Main Engine Cut Off - T+302: A Tour of Marotta Controls

Episode Date: May 5, 2025

We take a tour of Marotta Controls in Montville, New Jersey, to see how they work, how they develop, produce, and test products at rate, and we learn about the most feared topic in space—valves!This episode of Main Engine Cut Off is brought to you by 33 executive producers—Joonas, Josh from Impulse, Heiko, Donald, Stealth Julian, Warren, Kris, Frank, Steve, Bob, Better Every Day Studios, The Astrogators at SEE, Joakim (Jo-Kim), Fred, Matt, Pat from KC, Natasha Tsakos (pronounced Tszakos), Joel, Theo and Violet, Russell, Jan, Pat, Ryan, Tim Dodd (the Everyday Astronaut!), David, Will and Lars from Agile, Lee, and four anonymous—and hundreds of supporters.TopicsControls Engineering | Control System Company | MarottaSpace Controls | Spacecraft Control Systems | MarottaMarotta’s post with photos of my tourBrian’s photo of a thruster firingThe ShowLike the show? Support the show on Patreon or Substack!Email your thoughts, comments, and questions to [e-mail] @WeHaveMECOFollow @[e-mail] on MastodonListen to MECO HeadlinesListen to Off-NominalJoin the Off-Nominal DiscordSubscribe on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Pocket Casts, Spotify, Google Play, Stitcher, TuneIn or elsewhereSubscribe to the Main Engine Cut Off NewsletterArtwork photo by NASAWork with me and my design and development agency: Pine Works

Hello and welcome to Main Engine Cutoff, I'm Anthony Colangelo, and settle in. This is one of the longer episodes of the show, probably nears. Astrobotic was a little lengthy like this too, but that's because I'm once again heading up to an actual real-life space facility. Last week I took a drive up through my my native once-in-future homeland New Jersey to Merada Controls and up to their Montville, New Jersey facility where they do a lot of production, the design, a lot of the hardware is run out of this office. So I wanted to go up and get an understanding of what they're working on up there. This is the big old Valve's company that we always joke about.

So, got to go up, see a lot of hardware, got up close with some. There's some thruster firings that happened while I was mere feet away, which you will hear in this very episode. So, it's a two or three part episode, depending on how you slice it up. I wanted to do a couple of conversations after I took the tour. Just today I recorded these. So we're going to talk first with Max Wolfinger, who is the VP of Space Systems at Mirada, to understand a little bit of the story of the space side of the business on the Mirada side of things, where they started way back in the day in the 40s and then grew to become a verifiable space company.

So I understood a little bit about their trajectory, the way they manage their products with regards to the space industry. And then you'll hear from Brian Epolito, who is the Senior Director, Business Development of Space Business Unit. And he'll actually be the one taking us on the big tour. But we'll talk to him first about some of the forwardlooking stuff to understand how they're cultivating customers, maintaining client relationships, continuing to be at the top of the game and not rest on being the big old incumbent with the fact that they are supplying most of the Falcon stack at this

point, which is most of the valves in the space industry, as well as a bunch of other product lines. But that's really where the main growth from their space business has come over these years. Along the way on the tour, you'll hear a bunch of other voices as well. The one that's recurring most often is Jonathan Black, who's the Senior Director of Space Programs and Business Development. At Marotta, those three were the ones that took me around. So it's a long tour through their entire facility. We talked to some of the people that are actually working on the hardware. There's a guy named Jim who hand polishes poppets. I learned about poppets on this episode, so I can now actually speak about them authoritatively. But they're just using a little tiny piece of sandpaper, polishing these things to exact precision by eye, by hand.

It's incredible. So a lot of people are on the way to understand what they're doing, how they're producing all these things. And then towards the end, I'll make sure to dip the audio because otherwise it's an extreme headphone warning. I got to stand very, very close by to a first stage attitude control thruster. So think about the top of the Falcon 9, those cold gas thrusters that position the stage before it comes back into the atmosphere and can use its grid fins. It's those thrusters that I got to stand in the room with probably 15 feet away inside

of some crazy box set up that may or may not be exactly where I should have been standing. I don't know. It was pretty amazing. So we got to hear that and feel that fire at like 3000 PSI and then 5000 or 6000 PSI as well. So a really huge thruster firing. So major headphone warning towards the back end of this. You'll know when it's coming

based on the conversation around it, but I'm gonna dip the audio so that you don't get your ears blown out. If you want the full unedited audio so you can hear how loud this thing is, let me know, I'll send it to you directly. But yeah, this is, it was a really fun day. Got to drive up and like I said,

tour through the whole facility and talk to some of the team members there. Learned a lot and you'll hear all the different things that they're working on on this show. So, major thank you to all of you who support Main Engine Cut-Off. This kind of trip is only possible because you support the show.

100% listener supported, lets me do these kind of things because I don't have a boss, I don't have a travel budget outside of y'all being my boss and my travel budget. So, very much appreciate your support for that. If you like what I'm doing here, mainenginecutoff.com slash support is where to go. There are 33 executive producers of this episode

of Main Engine Cutoff who made this episode possible. Thanks to Eunice, Josh from Impulse, Heiko, Donald, Stealth, Julian, Warren, Chris, Frank, Steve, Bob, Better Everyday Studios, The Asher Gators at SCE, Joe Kim, Fred, Pat from KC, Natasha, Sakos, Joel, Theon Violet, Russell, Jan, Pat, Ryan, Tim Dodd, David The Astronaut, David, Will and Lars from Agile, Lee, and four anonymous executive producers.

Thank you all so much for making this possible. Without further ado, let's get into the marathon show that this is here. All right, Max, thanks so much for hanging out. People are gonna hear you as part of the tour. It's an hour coming up towards the back end of the show that people will be hearing you popping it out. But I thought it'd be cool to talk some of the context

that I got from talking to you guys before we had the mics rolling on the story of specifically the space side of Murata and as much as the long-term history is helpful to illuminate there considering the company goes back a lot farther than just the space side of things. But it's been an interesting journey for the work that you guys do from, you know, you tell me what the right start time is for the origin story, but the last 10 or 15 years has certainly been like a very dynamic time on the space business. Well, so the interesting thing about Murata to me is that Murata's like trajectory

and inflection points follow the space industry at large. So we've been around since the 40s and we were in Saturn program and on shuttle and all those things. But around early 2000s, all of a sudden there was these people out in California who decided they want to start making rockets. And that's kind of like the inflection point for our space business too, where we went from little thing that goes a couple of times a year to really mass producing valves. And the story to get from where we were to where we are has been so much fun to be a part of

because we've gone from this little niche shop with a couple of people putting things together. Bob, who makes valves, who you talked about on the show. Yeah. And we try to be less dependent on Bob, although there are still Bob's around. But we have Jim. We met a couple of you guys on the tour. Yeah. Yeah. We have to get some name diversity, I guess. But just watching the organization scale over the past 20 years and grow with the new space industry, make mistakes with the new space industry, deal with challenges on flights, with how valves act and how systems act the way the valves are plumbed and all of those things. We got to learn through that together with a lot of really smart people in the new space industry. So watching the legacy products that are like basically what we landed on the moon evolve, get new materials,

exist in higher vibration environments and in colder environments and watching engineers come onto our team and do all of that engineering work and working closely with customers and also with Bob or Jim to explain, you know, translate from rocket people in California what our products need to do has been a lot of fun to watch. There seems to be, you know, in the space industry generally, there's suppliers that tend to work out well in the SpaceX type environments and those that don't tend to work out well.

From the tour, it certainly looks like you guys got all bases covered, but I'm wondering on those early days when it was the new space industry coming about and it was this company that's been around since World War II era, was there a culture adjustment that needed to happen or was it something that instantly felt like the speed that Murata was moving matched the speed that SpaceX and the other new engines at the time wanted to see out of a supplier like yourself? No, there was definitely more friction early on

than we have now. We really kind of grown together, but it was a dynamic upset event, right? And so all of the paradigms that we had and the people that were used to those things either adapted or moved on to other projects. So what was really cool to see for me was there were a lot of people in the space industry through the 90s and I'm sure you've read like when the heavens went on sale and all that stuff

that were ready for this moment. So then we had engineers that had been working on kind of traditional space programs for a long time in their career, and they were just ready to turn and pivot, use an overused term in all kinds of industries. But that was really exciting to see. And then we just grew the team around those people with other like-minded people that were ready to go fast and break stuff, because that's really the mantra that has made space successful for the past 20 years. And Verada has tried to embody that as much as possible.

