Rapid Spacecraft Development and Manufacturing

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Col. Bryon E.C. McClain:

Okay. Well, good morning, everyone, and welcome to this panel on rapid spacecraft development and manufacturing. For those of you that were doing different strategies to underwater basket weaving, I think that’s by the pool, that’s not up here.

We’re really excited to dive into this topic and I expect we’re going to have a fun, well, now 39 minutes and 40 seconds. That said, given this is a rapid panel, we should probably get right into it and so I will start by asking our esteemed panel members to introduce themselves with something that sounds like this. Good morning, I’m Bryon McClain, program executive officer for space combat power and your moderator for today’s panel.

Chris Long:

Chris Long, I’m the vice president and deputy general manager for space cyber and intelligence for General Dynamics.

Kevin Czinger:

Good morning. I’m Kevin Czinger. I’m the founder and executive chairman of an advanced manufacturing company called Divergent Technologies.

Tony Ulloa-Severino:

Good morning. I’m Tony Ulloa-Severino, I go by Tony US, VP of manufacturing in Millennium Space System.

Col. Bryon E.C. McClain:

All right. Well, thank you very much. So, let’s get into this topic and I’ll start with my favorite stage setting question. When you hear rapid spacecraft development and manufacturing, what does that mean to you? Chris, we’ll just start it off.

Chris Long:

So, I basically started with what is the available platforms for the mission that we’re trying to get to. So, being on the payload side, it usually goes to what kind of payloads are available, what modifications need to be made, what orbits but what is the real mission effect that we’re trying to get to and then what are the available providers of spacecraft that have active lines that we could use to get onto those. And then there’s always that trade off of is it perfect, is it meeting all the requirements or is it meeting what the real mission needs to do, that to me is the responsive piece.

Kevin Czinger:

So, I would say what that means to me from the manufacturing side. And so, we’re a manufacturing infrastructure for the defense industry, we’re not a product developer in and of itself, we’re a manufacturer and to me what that means is fast and free. And it means fast development with a development package that can go directly from unit one to full volume production, that’s fast development to me. And free means it’s a fully digital system, digital package machines, in our case, printers that can print anything that’s generated by our system front end.

So, it’s design agnostic manufacturing and design agnostic assembly so you have a package which is, not only the optimized system structure, but the optimized manufacturing instructions and assembly instructions for volume manufacturing. And then the iteration is free meaning all you need to do is change data in that package, it flows down into the manufacturing and assembly instructions and, immediately, you can manufacture add volume if you want. So, fast development, free iteration.

Tony Ulloa-Severino:

Yeah. To me, that means, just because it needs to be rapid, it doesn’t mean it has to be chaotic. I think the predictability to schedule is important. I think it’s a value chain from a left to right in concert from requirements, design, engineering, supply chain and manufacturability that goes all in one hand in hand. And the word rapid sometimes maybe misconstrued for something other than not having a mission reliability for it and I think, working in concert, that’s something that’s needed.

Col. Bryon E.C. McClain:

I think that’s some great ideas. Let’s talk about some of the challenges that we’ve experienced and limitations that we’re finding in regards to development and manufacturing speed and what solutions you see are out there. Kevin, you really started diving into that, I’d like you to …

Tony Ulloa-Severino:

Yeah, absolutely. Some of the challenges are, really, they come down to any requirements, they’re changing, something that would not allow the team to just settle down on what needs to be done, be able to accomplish, put a plan in place and be able to execute. With changing requirements, sometimes it filters down to designs, supply chain and manufacturability of those designs and changes that go associated with it. So, as long as those are stable, I think those are pretty predictable.

Col. Bryon E.C. McClain:

Kevin, your thoughts?

Kevin Czinger:

I would say the largest challenges on our side and this is we’ve built a system called the Divergent Adaptive Production System which is really the first fully digital engineering and manufacturing platform and it is educating people about what that means because additive manufacturing is just a feature of that. And we’ve had to design our machines for that platform and we manufacture our own printers and assemblers within the factory. So, getting people to understand what a new manufacturing platform is that they’ve never seen before and then relating that to qualification and processes and contracting. So, when people say they want to move fast, educating them on what it’s going to take in terms of qualification and processes to do that in a fully digital system.

