defense
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ATI makes the metal that takes the heat.
A jet engine is a demanding customer. ATI built its business around that fact, trading ordinary stainless steel for alloys and components that earn their keep under pressure.
Viasat and the last mile above Earth
An antenna that would not unfold exposed the risk in Viasat’s giant-satellite bet. Its next chapter is about making connections work across oceans, aircraft cabins and competing orbits.
AAR’s next big move starts on the ground
AAR built a business around the unglamorous work that keeps aircraft flying. Now it is buying more hangar capacity, adding software, and walking away from revenue that ties up too much cash.
Lockheed Martin sells the long game
A fighter jet is the beginning of the relationship. The harder business is keeping an entire system ready, year after year.
Boeing’s future is built one bolt at a time.
Boeing can design an airplane that crosses an ocean. Its harder assignment is making sure every ordinary step on the factory floor happens exactly as it should.
RTX and the price of staying airborne
A tiny flaw in engine metal exposed the enormous promise behind RTX: selling a machine means standing behind it for years. Its aircraft systems and missile defenses run on the same demanding bargain.
Textron built an empire. Now comes the edit.
The company behind Cessna jets, Bell rotorcraft, and E-Z-GO golf cars grew by putting unlikely businesses together. Its next move is to pull some of them apart.
Rockwell Collins made the cockpit make sense.
A radio maker from Iowa learned to put complicated machines in conversation. Its enduring lesson is about what to connect - and where to stop.
Northrop Grumman and the price of getting it right
A telescope that unfolds in space. A bomber built to slip past radar. Northrop Grumman sells machines whose smallest details can decide whether the whole thing works.
Lisa Atherton and the education of an unlikely CEO
An ice cream franchise, an Air Force budget office and a tiltrotor program helped prepare Lisa Atherton to lead Textron. Her career makes a case for taking the next job seriously before imagining the one after it.
Jim Taiclet and the space between the machines
He learned to lead in a transport cockpit and spent 17 years running a cell-tower business. At Lockheed Martin, Jim Taiclet is betting that the connections between machines can matter as much as the machines themselves.
The art of keeping things running
Andromeda Systems Incorporated turns aircraft maintenance expertise into tools for fleets, factories, and even breweries. Its central question is deceptively simple: what actually needs fixing, and when?
SAP NS2 puts a border around the cloud
The cloud promises to go everywhere. SAP NS2 makes a business of controlling where it goes, who can touch it, and how government gets its work done.
SPARTA sold the thinking behind the shield
Before Parsons bought SPARTA for $350 million, its engineers had built a business around a difficult question: will the system actually work? The answer was worth paying for.
Hadrian makes the factory the product
A missile can wait on a single metal part. Hadrian is betting that the way to shorten that wait is to redesign the factory around software, then sell the capacity.
Gecko Robotics goes where the data isn't.
A wall-climbing robot makes a good entrance. Gecko Robotics’ bigger bet is that measuring the physical world can change how we repair it, finance it, and build it again.
Kerem Ozmen and the Cost of Making Things Real
From Reno’s startup community to nuclear power, remote computing and electric racing, Kerem Ozmen has built an investing career around a stubborn question: what does it take to get an ambitious machine into the world?
Matthew Ritchie and the business of keeping the lights on
After years in aerospace operations, Matthew Ritchie co-founded Collective Manufacturing Group to give established shops another chapter. His first acquisitions put that promise to work, from a reopened Indiana factory to a Connecticut picnic that stayed on the calendar.
Machina Labs builds a factory that can change its mind
A flying C-17 repair panel, a custom Toyota tailgate, and two robots with a taste for sheet metal. Machina Labs is testing what happens when a factory can make a new shape without buying a new die.
ideaForge’s drones can stay up. Can they get bought?
A police trial in Indiana reveals the real business of aerial intelligence: keeping the aircraft aloft, the operator confident, and the purchasing department on board.
CesiumAstro’s next frontier is the factory floor
Its radios can change their instructions in orbit. Now CesiumAstro is taking on a harder terrestrial problem: turning adaptable space hardware into a repeatable manufacturing business.
Flatirons Solutions makes the aircraft manual earn its keep
An aircraft manual has to survive revisions, local edits and a journey to the shop floor. Flatirons Solutions turns that paperwork into a connected maintenance workflow - and is now adding visual guidance to the job.
Progeny Systems: a submarine is only as good as its connections
A sonar, a weapon and a computer can each work perfectly and still make a dreadful team. Progeny Systems built a defense business around getting the parts to cooperate.
nLogic makes defense systems work together. Its employees own the company.
Missile defense depends on the unglamorous art of making complicated things cooperate. This Huntsville engineering company applies a second kind of integration to the people doing the work: shared ownership.
DirectViz Solutions and the art of making nothing happen
A $68.5 million Navy task order puts a quiet federal IT contractor in the spotlight. Its business is keeping complicated systems secure, useful, and running while the machinery changes underneath.
JWI builds the booth. The real job is everything around it.
For aerospace companies, a trade show is a temporary workplace with a very public deadline. JWI brings the stand, the shipping, and the small details under one roof.
The Guys Who 3D-Modeled a Better Night Vision Goggle in a Garage
An R&D engineer started building lighter night vision housings on the side in 2020. Five years later, Nocturn Industries ships carbon-composite goggles that weigh less than aluminum, cost less than the incumbents, and carry a lifetime warranty - all from a shop in New Hampshire.
The Liverpool radar shop that turned a $151 billion missile-defense door into an open one
A 58-person shop in upstate New York builds software-defined radar - and just landed on a defense contract worth up to $151 billion.
The Ski Bum Who Put NASA's Coldest Material Into Your Winter Boots
Michael Markesbery took $10,000 from an astronaut scholarship and a material NASA uses to insulate spacecraft, and spent a decade figuring out how to make it bend. Now Solarcore® sells that trick to boot brands, the Air Force, and battery makers.
Jackie Helfrich Sells the Invisible Parts That Hold the World Together
She markets connectors and sensors most people never see - the components inside airplanes, hospitals, factories and power grids - and has spent 20 years turning quiet industrial hardware into a story buyers can follow.