There's two things I want to dig into about the Valve side of things specifically. Since you know, as people hear you guys do tons of other stuff too, actuators and all sorts of different lines of business, not just in space, but on the Valve side, the reason I'm coming up to visit and understand what poppets are and all that kind of stuff, you know, in the... we hear from other hardware, there are other sections of the industry that build hardware, right? That the difference in today's space industry is more like relaxed tolerance, either something that doesn't need to be, you know, radiation hardened and we're just gonna fly a bunch of them and they're really cheap,

so we can fly more of them or we can add more redundancy or, you know, get by with components that aren't the crazy expensive super unique one off things. But then the other end of it is that everybody always talks about valves being the really hard part. So is there something that about the products themselves that you're shipping that are, you know, where are you at on that spectrum, I guess, and how have things changed over the last like decade or so? Yeah, absolutely. So I think that, you know, talking back about legacy space, there was a lot of legacy requirements that went with legacy space. And one of the big things that, you know, people have been doing for the past 10 or 20 years is questioning requirements, right. And some of the, and that's been productive, but there you can push that too far. And you can definitely push that too far with valves, which are, I would like to say a little bit more nuanced

than like, you know, some other off the shelf components and, you know, a little bit more sensitive to how they're operated in systems. And I think that, you know, good propulsion engineers still will make mistakes about about how the valve really works and will misinterpret how the valve is going to be used in the system. So I think that we're in the middle of that spectrum. We try to make things as commoditized as possible, make them so that they're plug-in legos and people can use them in systems because we know that that's

what the goal is, or that's what people would like to do. But there still needs to be a little bit of trade back and forth to make sure everyone's on the same page on how things are going to work. And when you do that upfront work well, you have less problems in systems. And when you don't do that well,

and you don't have a, you know, we've definitely seen both sides. We've seen environments where it's much more people retreating to the corners of, well, it did what it was supposed to do. Well, it didn't work the how I wanted it to. And they're nuanced things. So understanding how they work together

is a better way to engineer together. It's tough for me, somebody that's not super inside the industry in terms of hardware perspective, to know where the wiggle room is for cheaper products or cost savings or whatever or even just like more mass producing because you look at valves and you're like well stuff shouldn't leak because most of these things that would leak out are highly dangerous when when leaked in unison like it tends to produce combustion or whatever.

But also, and it also needs to be like, you know, very acutely, accurately controlled to be able to turn on and off at the right times at the right speeds and do the right kind of pulsing or whatever it is that that's particular parts job is. So where, where was that kind of flex found when you were trying to dial in cost per product or specific performance metrics? So really the thing that has, you know, we've benefited from, trying to dial in cost per product or specific performance metrics? So really, the thing that has, you know, we've benefited from, excuse me, that has made our product more reliable and we think better and easier to use is that scale helps, right?

Like GM makes, I don't know, you know, thousands of solenoid a day and we make a few thousand a year, but there's other people that only and we make a few thousand a year, but there's other people that only get to make a couple hundred and it's a lot harder to make something repeatably when it's a couple hundred than it is a couple of thousand than it is 10 or 20,000 right? You know, GM automotive talks and defects in parts per million and we don't make a million. So it's hard to get to parts per million. So yeah, I think that that has really enabled us to,

that has been a driving force for making a repeatable product. And it's really just been about, separate than that, an iterative environment. A lot of our designs that are similar to what we were flying in the 1940s have gone through 10 or 15 iterations since 2015, 16, kind of in the heat of the big launch ramp that has been the last decade. So to think that we've gone through 15 or 16 iterations on a product that's been in

existence for 70 years is crazy, but it's what we needed to do to get the things to work in the environments that people are using them today. All right. Last question, which is really kind of the origin story of me being like I should, number one, you guys are so close that obviously I should have come up and visited a long time ago anyway. But one of the things I wanted to ask the most was oftentimes valves are like the victim in the story, right?

Where like something will go wrong or they're the villain and the victim sometimes. They're both depending on what exact failure was. But a lot of times things will be reported out as like, you know, this valve failed and that's kind of where the publicly known story ends, which is like, well, I guess the valve screwed up. It was the valves fault. The vehicle is fine. The valve screwed up. And then I talked to people on mission teams, you know, current past missions and they're like, yeah, that valve broke, but we definitely broke the valve, and that's why the valve broke. And it just always felt to me,

not to be like the New Jersey Homer here, that it was unfairly written because it's like, the story got to the point at which the complexity was no longer worth diving in and understanding what the actual failure mechanism was. It was just good enough to be like, the valve failed. So from your end of things, you know, what is that experience like generally going through the industry and being the villain in many of these? Not that you personally or Marata's valves in

particular, but like, I don't know, you all probably band together in the valve universe to like, you know, you know, circle up and protect each other. But what is that like from your side of things as you hear these stories? Well, I mean, certainly nobody likes to read about the valve failing, you know, to circle up and protect each other. But what is that like from your side of things as you hear these stories? Well, I mean, certainly nobody likes to read about the valve failing, you know, especially if it's something, even if it's not your valve, right?

It's, you don't like to see that because they are nuanced products. And, you know, to be open, valve companies screw up too, right? Like nobody's perfect. There are times where, you know, it just didn't work the way that we thought it would. And we do whatever we can with the launch vehicle provider or satellite

provider, figure that out and fix that. But you really see in the industry, as you described, the people that are working on the components know that we're all working together collaboratively, and usually it's some kind of mismatch on like what people were going to do originally and how you know ConOps evolved through MISRIN or even through like the design of a vehicle and that pushed things out of a boundary that just didn't work. And as long as we get to continue to work with those people, it's so you know if we want to blame the valve we can blame blame the valve. Cause at the end of the day,

the valve is a thing not working. And we've seen, so to me, the interesting thing about that is you see all of these like new, new starts come to make new valves. Cause they're like, oh, all the valve guys are all just screwing this up. Like let's go fix this. And then most of them, you know,

like the half life is like 18 months or two years or three years and they try to get into production. It's like, man, these things are a little tricky sometimes. So yeah, we take that as our win, I guess. Yeah, it's a funny symbiotic relationship, right? Because your customers are probably not going to stop buying your products because they've integrated them into their vehicle. They're happy with the performance, happy enough to have them on their vehicle.

And, you know, there's not that many valve companies in existence that supply the space industry. And it's also useful then to have kind of the veil of like, well, the valve failed. And it's like, all right, but did the valve fail or did you fail a valve? And no one ever really asked that question whether or not, you know, you should even show it or it's just kind of interesting to find out as a nerd perspective. or not, you know, you should even show it or it's just kind of interesting to find out as a nerd perspective. But sometimes like getting a high enough description,

high level enough description of like the failure mode kind of absolves this new story, it moves on and everyone's happy that we've gotten past that storyline. So it's not always necessarily a bad thing that you know the valves are the butt end of the joke that I certainly make plenty of but it just it's a weird aspect that it is some you don't really hear that much about other sub components to the extent that you do about valves and that could be that we're sitting here in 2025 and they've been a hot topic between Starliner and all the other different things that have failed over the last couple

years upper stages certainly but it's just you know I guess I'm here to help you be the voice of the valves that no one. Thank you. Yeah, that's, that's really my goal here. Thank you. Yeah. Yeah. So let's see. I mean, I'm now I'm trying to think back to the tour, which we've already done, but people haven't heard back and I feel like this is pretty good previously on Mirada. So is there anything else particular that that context wise you want people to know going into to listening to the tour that we took last week? I think you're going to see here a lot of cool

applications and you're going to like hear hopefully hear some thruster firing and we get to do that's awesome. So I hope people enjoy that because we really enjoy it every day. I mean, getting to work on space parts in northern New Jersey and talk to all these people doing all these cool things in California and Texas and Florida, and just watching rockets with parts from, you know, that people put their hands on that I get to talk to every day is just super cool. So I hope everyone enjoys that. And we certainly like it. All right, Brian, everyone on the show here is going to listen to a lot of you for the next probably more than an hour. I put the whole interview toward interview audio together.