And this is going to be as disruptive to hardware manufacturing as digitization was disruptive to analog content. We saw what that did to media companies, we’ve seen social media, manufacturing will be just as disrupted. And I’d say, given the mission-critical need for speed in the military vis-a-vis China right now and China’s automating, there was just an article that said China automates, well, America waits, I’d say the thing is how do you get actual proven commercialized technical capability at the tactical level, that strategic capability tactically executed as quickly as possible.

Chris Long:

So, I’ll take it from a payload standpoint mostly on the electronic side. I think, on the software side, industry as a whole has become very good at being able to develop the packages, even updating software on orbit is a common practice now. I think where we see the biggest limitation is the supply chain as it relates to some of the parts that are still required to operate in some orbits, not all. I think we’re seeing in Leo that there’s a little bit more of a set of parts that are more resilient to radiation but we also … Even in those orbits, we see some issues. Some of that requires buying parts well ahead of time and inventorying those parts so that you can be ready to manufacture those rapidly.

On the RF side, higher digitization speeds are very important but, again, if you look at some of the IR platforms and some of the real high advanced systems, those things take time especially with the high sensitivity types of focal planes, et cetera, that some of the providers are making. And so, that to me is the limiting factor in terms of how fast we can get some of those things out and then looking long-term at the supply chain assets as to how many providers are really out there.

Col. Bryon E.C. McClain:

So, those are some really great topics. I want to start with the changing requirements topic and dive into that a little bit. We have Secretary of War coming out saying we’ll accept 80% of a solution and then iterate from there. How do we balance that especially speaking, again, speaking from the government guy who is sending out the requirements, how do we balance this idea of 80% and iterating without going down the path of, dare I say, the Bradley, something that we enjoyed a movie on but something that the requirements seem to just grow and grow and grow.

And so, we talked about requirement stability being a challenge yet I’m also talking about starting off with 80% and then iterating, my head’s trying to square that both in there and it’s having trouble. Can you help?

Tony Ulloa-Severino:

Yeah, absolutely. Look, I’ve had the pleasure of my career to be able to be mostly in design, build, test and implementation back my NASA JPL days, moved on to chief engineer and so on to run safety, quality emission assurance and now manufacturing. What I think, actually, the key element that you said was the requirement change. I think understanding what the requirements are actually, how they’re trickling down and what consequences they provide to the spacecraft, to the mission. Sometimes what seems to be an easy requirement addition or change or delta, it’s not fully understood.

So, I would say maybe ask, if there’s a design change or requirement change, how does it filter down all the way to the vehicle getting at the door. It’s not just about the engineering, it’s not just about the supply chain, it’s not just about the analysis, digitization of it, it’s about how does it impact the final product.

Col. Bryon E.C. McClain:

And so, we got to keep the order mixed up here so, Chris, how about you come at it from the payload perspective?

Chris Long:

I think it goes a lot of what Tony was saying. If you have the good digital twins, the good digital models, the analysis, if something changes, you can then go back in and rapidly be able to say this is what the real end mission effect is, again, starting from what the war fighter needs working back. A lot of times those models are in place and you can share that rapidly. I think what becomes more difficult is how does the government be able to look at those different trade-offs and then give us feedback so that we can move all of those levers that we have and do so in a competitive environment. And I know that’s very difficult the way some of our acquisition regulations are set up to make it fair but that’s what we’ve been looking at is how can we give the government as many levers as possible and find that sweet spot.

Col. Bryon E.C. McClain:

Kevin, sir?

