Tagged: hypersonics
3 results
Reditus Space
Reditus Space is an Atlanta-based aerospace startup building reusable spacecraft that carry payloads to low Earth orbit and return them safely to the ground. Its first vehicle, ENOS, is a free-flying reentry capsule designed to host commercial and research payloads for roughly two months in microgravity before splashing down for recovery and reuse. Founded in 2024 by Georgia Tech aerospace engineers Stef Crum and Will Sherman, the company sells 'microgravity as a service' and routine 'downmass' - the return of materials from orbit - to pharmaceutical, semiconductor, biotech, and defense customers.
Long Wall
Long Wall is a Long Beach, California defense manufacturer building cost-effective, mass-producible missile defense systems. Founded in 2017 as the rocket startup ABL Space Systems, it rebranded to Long Wall in February 2025 and pivoted from commercial satellite launch to defense, repurposing years of launch-vehicle engineering into interceptors, target rockets, and deployable ground infrastructure. Its lineup includes Cyclops, a surface-launched exoatmospheric interceptor; RSX, a low-cost liquid booster for flight testing and threat replication; and Ironwood, rapidly deployable ground support equipment. The company's thesis is that modern threats - hypersonic weapons, growing nuclear arsenals, and raid sizes in the hundreds - have outrun the price and production volume of legacy interceptors, so defense needs magazine depth measured in thousands, not dozens.
Will Roper
Will Roper is a physicist-turned-defense-strategist who now runs Istari Digital, a Cambridge, Massachusetts startup trying to build an 'engineering metaverse' where machines from satellites to medicines can be designed, tested and certified entirely in software. Before founding Istari in 2022, he was the 13th Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics, steering a roughly $40-60 billion annual portfolio, and earlier the founding director of the Pentagon's Strategic Capabilities Office, where he turned a $50 million budget into a $1.5 billion-plus prototype machine that produced drone swarms, hypervelocity guns and fighter-jet AI co-pilots. A Rhodes Scholar with an Oxford doctorate in string theory, he names his ventures after Tolkien wizards and argues America must learn to make hardware behave like software before its rivals do.