So they're going to hear a lot of you. But one thing we didn't talk about while we were there live was more like forward leaning kind of customer facing stuff and sort of the, you know, tremendous growth that Marotta has had over the last couple of years, last tens of years or however long you would, you would paint that picture. I'm curious how you see like that following increment of time from this point forward, right? The industry is changing a lot. There's a, there's both a lot of new launch vehicles and there's less new launch vehicles

now than there were predicted to be five or 10 years ago. Cause some of the, you know, competitors have been pivoting away to hypersonics or going towards different mega constellations, vice versa, yada yada. So you mentioned when we were talking the growth of Mirada tracks very closely with the number of launch vehicles launched in the industry over the past several years. But is that going to continue to be the case, that you are directly in proportion with the kind of launch vehicle activity?

Or do you see these other markets that are coming online, commercial space stations, more human space flight, those things that could be the drivers of growth in the next 10 years, say? Yeah, I mean, either way, this stuff has to get to space, right? So whether there's a single player or there's a group of players in the industry for the launch market stuff, it's gonna have to continue to space, right? So whether there's a single player or there's a group of players in the industry

for the launch market stuff, it's gonna have to continue to grow exponentially as we've seen it. So I think we all kind of knew in industry that there was gonna be a bunch of these startups that were gonna not make it all the way through, especially the small launch category, but somebody has to be putting the stuff in space

and luckily the Murauder hardware and content that we're making is all a part of that. So we expect it to continue to grow, and we're kind of projecting it that way as well. Why do you think that the Valve side of the industry is, seems to be one of the few that is not prone to being vertically integrated within SpaceX or within Rocket Lab or these other providers? What is the special case that leads to Mirada existing out on its own and some

of your competitors that still exist outside of a typical fully vertically integrated launch company? It's a difficult thing to do, right? So when you're starting up a, you know, you hit a billion dollars in industry or in the internet and you you're gonna come over and make a rocket company. You're not like, I'm gonna make a rocket company, and I'm gonna start by making the valves first. Like, no one goes into rocketry like, oh, you know what I'm gonna do?

I'm not gonna do the thrust engine or the thrust chamber. I'm gonna do the valves, because that's the coolest part. The valves are always like the afterthought of like, yeah, I just buy those things. Like, they're just available. I just get them off the shelf and we go. Like, everyone says they wanna do everything themselves, but there's a lot of investment things. They're just available. I just get them off the shelf and we go. Everyone says

they want to do everything themselves, but there's a lot of investment and a lot of infrastructure that goes into the manufacturing as well as the design and development of the valves that it's easier to just to buy those and then work on the cooler, harder things that are maybe more of a niche that's separating a lot of the different companies out there. That's also the case where, what's that short story that's like how to make bread and it's like split hydrogen and oxygen, or whatever, like how from scratch are we talking? Because yeah, at the same extent,

it's not like SpaceX isn't going out there like mining their own aluminum and creating the aluminum rolls that are coming in the door. So I mean, it's always like, you kind of know it when you see it, when someone says I'm gonna do it all myself. It's like, all's, it's always like, you kind of know when you see it, when someone says I'm going to do it all myself, it's like, all right, well, you're not, you know, you're starting from somewhere. And I guess you're saying that, is it the case that that because of the other industries that Marotta operates in that by the time that valves were needed

in the space industry, you kind of were at a certain level that didn't lead to it being something that was also produced as like a side effect of these companies growing that That there was such an institution already there or is it not necessarily as one-to-one as that? I think I think it came from just decades of Buildup, right? So no one wakes up in the morning and says I want to start a valve company or at least they do if they Do I haven't met them yet? I think it's just kind of a thing that happened at a necessity, and then it continued to develop and become the large manufacturing area that Mirada is now. And it's similar to the other...

A lot of our competitors have similar track records, right? They were making small aerospace components, and someone said, can you make a fluid component? And then it was like, hey, if you did that good, can you make a valve for me? And then all of a sudden, you're manufacturing valves. So it's just kind of a thing that happens out of necessity. I don't think it's the first thing that a lot of valve companies get into, like, hey, I'm going to start a company tomorrow,

and I'm going to make these really difficult widgets. Annoying things. Yeah. The thing that always annoys them about their thing. So how do you then take that and look forward in terms of acquiring new customers or expanding your current customer base? Is it staying on top of where the industry's going and making sure that you're in conversation

with the new entrants as soon as they're there? It feels like some companies can be in your position and the risk is they are so incumbent. You've guys got the Falcon Stack lifting the sails of Mirada because of the volume that they're driving at. So how do you not just sit and rest on those morals? How do you continue to actually go out and grow customers? I mean, if we're not competing with ourselves,

then someone else will. So from a market standpoint and a technology standpoint, we're constantly trying to innovate to beat ourselves and come up with a better mousetrap. As far as new customers, for a long time, we almost had no business development team in space. So, we didn't have a team that was outside ringing doorbells asking if anybody wanted valves because we had so much work and a lot of the stuff was passive.

As long as we were answering the phone when people were calling, whether they were customers of the past or people that knew of the content we had already going, we didn't have to go out there and go fish for more work. A lot of the newer startups that were rolling along, they were calling us rather than us calling them for business. So it kind of worked out well that way. And then do you subscribe that to them having worked on a piece of hardware that had your stuff on it previously, and then when they're gonna go out on their own,

they're like, oh, I should call the people that did really good jobs last time, or what is that? 100%. Yeah, that's what it is. Yeah, and a lot of the stuff, even getting into the new space market, our first phone calls were from ex-ULA guys, or people that have seen stuff on test stands, or old NASA hardware, and like, yeah, I had that Marauda valve,

that thing worked really good, I should call them up again. We often hear stories of people in the field that have the one Marauda valve that they just cherish and they keep in the corner, and the test guys are like, don't touch that Marauda valve, that one's mine, if you're gonna run a dirty setup, go run something else. Because the stuff that was made in the 50s and 60s were unbreakable, and they still wanted

to use those. We still get phone calls for rebuild kits from stuff that's been down in Kennedy for 60 years. And they're like, hey, can I get new poppets and seats for this thing? That's pretty wild. It's like this old house, but with valves. This old house, and you want some reclaimed barn wood. And it's like, I need the same poppet I bought in 1945.

I mean, yeah, it is kind of interesting when you look at that positioning, right? Because we went and we saw so much hardware that you're working on that's new versions or new part numbers. But at the same time, you have those relationships still with people that have been running hardware for a long time. We talked a little bit about turning off product lines and deprecating products. But there's also something to the history of this, that there are things that are kind of doing their job. They're doing what you need. You're obviously making incremental improvements on that as materials advance, new processes

come along. But I don't know. I just think I talk to a lot of people that have that same line, which is like the staying power, but I don't necessarily know that they have the storyline of Murata being family owned and operated, which is also kind of, we should talk about that for a second with how it plays into the way that you can cultivate business because we're an industry where like you're either a giant incumbent who has massive venture capital behind them or massive private contributions or Eric Schmidt or whoever, or you went public

via SPAC and you've got a huge cash reserve that you're sitting on. But all of those things come with pressure of either the existing investors or the core funder that has their own desires and where to take a company. So existing 50 years outside, 60, I don't even know how many years outside of that structure you would compare it, but does that also change the way that you can attack the industry or the way that you can strategize

or ignore things entirely, ignore trends because you don't have to say the word AI or you don't have to say 3D printed? What does that do for you internally? We have a very short visibility to the top for when we need to make decisions. So if we need to invest in something and we make a good case for it, I don't have to need to go present to the board. There's not 20 people that I need approvals on.