Kevin Czinger:

I would say I’ve done 30 plus years of technology companies, our approach, and this is from a manufacturing, not a product standpoint, requirement standpoint, is you look at what would be called a minimally viable version, not 80%. You’d say what is the minimally viable version that I want to test and iterate off of as a foundation and I’d say that’s first requirements package. My hope as a citizen of this country is that we look at fully digital engineering and manufacturing and go you connect that minimally viable version to a generated technical data package that has all of the optimized instructions for manufacturer assembly connected to design agnostic manufacturing, design agnostic assembly then iteration is going to be fast and free and you can start adding those blocks but complexity is not a friend, tooling is not a friend, fixturing is not a friend.

If we seek complexity step one and we go back to manufacturing the way that America always did, God bless freedoms forward but, if we do go back, we’ll get creamed by the Chinese. So, that’s what it means to me.

Tony Ulloa-Severino:

I do have … I’ll go back on that, actually. If we were to miss on the requirement set that was important and somehow they could not have made it, I would suggest to make that present to the implementer so we can actually get ahead for the next go around.

Col. Bryon E.C. McClain:

Great. We talked a little bit about supply chain challenges as well. Chris, you really started kicking us off on this. Supply chains for spacecraft are very unique especially when we start talking about the unique environment that we operate in and I know this, from an electronics perspective, this is definitely a big challenge. I’ve seen a lot of new companies approach this with vertical integration which has its own challenges especially when it comes to scale. What approaches do you think the industry needs to take really so that we can look at the supply chain and help the supply chain support rapid manufacturing, rapid development? Chris, you want to take us …

Chris Long:

Yeah, I think what our focus has been is a very deliberate at the company level and then down to each business working with a larger base. It used to be where you had a smaller set and subcontracts and supply chain was it was very focused on a couple of suppliers and then you’d have long-term agreements. We still do that but one of the things that we do at these conferences is we go in and we walk around and we find anybody that we can find that we think has some other alternatives and then we invest in them. And in some cases, it’s nothing more than a backup to have a … Some people would say, “Well, you’re making sure that you’re keeping the knife at the other provider,” but the reality is it’s really making sure that you have some backups in that process.

And then it’s also buying things in advance, I think that’s one of the things that we have found no different than any other industry over time that, if you’re going to be able to respond rapidly, you have to have some level of inventory of capacity and that also then helps that next level supplier.

Col. Bryon E.C. McClain:

Tony, what are your thoughts?

Tony Ulloa-Severino:

Yeah, I don’t disagree with the answer, I think knowing what you’re going to build ahead of time based on your products it’s key. Get ahead of those and, as long as the demand is clear, you can get ahead of those for most part. There are some parts, radiation components that may come out for specific mission requirements that may be a challenge and they just have to deal with those. When it comes down to vertical integration, trying to do it all sometimes feels like it’s a lot but, when it’s your own products, you have to see that through and, at the same time, maybe develop a supply chain that’s reliable and have qualified the product and can go along with it because, as much as vertical integration is great, you control your own destiny, it’s also not necessarily fully scalable when you start going up to hundreds.

Col. Bryon E.C. McClain:

Excellent. Kevin?

Kevin Czinger:

As someone that is acting as a digital manufacturer for primes, I can say what I would hope to see things develop into which is, when you went from setting up your own servers as a software company to AWS and you had the cloud and a set of tools, you saw tens of thousands of developers all of a sudden start to create software companies. If you have a digital system that can support things and, say, you’re even a large prime and you’ve got that package, then you can look at that system as basically a configurator and potentially qualify multiple suppliers in a very rapid way. So, what I would say is, and I know it’s not the season but I’ve heard this analogy used, if the Christmas tree is fast and free, get as many ornament makers as possible and plug in as many innovative ornaments into your system platform as possible.

Col. Bryon E.C. McClain:

Great. I think we should probably move on to the exciting part of this panel which I say that being the government guy about to ask the question as someone who’s part of the problem. So, what do you think we need to do differently? Because, let’s be honest, a lot of satellite is still a fairly strong monopsony market where we have quite a power and influence in that. So, Kevin, I’ll start with you. What do you think the government needs to do differently in our process for interacting and doing RFIs, doing RFPs to enable some of what we’ve been talking about here?

