What is the big vision at Anduril? SpaceX has the goal to make life multiplanetary, which sets them apart from the old crop of rocket companies.
This drone looks no different than what comes out of Lockheed?
This drone looks no different than what comes out of Lockheed?
Word is Anduril's trying to do the SpaceX thing to defense. Personal ideology aside, more power to 'em; DoD procurement is a lightless nightmare realm from which nothing good can emerge.
But for Anduril I fail to see what they actually do that is so revolutionary vs what was already out there. And most of the info out there, including here, is about the founder and not the company. But perhaps it's just that the cool demos are not public.
OK, I say that with some levity. From what I've seen, it was far more subtle, and this is the aspect, the "secret sauce", that Anduril might be looking to replicate.
What they really did - one of the things, the thing that's in my core interest - was go through the . . tens of thousands . . of specifications, and isolate the ones that actually mattered, versus the ones that were good but onerously labor intensive[1], versus the ones that weren't only not necessary but which were unfalsifiable[2].
One of SpaceX's great advantages is that they could just deep six such very-expensive-hourly-headcount piles of "work", before they got stuck up to their axles in an entirely speculative systems engineering approach or some other brilliant piece of paperwork.
[1] Like looking for "commonality" when no such thing exists or is even possible. SpaceX doesn't waste time trying to show how "modular" their crap is according to some spec or other - when a variant goes far enough afield, they don't hesitate to cut the cord and roll a new product. False equivalence is a poison pill across all of aerospace, but in MIL-STD especially.
[2] Like the DoD mapping of Mil-STD-881 to MIL-STD-498 to goddamn scrums - how the hell do you tell if that's useful or not? Or if it's an actual thing in the world? You can't. It's horseshit, a six million dollar Powerpoint slide.
i.e. consume information from multiple sources (satellites, ground stations, planes, drones) and use it to coordinate the action of other drones/planes/etc.
There's a list of things they actually do now on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anduril_Industries (see "Lattice" in particular)
There was an announcement last week (and yesterday) about a "Replicator" initiative from the DoD (using large numbers of cheap drones) that seems largely aimed at countering China in the Taiwan Strait; I can imagine this is the sort of business they want to be involved with.
https://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/articles/2023/8/29/n...
""" With Replicator, we're beginning with all-domain, attritable autonomy, or ADA2, to help us overcome the PRC's advantage in mass: more ships, more missiles, more forces.
Before Russia invaded Ukraine again last February, they had that advantage too. Yet we've seen in Ukraine what low-cost, attritable systems can do — not to mention other commercial technologies.
They can help a determined defender stop a larger aggressor from achieving its objectives, put fewer people in the line of fire, and be made, fielded, and upgraded at the speed warfighters need, without long maintenance tails.
At DoD, we've already been investing in attritable autonomous systems [...] and in multiple domains: self-piloting ships, uncrewed aircraft, and more.
Now is the time to scale, with systems that are harder to plan for, harder to hit, and harder to beat than those of potential competitors. """
- (2023-09-06) https://www.defense.gov/News/Speeches/Speech/Article/3517213...
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2016/9/23/13025422/palmer-luckey-oc...