I convince two people if we should go spend a million dollars onto a new product line, and I get the thumbs up because there's a business case or they're interested in doing it and we go which is different everywhere else because you don't have all this red tape of bureaucracy and internal research and development stuff and that goes back to the to the family-owned mentality and the the desire to continue to innovate right so we have the ability to pick what we want to work on, when we want to work on it, and I think it's been working out pretty well for us,

especially in the launch vehicle market. Yeah, you mentioned, people here on the interview, you mentioned the different flooring you can see as we walk through the facility, and those are different eras of the company and deciding what investment is worth it at which time. And there's something to the scrappiness of that where it's not a beautiful factory in Long Beach

or something like that that's fully end to end seamless. There's a little bit of a decorator crab aspect where it's like, well, then we added this little machine shop. We added that section of the floor because we needed 10,000 more square feet. And I don't know, it's cool that you can see that, the way that you are tucked up in the hills up there. It's just such a unique place. So I'm glad I could come up and see what it's like in

person. Yeah, the polished concrete is all the craze. Anything done in the past five years is polished concrete, and everything that was 20 years ago was battleship gray floors. We just keep putting more gray paint on the floors, and no one will know the difference. What is the... We'll end on this. What is the thing in the next five, 10 years that you're looking forward to most with regards to your positioning in the industry? I think what we'd like to do is to bring the

satellite components to the same state that the launch vehicle components are. So we have a very good cadence going on with the launch vehicles, you know, we're cranking those things out. We just need to be able to do the same thing as the satellite market continues to grow. If we can do that for the small welded components that I showed you, for the quarter inch to half inch line size on deeper space vehicles, we'll be doing alright. So just applying those same principles to the more bespoke product line is what's going to bring us to the next level.

Awesome. Well, let's let people listen to this tour then. Hey, it's me again. One thing I should mention before we get into the actual tour here is that most of this is really good audio. We're talking in quieter environments. You can hear the isolated mics between me and Brian quite a bit. There are definitely times where we are in a very noisy production environment, machine shop. There's, you know, all sorts of pneumatic noises running everywhere,

there's pressurized gas, there's thrusters being fired, there's different tests being run, there's gigantic machines that are producing hardware in the background, so there's gonna be times where it gets a little bit tricky to hear. I listen through it all to make sure that I could understand what's going on. Maybe I have a higher tolerance than you do,

so totally get it if this is annoying to listen to, which is why I wanted to give you that little bit of a show upfront as well. But for those of you that like listening to these kind of things, I do think this is an enjoyable listen as we walk through and you kind of get a sense for what they're doing up there, the pace of activity, how much is going on, there were just people everywhere in this facility working on everything. You get a vibe when you go to these space companies of like how much activity is there actually at any one moment are people just sitting around or people actually doing work very fast paced and chaotic borderline chaotic environment.

Tons of work going on. Um, really interesting place to go and tour through. But like I said, audio and places are going to get a little bit weird. There's some noisy rooms that we go through. Uh, but generally I think it's a, it's a good time, so enjoy. All right, we are here on the tour. Can you introduce yourself so everybody knows? There are going to be a bunch of voices on the show, so you start. I'm Brian Ippolito. I'm the Senior Director of Operations here at Mirada Controls. And where are we starting? We're starting at the display case. All the fancy boxes. So here

we have the different display cases that represent each one of the business units here at Marotta. So starting off first, we do have the space business unit. So the components here are basically broken down to different launch vehicles, as well as satellite components, all manufactured on site. All assembly and test is done here. Some machining is done outside.

On tour, we'll walk around and see some of those machine components, as well as the assembly and test. So the middle shelf is the core components. So core stands for commercial reusable. We manufacture these here. They large volume and lower mix and then the satellite components that we have are high mix low volume that are manufactured out in the back as well. So this year we're planning on making 21,000 units just in operations. This is a large volume for space which is kind of unheard of and definitely one of our proud badges that we go throughout the year. In our second window here we have our power and

actuation systems. So we have a lot of electronic boxes for fixed wing and rotor wing aircraft. This represents power supplies for AC to DC power conversion as well as DC to DC power conversion. We manufacture these as well. We can see that facility on tour as well. And then last window represents the naval systems business units similar to the pneumatic components that we're doing for space, but much larger. When we walk around the building, we'll see components manufactured out of stainless and brass,

and they're representing things that are going on boats, rather than the aluminum and smaller stainless components that are going for launch vehicles as well as satellites. Also on the top, we have some actuator systems. So part of our power and actuation systems business unit, we also manufacture several different components that are going to mostly DOD applications where we are controlling as well the electronics as well as the mechanical for going into missiles and similar systems. So as far as the offices are here, Max had mentioned earlier that we have about 900 employees

here at Mirada. Just in this facility we're about 300. A lot of the employees that are here are supporting manufacturing specifically. We're going to cut through this way. So we have production engineering, quality engineering, as well as planning on site here. And then down the street we have a lot of the admin functions purchasing, which we're trying to bring back here as well. And trying to get everyone back into the same room as much as possible. So the facility that we're in now is about 125,

130,000 square feet. Most of it is geared towards assembly and test of components. So we were in the offices as much smaller subset of the entire building as compared to everything else that's going on here. So we're gonna stop outside this window for a second before we go in.

So this is our space business unit development lab. So in here we're housing 12 engineers. So difference to other components and other companies that have development labs like this, these are not operators, these are all engineers. So when the design team will come up with a configuration and new design, they'll bring it down here to test, and then if for some reason something fails,

instead of going back and say, hey, my test fails, here's a result. So they go, here, your test failed, and here's how you're gonna fix it. So they'll come back with red line drawings, they'll come out with updates, they can machine stuff on site here to get things to be compliant to drawing or whatever need be,

and then feedback to the design engineering team down the street. So we talked about the market breakup for Mirada. So we are very saturated on launch vehicle. We have a very established product line with Core. So with that going on with ongoing production, the focus of John's team and business development is where else can we get onto other satellite

or deeper space applications. So more than half of these guys are working on development efforts for deeper space, whether it's the small isolation valves, the fill and drain valves, or regulators and things of that nature. So we can pop in there and look at some stuff specifically. I think John can talk to some of the dual stage regulator and detail that we have in

testing unless you got anything else. Yeah, when you are starting to work on a new product, is it often directly in response to somebody asking if you can create something to fit a need or are there times where you're realizing there's a gap in your product line or a gap in the baby coming? Yeah, like how much of that is derived internally versus from customers? Probably half. So some of it is said, you know, hey, can you go make this?

And we said, we'll look at it and evaluate and see if we can make this or something else like this on market. We know where the market gaps are. There's some ones that we've been attacking as of late that we felt that there was significant market gaps that we can fulfill. And we fund that internally from research

and development efforts to fill market need. And is there ever, like how often are variants of things that you already produce? Often. Yeah, so it's like, hey, can you spin this off and paint it blue? And we can do that all day. Or, you know, can you spin this off

and make this for hydrazine and, you know, whatever it is to meet the need. But a lot of stuff when people are fishing around on websites or through catalogs, they say, oh, this looks close to what I need, but can you do it out of titanium? Or can you do it for hydrazine? Or whatever the case may be.

You make a latch if it's not a latching round thing. What about, like, what's the right word? I guess like turning off old product lines. Either decommissioning, yeah, is there times when you're realizing like something's falling out of favor or not really So there's really no reason to so we're not an active manufacturer where we're making things for fall fashion Yeah, so we're making things to order so stuff that you're gonna buy if you're gonna give me purchase order for 20 units

We're gonna go buy 20 units. I'm not saying no. I think Anthony's gonna buy 20 of these later I think I think spring seems like a good latching valve time of year And that's mostly on the satellite side a lot of the launch vehicle stuff. We have I think spring seems like a good latching valve time of year. And that's mostly on the satellite side. A lot of the launch vehicle stuff, we have every flavor we've seen already, right? So no one's coming up with a new thing. I mean, methane is the new ticket lately, but there's not much new variants that we haven't seen before.

So either we're running those and we're making work orders or a few hundred already and we can split off two of those for customer XYZ or hey we can spin off this in a different Monell version or a different oxygen compatible flavor or something like that. Cool. Fun stuff? Really fun. Alright let's see some hardware. We're going in this aquarium? We're going in this aquarium this. Feels like an aquarium. These great. All right we'll put glasses on. Hey Mikey how you doing? How's it going? All right we want to look at your beautiful setup here you got going on. John you want to talk to this beast a little bit? Sure. So this is a dual stage, are you testing the xenon or helium? This is the helium unit. Dual stage

helium regulator unit for satellite propulsion systems. So these are like full welded designs. You can actually see what it looks like on the inside there. But yeah, so this is a challenging product to me because we have thousands of PSI held back by a flexible pressure element basically. It's all metal, ceramic metal metal sealing interfaces that kind of stuff.