Kevin Czinger:

Well, what I would say is a couple of things but one is … And, obviously, I have the greatest respect for our military is just, on the contracting side, obviously we’ve lost hundreds of contract officers across all of these military branches. If we’re going to get innovation in especially at this critical time where people seem to talk seriously whether 2027 is something, it is something even if it isn’t an exact date, that contracting needs to be enormously sped up. Going back to the China automates, well, America waits, I would find the best set of AI tools, match them to our contractors, have a new contracting process where our contractors, which our contractor base within the military has shrunk, they use those tools in a new process and have a race not to the bottom, not trying to individually without tools turn contracting into rocket science but having speed goals, use the technology, incorporate AI into contracting and make it as fast as possible so that we can innovate faster than the Chinese.

And so, I’d say that’s it. Obviously, the big thing is always demand signal and I would say, when you’re implementing a new technology, going back to the minimally viable version of something, figure out quick qualification programs on something that demonstrates what you think needs to be demonstrated so that you can create qualification standards for things across the services. I’ll give one example which is the ERAM which we just did with CoAspire, it was just in the Wall Street Journal, I think, this morning about, hey, finally the Pentagon’s done something super fast. That was done with Brigadier General Bob Lyon’s team where we said let’s look at a foreign military sale and try to get this done as quickly as possible. And I think that minimally viable version that we can build off for qualification and other things is something that makes sense and that would create also a demand signal if you say hit these milestones and then this contract is certain.

Col. Bryon E.C. McClain:

Chris, what are your thoughts on this?

Chris Long:

Well, I certainly wouldn’t want to have your job even though I think you do a great job at it.

Col. Bryon E.C. McClain:

By the way, these answers don’t influence any ongoing contracting actions, I swear.

Chris Long:

That’s true. So, first of all, it’s the improvement over the last 15, maybe 10 and now even the last five years has been impressive. I think we like some of the processes that you guys are doing where you have some level of an award at the end of that and that allows, again, for flexibility because at the end it’s not all just about requirements, it’s about mission capability so it allows the provider and, in a lot of cases, the rest of the supply chain to trade that off so I think that’s an important process. Certainly, I think I would echo the same thing, I think we’ve seen, and not just on the Air Force side but across the IC as well, the loss of contracting officers and officials has made it a little bit more complicated certainly on that.

But I guess if we really looked at the demand signal is important but also you guys have made some strides in certain areas in sharing the threat and where things are already taken care of. The worst thing in industry is to walk in and go to a meeting and find out that you’re three years behind on a specific area or find out that you’re the only one investing in a certain area, we like that but we don’t like the other side of it. But we’re going to invest our money and we want to know where we’re to invest the money where we can bring the most value and I think you guys have done a better job over the last 10 years of saying this is where the industrial base really is and I think continuing to do that’s going to be important.

Col. Bryon E.C. McClain:

Tony, I’ll give you the last stab at this.

Tony Ulloa-Severino:

Yeah. Look, I think transparency is key. I think cadence and multi-year contracts develop capacity and, ultimately, I think that’s what we are looking for. Some of the members here that have provided the answers, I think I align with directly, knowing what’s coming, what allow us to be ahead of it and be able to prep for it and be able to get in. By the time we find out, sometimes it’s too late, we have to be more reactive and we’ll do that when it’s necessary to get the job done. Knowing ahead, understanding what might be coming, and I’m sure you have your own challenges and we appreciate everything you guys are doing, knowing budgets and everything else but we start knowing quantities, understanding what technology may be missing will allow us to be able to get ahead and develop the capacity to be able to respond when the demand is there.

Col. Bryon E.C. McClain:

That’s fantastic. And for those of you that are thinking about it, I think the panel just highlighted how important contracting officers are so please go to USA Jobs and look for contracting jobs, we would love to have you come join our team. I’m going to take that opportunity, thank you all for highlighting their importance. I couldn’t do my job without a stellar team that we have.

