makes test flights cheap, routine, and highly available - the direct heir to the RS1 launch program, now repurposed to let the military practice against realistic targets.
A rapidly deployable ground support system - command and control, power, and communications - built to launch and operate defensive systems anywhere in the world. The unglamorous infrastructure that decides whether the rest of it actually works.
Photographs of the hardware itself are held closely, as is customary in defense. What is public is the shape of the strategy: interceptor, test vehicle, and ground gear, all fed by one manufacturing base.
The public voice of the pivot. Piemont announced the rebrand in a February 2025 blog post and frames the company's whole case around cost: the Defense Department, in his words, "has made clear its need for more cost-effective solutions." Came up through SpaceX and Morgan Stanley.
Co-founded the company in 2017 and steered its engineering identity through both the rocket era and the defense turn. Also a SpaceX and Morgan Stanley alum - the pair have now built two companies out of one team.
Unit costs remain too high, magazine depth too low.
The name comes from the Long Walls of ancient Athens - fortifications linking the city to its port so it could stay supplied under siege. Defense as logistics, roughly 2,400 years ago.
The RS1 rocket was designed to launch from a standard shipping container, so it could deploy almost anywhere on Earth. That container logic still runs through the defense products.
The old rocket didn't retire - it was repurposed as a target, so the military can practice intercepting things that fly like real threats.
Cyclops carries no explosive warhead. It kills by hitting the incoming missile hard enough, in space, that physics finishes the job.
Long Wall's Long Beach home was leased from the former Sea Launch operation - a site once used to launch rockets from a floating ocean platform.
Both founders came from the same two employers - SpaceX and Morgan Stanley - and have now built two companies together out of one core team.