So this is a this is a newer product to Murano that we've been developing on for I don't know some amount of time. That is a market that we see is currently under under served by heritage contractors in the valve space. A lot of this is about consistency across temperature ranges. So right now we're testing at negative 60, negative 80. Negative 80 Fahrenheit. Fahrenheit. So it's been a lot of our development time doing, is going hot, going cold, seeing if it breaks. And we have two different configurations right now.

We have one for xenon, one for helium running. Very small flow, but destined for deep space applications where we're doing super tight external leakage, super tight internal leakage and needs to work through the vacuums of space and thermal and all that. Right, so the helium one is for chemical by-prop and then xenon is for EP systems. Cool. You want to see what else we have going on?

Yeah, thanks for letting us bother you. This is a Hydrazine Mon liquid latch valve. So these are basically, this is a series redundant manifold. So inlet, outlet. These are balanced poppet valves, which are like maradas, bread and butter. This is what we make most of. So this is for our crude space capsule. I don't know what this exact unit is. It must be a past test article. Scrap, yeah.

Yeah. It's a good spaceship. So we make those series redundant manifolds and then the same thing in a single unit, which is, so this is like single valve. Got position indication. These are latching with polarity switching. These have a pretty interesting latching mechanism which is a little different. So those are iso valves for a thrusting system?

Yeah, so these are between regulation system and thruster valves. These are liquid isolations. Brian's holding a pressure regulator, or actually a relief valve. Can I see it? Yep. So this guy here, this is a launch vehicle pressure relief valve. So the way this one works, this is the outlet inlet here. There's a sensing element here so it basically lifts a poppet at specific inlet pressure. This feeds a main relief valve. So these are fuel and ox tank relief valves. These are set at like 60 PSI or so,

and they prevent the fuel and ox tanks from exploding if there's a runaway event. Pressure and gas. Yep, pressure and or autogenous fed depends on the vehicle. We make these for a couple different customers. Cool. Paris had a thing half apart. Yeah. Troy's got a 25T. She got it over here.

Buzzing today. Bothering everybody in the room today. Mike's working on a, this is a Mars mission valve. This is a fuel shut off valve for a hydrazine prop system. He's basically like when the Mars lander lands, they terminate fuel flow to the main engines, the landing engines. So that these particular engines don't have a shutoff valve, they're throttling.

And so this valve will do exactly that. So it's single use latching, pretty high flow rates, it's a big engine. And the customer is using, I don't know how many of these, but one per engine basically. Is this like a new part or? Custom. Custom, also something that already existed?

Yeah, kinda, yeah. This one we had worked on for a different customer and then we're modifying it to work in new environments for this customer. Cool. Thanks, Mike. See, Mike's wrist deep in that valve right now. Sorry.

Oh, don't worry. I'm talking about this valve. Yeah, we can talk about that in a second. These are the actual stages for the helium regulator that we're looking at over there. So this is the dev article that's got separate stages. These are series one and then normally. And then this one here is the dev article that's got separate stages. These are series with them. Okay, gotcha. And then this one here is the xenon unit. So similar design, just different set points,

very different set points. It's so steampunk in here. Yeah, a lot of stainless and aluminum, right? This is a steaf step and fairing step manifold. One guess of the customer. So this one here is a series and parallel redundant manifold. These... hang on. I'm just gonna make some noise.

So these are the pilot valves. These are Murata PLV 34LTs. So basically these are actuating main pistons that sit in bores here. So there are two up here, two down here. And then they're connecting fluid paths down there. So basically each leg is series redundant. So two seals to leakage from inlet to outlet. And then they're parallel redundant in that

either one can fail, but the manifold still operates just fine. How this is installed in vehicle, so you got a high pressure tank upstream and downstream, there's just a piston pusher. So for stage separation and fairing separation, you just blast these all open. And then when you're trying to move your second stage away from your first stage or from your fairing halves and have them not hit that payload, this pushes those things out of the way.

So is the X-crossing functional? Or did it have to be like this? Absolutely. Did it have to be like that? That's weight savings. It is. Well, I mean, the other way you do it is you have to do a bunch of right turns. Yeah, because they come to... this is just like a common feed, right?

So this is like, you have flip flow coming through here, goes to the front two valves, then flows through here. These are just communication ports for the pilots two valves, then flows through here. These are just communication ports for the pilots actually, and then feeds into the secondary valve. So you needed to have them all come back together in the middle. And it's just nice that it makes an X. Cool. It's your favorite social network.

Yeah. I guess so. Cannot confirm nor deny. Cool. All right. So that's just for fairings or also for stage step? You said it's both? Yeah.

Both things. It's the same one for both? Or is there? Same part number for both. And then they actually stack them, because they wanted more redundancy. So they have two of them stacked up together. A lot of redundancy.

Two. So the one side of it. But is it the same? This is a dumb person who doesn't know about valve's question. Is it the same power that you need for stage step and fairing? It's about the same amount of pneumatic push that you need for both, yeah.

I would never guess that. Duh. Yeah. You know that? I love it. Yeah, who would have known the relative weights of these things? Well, it's like you want the stage separation to happen

pretty aggressively. Otherwise, you get a Falcon 1 situation, right? Or the astro-kool-aid man. Or astro-kool-aid. Yeah. The best one. you get a Falcon 1 situation, right? Or the astro-kool-aid man. Or astro-kool-aid man. Yeah. Yeah. The best one.

So I mean, they can vary. Whatever they're doing, they're just trying to take pressure from one side to the other, right? So if they needed more power, they can play with higher pressures, or they can play with piston size. So theoretically, if you wanted to punch something higher, like a piston pusher, you can change things

and play with other pneumatic downstream. And actually, what we didn't talk about, what a lot of people do, is they'll just buy valves that are slightly bigger than what they need and then when they need to adjust they use what are called trim orifices downstream or upstream. So they just have like a really tightly specified hole to control what the flow is and then this is overkill for what they need and the amount of flow that they need. And for as electronic power, you know electrical power, it's all just taken 24 volts and an

amp so it's not taking much to drive these. A lot of that's fed by requirements. Yeah, each solenoid's about 24 watts, nominal-ish. Cool? Yeah. All right, let's pop back out so we're not making any more noise. We're the noisy ones.

So just the wrap-up on here, you can see that everybody's buzzing, right? All these engineers have two or three active programs that they're chasing. They're chasing hardware and hands on hardware the whole day. So it's not like we got a bunch of keyboard jockeys that are hanging out. Max likes to find more toys. Yeah, apparently. So we're talking about Stage 1 ACS.

Oh yeah. Oh damn, look at that thing. We get this directly from our customer printed and then we this is a Immediately post printing and when we machine all the valvy stuff into it Both for those pilots onto the outside and then ship it back to them for ACS Wow Why don't you do the machining we do the machining we do the machine we don't do the printing okay? Why not we don't have a printer? Why not?

we don't do the printing. Okay. Why not? We don't have a printer. Why not? I'm trying to figure out where the edges of what you want to take on versus what you see as someone else's job. So the challenge with printing in valves is I don't know if you can kind of see but there's a lot of dusty stuff in there and we talked about before how you really can't put schmutz in the valves otherwise they leak so it's a real challenge it's a it's a big cleaning process to use a material like this and it's like is it worth the squeeze or should we just do it out of billet aluminum so that's been the trade-off. We actually have a variant of this that is just billet aluminum.

Actually this is what we have assembled. Yeah we're gonna go look at that later and fire it. I think I'm wondering why they ship you this part. They wanted to print this. It's a desire thing more than a functionality. They were like, we're going to make this so complicated, the only way to do it is print it. And then we were like, Marata said, you can do this without printing it.

That ship had sailed. Unintended. Flown? The ship has flown? The ship has flown? Cool, that's hot. Yeah, about 20 minutes, we'll be back there. We have to push a button. Cool?