One of the other challenges that I know is out there, let’s talk about redundancy, duplication and redundancy. How do we balance critical missions that need that redundancy with the impact of the complexity that happens? And I think this really starts tying to me also to that requirements discussion. What are your thoughts on dealing with complexity? Are we framing the mission in the right way in that aspect? Anybody want to jump in? Well, dealer’s choice.

Chris Long:

Please.

Kevin Czinger:

You can …

Chris Long:

Please, Kevin.

Kevin Czinger:

Honestly, I think that’s probably something where you’ve done more repetitions than I’ve done.

Chris Long:

Okay, sure. Yeah, I just didn’t want to take the question first but I’ll take a stab at it. I think it goes back again to, and this goes back to some of the digital capability, the digital twins, the more that we can have trade space and be able to go back to the government and say do you really need one … And I think we’ve been talking about this before. Do you need one advanced DHF or do you need three quasi-semi-capable systems? Even on satellites, for years, we’ve looked at what is the trade space, do you need everything redundant or do you need TT&C redundant or do you need a Star Trek redundant but you don’t necessarily need a four for three type of reaction wheel package? Those all are done and usually done at the reliability level of the spacecraft but not necessarily how it affects the mission.

So, I think some of what we have to do is then be able to translate that and I think we would need … Some of that needs to be interactive with the government as to how that trade space ends up really affecting the P sub S not just of the spacecraft but of what the war fighter needs.

Tony Ulloa-Severino:

I could take the next one if you want. Look, I think there’s a home for everything. There are single string systems that could be … They rely on proliferated constellations to be able to have the redundancy. If that’s part of the mission, that works, great, take advantage of it. There are some other missions that cannot and you have to have a redundant system. We obviously know that, when you add a redundant system, it creates complications sometimes depending how actually it’s implemented. There have been many opportunities to implement things with TMR, treatable majority redundancy versus AB and there are all kinds of architectures that I’ve had the pleasure to work with and they all have their own plus and minuses.

I would say the best way to help would be to understand what it’s really needed and not add it because it’s a nice to have but it’s a need to have. So, if we stick with that approach, I think there’s a home for everything that needs to happen and that would really help the implementation and output.

Kevin Czinger:

I would just say, going back to that idea about minimally viable version of something, when iteration can be virtually free and is very fast, then you can version and have mission-specific variants for things and I see what we’re doing and I think that is absolutely possible. Recently, and I’ll just give an analogy to a different system, we got a set of requirements for a ground launch, long range effects vehicle, from getting those requirements and whiteboarding to flight, 71 days that was ground launched, we’re now doing an air launched variant. These things are happening very rapidly. I think, as you prove it … And I would just say I’m not saying what Divergent does should be what everybody does, we welcome the competition but what I would say is that kind of rapid digital engineering and digital manufacturing has been proven and it can provide that set of capabilities.

Col. Bryon E.C. McClain:

So, let’s talk a little bit about modular open system architectures or MOSA. I know that’s always a key term that’s out there that we, especially in the government, we say, “We’ll just make sure that that’s MOSA and that’s how we go fast.” How do we really leverage the power of modular open systems and what do we need to do in the government to make sure that our engagement with industry supports that?

Tony Ulloa-Severino:

Look, I think using MOSA is something that would be … Is something that definitely help to be able to get what we’re trying to do. It should not be a philosophy, it should be an implementation. It should be maybe almost a requirement set in the contract that says you shall implement this way which I know gets difficult but, if you want to use that across multiple companies, multiple approaches, that’s the only way you have to enforce it to make sure it actually happens, otherwise, it becomes almost a philosophy of how to implement it.

Col. Bryon E.C. McClain:

Kevin, any thoughts?

Kevin Czinger:

Well, I would say, in my mind, if you have a tooled and fixtured Christmas tree that is constrained by tooling and constrained by fixturing, MOSA is okay. It can be super powerful if you have a digital, rapidly adaptable Christmas tree then it makes sense, then you can grow that supplier base, you can rapidly create variance.