Alright, so behind you here is our space stock room. So we didn't talk about volumes on a weekly basis, but to support the 20,000 units we're going to ship this year, we're doing between 400 and 500 units a week. So from a piece parts standpoint, we are holding a lot of piece parts just to make sure that we can play the mix game on the floor to ensure that all of our technicians are staying busy. So there's about eight weeks worth of volume demand in our stock room. At least that's our goal. We're probably running like six and change at the moment. But the idea is that if you have eight weeks of stuff

there, if something comes up, hey I need a few of these or I had some of these fall out, can I swap these around? We have the flexibility to move within our operations plan to backfill as needed. So these are like components of what you're building? These are the piece parts of the stock that's going in there. So the build process goes from here from stock room. They'll get a kit that says I'm getting 40 piece valve, one, two, three. They'll pick the job onto these trays

and we'll roll those trays into cleaning. We'll see that in a little bit. After they go through cleaning with all their documentation, sign off. They'll roll into the cell. In the core cell, we have about 48 technicians supporting build all the time, running across two shifts.

And they're supporting that output of 400, 500 valves a week. It's wild. It's a lot of stuff. It's a lot of stuff. A lot of stuff's going out. So on this side, we actually have a classical NASA looking bunny suit clean room.

So we do a lot of stuff there still. So a lot of the heritage customers that are looking for, Hey, I have this thing that I bought in 1995. I want to buy the same thing to the same requirements. We can support that. A lot of that stuff flows through clean room for space customers. We've evolved the ergonomics to be more on flow benches and I'll show you what that is in a second. But the flow bench is the same cleanliness level that we're holding in a clean room,

but it allows the technicians to pop on, pop off without having to go through a full suit up and go through a shower and then worry about, I can't touch my face, I can't touch my phone, et cetera, et cetera. If they have to do something, they can step off, de-gown, and then go back as needed. We have the capability. We still utilize it a lot, but the volume that we're doing, we couldn't flow through this 2,000 square foot area, so the volume that we're doing, we couldn't flow through this 2000 square foot area. So the flow benches is the new evolution of technology.

One person in there versus. She or he, I can't see who it is. He, looks like they're just working on one thing. A lot of the special cleaning goes through there as well. So we have a department of about five people that are managing cleaning the components. And when they have to go through special clean, so like a super cleanliness level,

they go through verification in there and they'll bag up in there we can see some of that examples in a second as well that room. The room you can't see. There's a couple of them. It can accommodate like five or six people. It's a little warm and a little open. I mean not compared to that room over there. Oh wait till you get out back. We got hardware everywhere. All right so we can pop into cleaning real quick and I can show you what's going on there. It's a little noisy. I don't know if that's gonna... Oh, it's fine....dress things up. So once things are staged, they'll actually come out into a kit. This will be a good example. Keep scaring people off. That's it. It's not me. I'm here all the time. So things will get kitted.

This is a 36-piece work order. This is going through special clean. So basically it goes through dishwasher one to get regular clean and then is going through special clean. So basically it goes through dishwasher one to get regular clean, and then it goes through special dishwasher to get extra clean. And that's what we saw going on in the other room. So a lot of these trays are custom designed for Mirada and manufactured here,

where we can pick to these trays and they're picked in a certain sequence so the technicians know, oh, I'm gonna grab in bin two, bin three, bin four, and build my valves. The special design components is these actually also go through the cleaner. So these are compatible with all the cleaning fluids. Sometimes they go through passivation, which is a special process to protect some materials. But like everything is done in these special handling trays.

Something that we've learned over the past decade or two when we get to high volume is, yeah, you can make two or three of these on the bench. Like you know, me and you can sit down and figure out how to build them. But when you want to do stuff in volume you got to get innovative you got to do different things so we've come up with a lot of special handling fixtures to maintain cleanliness handling damage etc etc to ensure that we're not screwed up parts before they get there. Big thing in valves a lot of times you hear about leakage and stuff

that's delaying launch it's all about the leakage rates. Leakage rates are maintained by surface finishes that we see that are on a sub 4RA scale. So like you have very very very tiny surface finish imperfections on these things and they're going to be perfect all the way around. So when we were manufacturing these components, these poppits, these seats, other bodies and stuff like that in-house, just going from one side of the wall to the other side of the wall was a problem because I hand them off to Anthony Anthony goes and cleans them he hands them off to Max Max puts them into the Stock room and then John pulls them out later goes to build it all the sudden there's scratches on everything

So we have to develop processes and fixtures to prevent that So we're seeing here is is one of our fixtures that I can rattle this thing around and these components are not getting damaged Ten years ago if I saw someone doing that they were getting Slap is this what this is what a pop it is? It was a hot poppet summer last year. I don't know if you know about that but we're all about the poppet. Yeah it was a lot of talk about poppets nobody knows what that means. This is what a poppet is. This is a poppet. You want to describe this in words? Nobody knows what that means. There's about 10 people that are listening right now that know what poppets mean. I have this debate with my wife who's a physician all the time that she uses words like febrile and

like people just say they have a fever uses words like febrile. People just say they have a fever, nobody knows what febrile means. Y'all here with poppets? We're here with the poppets. Yeah, I know. You can tell me what this is. It's a shiny school looking thing. Yeah, I mean I'll post a picture of it, but I never saw one with scale accordingly.

I should have brought a banana so you can see. I was going to go with a guy. Tell me how it fits into stuff. Is this the thing that's going in and out to open it? So this is essentially a spool, right? So if you said a spool, it may be more applicable. Okay, there you go. So this is the sliding element inside of a valve

that is used for seating for internal leakage. It's one of the two things that makes the seal, right? So there's this, and then there's a seat. And those two things come together, that's what stops the 6,000 PSI, 8,000 PSI, whatever it is, from going down the outpipe. So it needs to be able to, you know, it needs to be perfect, it needs to be super smooth,

no scratches or anything, because if there's any little scratches, the helium molecules, which are really, really small, they'll find their way out and you get leakage and then you blow down your tanks and you have a bad day with your launch vehicle. That's why you can't get them dirty, because each one of the, you know,

you're talking about, we go through a special cleaner, we're counting how many microns of particles are on stuff, a fuzzy going into a valve causes a problem. And from the manufacturing side it's difficult because if I have a manufacturing defect on a piece part component, I've invested all of this time into picking it, putting it in the stock room, cleaning it, getting it onto the floor. I've invested thousands of dollars into a component before I know it's a failure. And you probably have a customer that's like waiting for it to be there like the next week and like all of a sudden we Got a problem. So why are the poppets in this fancy case and the seats are under like a little piece of whatever? That you have something we do have special seat trays where the seats are more critical

The little piece of foam here is just holding it there for cleaning I can show you some other ones we have like these little maraca looking things But that's basically the handling fixtures that we're using to prevent things from getting damaged. I Had a rubber band, I lost it. What else do I know about poppets? We can show you how we make poppets. Yeah, let's see that. We'll get there after we look at the core cell. We didn't talk about this valve, but this is stage two ACS ISO valve, so like if you have a leak on your stage two and you need to hit the O-ship button and seal it up so you don't blow down your tanks, that's what these valves are for.

Generic stage two? Or a particular stage two that you don't have to tell me the name of? Generic. Yeah. May or may not be flying this year already. We have a lot of those. So as far as manufacturing stuff,

running through a typical manufacturing day, we'll have stuff on a board where it's being maintained of like, hey, this is my priority stuff, constantly shuffling things because when a customer calls up and says, I need something in two weeks, we get to bang things around. So we have some digital systems as well as some paper-based systems where we can shuffle around workload as accordingly to meet customers' needs. Typically, we're trying to manufacture things in the best economic order quantity, so I'm trying to build things in four ways.

If I have to build one, I have to go through the full process as described for one piece, it's not gonna work out. I'd rather build in bigger batches. So a lot of stuff we see on the floor is 36 or 40s or larger than that. We can actually pop over to the cell, might be easier to see. And in that case, are you talking like even across customers? That could be the case? No, so sometimes. So a lot of times we're building to a specific order. So Max calls up and says, I need 50 of these.

I'm gonna cut a work order for 50 of them. We do have components where we're building the stock now. So I'm gonna build 100 generic ones. I'm gonna throw them all in stock and I'll split 50 to Max and I'll split 50 to Anthony. You know, whatever. Yeah, yeah. Whatever.

I just didn't know if like, if you had a customer that said something happened, I lost a stage, I need 12 replacements, would you try to find another customer that also needs 30 so you can do a whole batch? No, no, we'll build the 12. Yeah, I mean, that's not a problem. All the parts are usually here, so that's not that big of a deal. You know, sometimes when you get some weird bespoke assembly, it happens, but.

Well, and the goal is kind of like, as customers move into rate production, they have their own little rotable pool of inventory So if they need an extra 12, then they'll just pull in their next order of like 36 You know by like a week or two and then they'll just balance it out as time goes on And we have a forecast right? We know what people are buying. We have history going back a few years We know you know customer ABC is coming every year for this quantity We can kind of predict that as well as we're getting feedback from them on what they're trying to build. All right so we'll get the kit to the floor right, poppets are in their poppet

trays, we all know what they are now and we'll get ready to build them. So as I mentioned before, yeah John pull that cover off a little bit. So these are in bags, so these are special cleaned and in bags. So the idea is these have gone through the special cleaner and we don't want to open them in a dirty environment. Where we're standing right now is a dirty environment. Where the technicians are sitting on these class 7 or class 5 cleanroom benches, those are clean. So we're allowed to take these in bags, bring them to the flow bench, open them and then

maintain a clean environment. Much better ergonomics rather than having to go to the NASA room. One other note on that is these guys are getting gowned from the waist up. So everything that they're doing is clean. Everything on this bench has been properly cleaned. So that when they get on a Zoom call, they still look like they're working. They have to de-gown from the Zoom to pull up a Zoom call. And they're called flow benches because I hear some blowing happening.

So it's probably keeping a... I don't want to touch things. So the filters on the bottom are pulling air through and the positive clean air is pushing it out this way. So no matter what, everything's pumping on. If power goes out, these are all tied to a unique generator where these things maintain clean and run all night. Cool, sorry John, you have something?

Oh, I just wanted to show, this is another poppet. So this looks very different than the other poppet. See, this is why nobody knows what these things are. Yeah, this is a... Okay, so it just is different. I got it. Let's hear it. Those are what we call direct acting poppets.

So those are the only thing in the flow path. These are pneumatically actuated. So that little poppet is going to open and feed gas to the back of this big poppet to open the valve for a larger flow capacity valve. Yep. A lot of poppets. This is what I came here for. So full capacity valve. A lot of poppits. This is what I came here for. So it's good, now I feel, I get it now.

You know what, checklist this. If you're learning about poppits, check. There's at least three people that I'm gonna call and be like, I know what a poppet is now. Smash that like button if you know what a poppet is. So that's about it. So, you know, our ratio of builders to testers, there's testing happening on the non-clean benches. So after they're cleaned, they're buttoned up, we put filters on them and then they can

come off and then go on to a setup and test bench. So in this area we have about four builders feeding about six or seven testers. So they'll build up a full work order, so something like this on a cart where there's 40 units that have the red caps on them, those will get moved over to test benches, you hear the guys firing the pneumatics all the time, they're running the full acceptance test procedure. Those can take a few hours to run to even longer if there's additional thermal and vibration testing. So you can test on dirty benches?

Test on dirty benches, once they're filtered. Once they're filtered. So we'll put filters on all the clean areas and then everything else doesn't matter. And then all the lines that they're feeding are also filtered, all the filter. So we'll put filters on all the clean, the clean areas and then everything else doesn't matter. Okay. And then all the lines that they're feeding are also filtered. Um, all the regulators on their bench, they're, they're shown there. So then the internals is then what you're talking about there. We're protecting everything. Once it's, once it's buttoned up, the inside pipes are all clean and that's what the red caps are doing here.

Or what we can look at this one. So the red caps are really just for protection. These large items on here are not shippable. These are the filtered elements. Okay. So there's a big standoff. Got the filter on here. You can't really see it, but there's a filter in there

with a billion little holes on it. But that part isn't actually part of the part. This is not the shippable component. No, the customer will tee that right up. These are stage two reaction control valves. We ship a lot of these, something like 60 to 70 a week, so we get a good volume of these. So this all takes a long time.

Yeah, so a 40 piece job, so each one of these, like the technicians are taking, they do like 10 a day. So they're doing an hour of valve on test, or two hours of valve on test. So just the volume of throughput that you're seeing here, I mean, we're standing in front of six or seven different carts of 40 piece jobs and we're trying to get out four or five hundred a week so the volume and turnover is just it's all rapid it's all

happening so that's why we have to make sure that we're maintaining that stock over there such that something does happen we find an anomalous condition on a component we can backfill or we can shuffle work order we can stop doing the reaction control valves and we can start doing the isolation valves etc etc. So none it doesn't really matter who's working on what kind of valve here? They have a there's a matrix set up for each one of the technicians that says I am certified to work on part number ABC their goal is I want to be able to work on everything right and it gives us more flexibility because then whenever rolls up here they

can tackle. We try to avoid that Bob has to be here to do this valve. I like the Bob call out. Bob from Val Zink he's here here somewhere. I'll find him. Well we just had one guy retire that was here for 35 years. We used to say he was the guy. Anthony's been talking to Bob. That was a machine in? Yeah. So all told, the valves get completed here. We have what we call a pre-final checkout. So we'll roll over to another set of skilled technicians that are familiar with the process and they'll check everything to ensure that it's meeting the quality standard.

So they're making sure that the components are visually correct, that the documentation is all there from the testing that we run, everything's passing prior to going to quality checkouts at the back door. Right before we complete that, we have a computer topography machine. We actually have two of them. Mark Fish is actually gonna run us a demo real quick. So these are two computer topography machines,

essentially do the same thing. One's got a more powerful laser than the other bought by Murata for inspection of final finished goods. So Mark here is pulling up one of the units that's in there. Computer topography is basically a 3D X-ray. So he can look inside the component after it's completely built and see what's going on. It's like a live picture of the inside of the mouth. So, thanks Mark. On the right there, a live picture of the inside of the valve. So thanks Mark.

On the right there, this is one of the components that we saw being built over there. It's a PLB 34LT and you can get this live image of the things that we want to inspect from a quality standpoint. And it builds a 3D model of it too. And that's like rotatable, you can turn off certain things and see inside the valve to make sure everything's in there correct. And we use this to just check for manufacturing defects or very stellar problems that we've seen over the years.

So an easy one is like you can see these wires, right? You see electrical wires that are running through. We want to make sure those electrical wires are not being pinched on something, they're not stuck between a connector. They're running all the way to the solenoid without having any issues. So Mark's got a checklist of 10 or 12 items that he runs through from a quality standpoint to make sure that hey this is in the right place, this is not cocked the wrong way, these screws are all the way tightened, just to make sure that we're checking everything that you would not be able

to check from an external inspection. Is that like automated to any extent or it's just this man's eyeballs? Mark is the automation. Your brain's in your eyes. That is a goal for this year though. With the AI coming along, and especially locally hosted AI, we should be able to feed in images and the computer should be able to eventually pick up on the defects that we're looking for. And then furthermore, we maintain a snapshot and 3D image on site, such that if a customer calls us up and says, hey, I've got this problem with this valve, we don't know what happened to it between shipping.

We call it their specific thing and then. And we can say, this is how we shipped it to you. Maybe something else went awry. You can send it back and we can rescan it, compare the two and say, hey, is there half of a screw stuck inside of it that's causing the problem? And this imaging is happening at steady state, right? None of this is going to actuate or move or anything when it's in there. It's just in there.

It's just sitting there. We've done it before. I can reduce the speed, but right now it's just spinning in place. Okay. But you could definitely pass electrical power and see it actuate if you wanted it to. Yeah, if you wanna see the actual.

Yeah, I was gonna look in the window. It does exist. It's not just a video we have running on loop. It's not just fancy. Like a speed movie. It's just like rotisserie running on loop. It's not just fancy doing it. Like a speed movie. It's just like rotisserie style in here. It's going full rotisserie. It is, is that not?