Col. Bryon E.C. McClain:

Kevin, I have to ask, this Christmas, did you digitally print a Christmas tree for the house? And, if not, will you next Christmas?

Kevin Czinger:

No, but we have a 3D printed car that we sell which is expensive but, to the people who bought it, we 3D printed Christmas gifts for them.

Col. Bryon E.C. McClain:

There you go. Chris?

Chris Long:

We have accepted MOSA as the standard and, when we work as a provider of payloads or avionics and space encryption, et cetera, what we’ve found is to standardize, not only the form factor, so from an electrical interface standpoint but from a software standpoint, it’s the only real way to do it. And working with the various primes, I think everybody understands that, if they do have a different interface, then you simply, in the digital twin side, you simply build a converter to some level. Maybe not as efficient as you would like it to be but you still can do that.

Col. Bryon E.C. McClain:

Did you accept MOSA because the government put somewhere in a contract though shall do MOSA or because you found that it actually made more sense? And I always think back to our capability development document has the critical parameter that says you shall be net ready and we still have challenges actually implementing documents like that so I’m curious your thoughts.

Chris Long:

No. So, for us, it was practical for business. When you have N number of primes that want to have an interface, you just have to standardize on it.

Col. Bryon E.C. McClain:

Tony, I think that’s really what you were getting at, wasn’t it?

Tony Ulloa-Severino:

That’s exactly it, yeah. You got to standardize it so you can actually use it.

Col. Bryon E.C. McClain:

Okay. So, let’s shift gears a little bit here, we’re coming up on the last stretch. Let’s talk about scaling and production challenges. What challenges and lessons learned have you had, really, regarding that scaling to production? Tony, I’d love to start with you and your Millennium perspective.

Tony Ulloa-Severino:

Yeah. Standardization is a part of the answer, we at Millennium start early, we prototypes, we learn quickly, we … If you have to fail, fail fast, recover faster I like to say. We implement manufacturing as part of the design process from the very beginning, if you show up late, if you show up at PDR, CDR, trying to understand how that goes, it’s too late, you’re already too slow to get that done. Ramping up workforce and focusing on processes not just headcount is something that’s important as you want the individuals to be able to follow certain processes to have repeatability. When you have repeatability, then you have a prediction schedule and I think those are key.

Col. Bryon E.C. McClain:

Kevin, I know you’re currently in the process of doing this scaling. What are your thoughts for Divergent?

Kevin Czinger:

Yeah. Our scaling, obviously, is very different than previous manufacturing scaling in that a factory has always been like a music box playing one single tune. Every single one of our printers is the same, every single one of our assemblers is the same, anything that we generate upfront as the manufacturing package, every printer, everywhere it’s located can print, every assembler can assemble. So, for us, the critical thing, really, is the demand signal because it’s about a six to eight a month lead time to set up a factory is to say, assume, and I’ll just use a midpoint number, say a printer can put out 10,000 kilograms plus annual printing. So, if you’re going back to ERAM, that’s about 200 or so of those bodies a year but it can print anything that’s there. You’re simply looking at what that capacity is and we can manufacture in our factory about a printer a week right now.

Under a wartime circumstance, we could print or we could manufacture a printer in a day or two, we’ve looked at the supply chain. So, it’s really having the government say or the prime, really the prime go, okay, we can commit to this manufacturing volume and back that into capacity just the way, say, an AI company would look and go, “Here’s the number of servers we’re going to need in a data facility, let’s build X number of servers and put them in the facility.” We would do the same except with printers and assemblers.

Col. Bryon E.C. McClain:

Chris, your perspective.

Chris Long:

Well, for us as an electronics manufacturer, it’s a little easier. We would be limited by the supply chain of the capabilities of the foundries, how fast we could get in dye and get those things packaged. But from an electronics assembly standpoint and test and integration, I think the capacity exists from that standpoint, it really is back to the very fundamental silica in a lot of cases that is the long lead for us.

Col. Bryon E.C. McClain:

Great. So, as we start wrapping it up, we talked a little bit about the government demand signal and how that helps you plan. What are your thoughts on the best way for the government to really provide that demand signal so that it’s clear and unambiguous and allows you to make those business case decisions? Kevin, you want to kick it off?

Kevin Czinger:

Yeah, I would just go back to our work right now with primes, with the services, with the Pentagon civilian leadership is really to look and say, having proven, say, qualification on a foreign military sale, how does that then move into, say, aircraft. If you go by our booth, you’ll see that there are gearboxes that are on South Korean jet fighters right now fully qualified, same thing on French helicopters. How do we look at that and start to qualify in some standard qualification recipe and to pick thinking, both tactically and strategically, how do you introduce fully digital engineering and manufacturing into these programs and I think that is choosing the right programs and getting the right people together to push those through as quickly as possible.

Col. Bryon E.C. McClain:

Great. Hey, Tony.

Tony Ulloa-Severino:

Well, I think it’s pretty simple, understanding what the multi-year contracts could be, be able to maybe iron out some of the language in the contracts beforehand and be ready to go. When we go, it gives us a clear signal to understand what could be coming. I understand you probably have your own challenges to get that done but, having those clear signals, I think it means getting an understanding on quantities, on response time, on the need base to get that done so we can get ahead of it with multiple areas.

I’ll sum it up with this. Having the digital engineering part of it is great as you can actually get ahead, understand how things could change in the value chain, understanding your interfaces, understanding what requirement changes would be, understanding what different printers you would have to go build to get to the rates that you get to. And then, furthermore, it allows us to plan ahead and get a capacity that is commensurate with the expectation is in the years to come.

Col. Bryon E.C. McClain:

Chris?

Chris Long:

I think, as there’s been various parts of the government, the Air Force, SDA, the IC, I think that the one thing that we would probably like to see is a little bit clearer demand signal as is to who’s doing what and what systems are really going to be moving to the next phase. I think that there’s a lot of great opportunity out there and a lot of good progress but I think that does, as a subsystem provider to a lot of the primes on these things, that’s where we see where they’re questioning who’s doing what and where and what’s the real timeline.

Col. Bryon E.C. McClain:

Great. So, we’ll just go down reverse and come down for any final thoughts that you have that you want to share with everyone. Tony?

Tony Ulloa-Severino:

Look, I appreciate you guys having us here, thank you. I think this has been a fun panel, I appreciate the invitation and meeting the other guests, you as well. I think the future is bright, I think industry will be there to support whatever needs to be done, the capacity will grow with the demand and clear signals will take us there.

Col. Bryon E.C. McClain:

Kevin?

Kevin Czinger:

Thanks, Bryon, for inviting us on the panel, it’s an honor to be here, it’s been a very productive conference for you. And we view ourselves as the manufacturing infrastructure for the ecosystem of primes and we hope to do business with as many of them as possible.

Col. Bryon E.C. McClain:

Great. Okay, Chris.

Chris Long:

I would say this is the most exciting time in space since Apollo and, having done this 30 years, the opportunities are amazing. Just the very fact that we’re able to sit here with Kevin and the kind of stuff he does and actually now be able to think forward on how we’re going to change the way we think, it’s amazing so thank you.

Col. Bryon E.C. McClain:

Thank you all. Definitely big thanks to AFA for inviting all of us up here. Thank you all. Especially those of you that don’t work for somebody up here, for being in the audience, very great to see you all. I will say I think my big takeaways is … I have my last 15 seconds to wrap this up. Biggest takeaway, contracting officers are a critical part of our war fighter supply chain and they’re amazing. And I think the other thing is, when it really comes to rapid, it’s all about the requirements, the iteration and how we have that true partnership and I think that really came out over and over and over. So, thank you all very much and have a wonderful rest of the conference.