Okay, that's a fair description. So we also have this machine so we can do larger volumes. You see the robotic arm here, we're going to have this thing load robot, robot's going to load the units one at a time. But we actually have this tower set up where we can put 10 of them in a clip. So instead of running a two minute scan with a robot load and we can load it manually, put 10 of them in there, take a single picture,

and then do that zoom in later. And it's basically the same time. So we're actually, Mark wants to race the robot and see if he can beat it. But I think we're convinced he will. It's a good fairy tale. This is the receiving inspection area. So before stuff gets into stock, stuff's flowing through here.

A lot of piece parts. I mean, the volume that's coming through here is just. I see the signs. It's the Marine final inspections over there. There's space for standing under here. So I don't know if I knew in the other areas. All that was just the space-specific work? That was all space.

Everything until now has been only space. So there are areas like this that they are at least adjacent to each other. Correct. Not fully integrated. Yeah and we'll see that out back too where there's a split. But that's not, there isn't, is that because there's not a significant overlap

in the products between these business units or? The job function of certain departments, it doesn't matter what they're inspecting, right? If I'm inspecting something from Marine Component, it comes in with the requirements or space comes in with their own requirements. So from a receiving inspection standpoint, we have common employees that are working

on the same components. Cleaning, we had that for a while, now we broke off and the volume was enough, so we have two separate areas. A&T is just strictly space, geyser, space, and the marine business. And so the split off, is that more like workload management versus,

as you said the individual technicians are like qualified on certain units. Yep, exactly. Okay. So yeah, I mean you're specialized too, right? And at some point where the components, we'll see that out back more, where you know, you were working on a specific component

and you're doing this all day, it's a different skill set as compared to I'm building this marine manifold that's you know, the size of a Mini Cooper. So dedicated area for the power and actuation systems business unit. So as we mentioned before, Max is talking about the boat tail. That's actually on a tester here. So those are dynamometers.

So they're measuring load output from the different motors for the missile fin steering. So test the whole unit once. You put it in, you plug it in, and then those, it runs through a sequence to make sure it's going to be able to steer the missile correctly. And it's the one particular kind of missile? It is that one. The Hellfire.

I didn't know if I was allowed to say that. Yep. Crazy. See, they're coming off the drone. You can see the tail fins there. That's the whole tail fin. OK, so it's at the very bottom there. Oh, gotcha, and then just the bottom parts are actuated.

Yep. That's the phantom thing that wasn't in the showcase before. Also make this, which is the power supply for this missile. You'll see those somewhere else. Very cool. That's awesome. So it's going to get a little bit noisy in here. This is our machine shop.

On the right we do have more power and actuation systems teams that are doing similar manufacturing methods. In the machine shop we can see the pop-it seats actually being manufactured. The other half of the machine shop is set up to run large manifolds for marine components. We don't do a lot of the manufacturing for the space bodies and things of that nature. We outsource a lot of that just because the volume throughput just overgrew our 30,000 square foot area. So outsourcing that to supply chain locally was definitely the key move. We have two different types of machines, three each. So we have a Swiss machine

that we're making poppets on. So the poppets that you saw before, it's basically a huge bar that's being fed through a machine and basically it loads up, we machine that component parted off and then the machine automatically loads more material. That's our Swiss machines. We have other turning lathes where you have to put a single piece in, you cut it, you take that piece out and you put a new rod in, you know, depending on, or you have to extend it yourself. Similar capacity concerns when you got to make 25,000 of them this year, you know, you got to get moving. So we're doing a lot of pop-up seats and a lot of infrastructure add recently to support

that. So last year we had another lathe, this year we had another Swiss machine continuing to build up more and more. We have some other manufacturing methods that we've been experimenting with, still maintained, formed for the function of the existing heritage product, not violation of anything qualification-wise, but we can do them faster if we do them

on the new technology machines. So what Greg is making here is on the regular turn lanes. We showed you the seats before. This is another example of them. These are the pre-machine parts, and these are some metal rings. So Murata has this patent from the 50s, where you have a metal ring around a piece of plastic. of them these are the pre-machine parts and these are some metal rings. So Murata has this patent from the 50s where you have a metal ring around a piece of

plastic it gives it the rigidity to support a 6,000 psi but also a safe place for the poppet to land so it's not picking up scratches on a metal component and can seal at 6,000 psi. This work order is a little bit smaller it's 19 piece job he's typically running a hundred two hundred piece or 400 piece job just to maintain the volume limit limit the setups. Because every time he changes part numbers he's got to tear down and get set up for a new job. Thank you sir. And then the layout's a little bit different here. Sorry. Hey Jim. Alright how are you? So here's more poppets. So these are actually post machine. Jim is grabbing some emery cloth and he's polishing them up on this little mini lathe.

Again, we're trying to maintain that super high surface finish. So when they come off machine, I told you before, we got to get them under like a four coming off machine. They may be at like an eight or a 12. He's hitting them up with a tiny bit of sandpaper. This is where like the Bob from Val's jokes come in because we have the skilled guys that know exactly how much to polish them to the right point to ensure that they're going to pass test. And he'll look at these in the microscope

and he'll tell you, yeah, this one's not going to work. This one will work, this one won't work. And it's just a skilled, you know, piece of art. Jim the artist. It's like polishing jewelry that matters. Jewelry that's going to go to space. Such a good tagline. That's how I that's awesome. So are these, you already finished this set? Oh those are, okay.

So these are going back to the trays again. Almost like we drew it up that way. I'm putting it together. Almost like we drew it up with the trays. I showed them the trays earlier and I said once they're in the trays they're protected. There they are. More shiny ones. I showed them the trays earlier and I said, you know, once they're in the trays, they're protected. There they are. More shiny ones. And you know, if you don't look under the microscope, those look a lot similar to those.

But you know, Jim will tell you, those are all crap because they're not cleaned up yet. Believe me, it's tedious. Very tedious. Very important. Thanks for letting us bother you. Thanks, Jim. Have a nice day. Hey, how's it going? This is the bar fed machine I was talking about earlier, so essentially to make those poppits, they're going through the bar, getting fed through this machine.

He's cutting them. This one's actually getting set up for plastic. You see this little piece of plastic sticking out there, he'll machine it, next one will pop through. That's crazy. Where all the magic happens. piece of plastic sticking out there, he'll machine it, next one will pop through. It's crazy. It's where all the magic happens. It's just, yeah, it's like it's hard to explain this whole situation. You have to like definitely stand here and smell it and see people working it. You get used to the machine oil and then you're away for a week or two.

You're like, wow, is it always so like this? But you it's good. But the difficult part for us is that we were making the pop-its and seats 20 feet from where they're testing them. And then just, you know, I go home and tell my wife, like, oh, you know, we get the parts over there and they're all broken. She's like, how can they possibly be bad from 20 feet away? But there's five other people in between. So many things happening on here, yeah.

This goes through inspection, then it goes to stock room. You know, we have to maintain those perfect parts when they come out of Jim's hands. And well, the difference too, between the size of these machines over here and then what Jim to stock room. We have to maintain those perfect parts when they come out of Jim Pan's. Well, the difference too between the size of these machines over here and then what Jim's doing over there at the small scale. It's like all that's happening right next to each other. It's crazy.

Hey, blow your mind on this one. The rest of the machine shop, aside from the turning center we just went through, is set up to run large things. You're looking at a block of material that's eight by eight by eight that's bigger than the valves that we're manufacturing so these are basically set up to run larger machine manifolds for marine components so this

Akuma is this is one machine 25 foot long machine like an apartment and holders right so there all these tools that I can use to do different machine ops and It can automatically switch between them We're talking about the breathing Yeah, and all the work all the work is done inside of here. So like actually The work is done in this four by four things the rest of that power and tools and everything else that's happening Wow, what max is unrolling is the ACS pod that we were talking about earlier in the pre-machined configuration. We get it from our customer

in these Pelican cases and then it goes to the machine shop here. This is a shipping fixture so this goes on the bottom when it shifts back out to protect it so that the ceiling surfaces won't get damaged. Seen more fixtures than the R valves. And then we can pop over here and see some other fun stuff. So I imagine your first impression when you see the poppet thing, right? You see Jim over there polishing them and you're saying, well, how many army of people do we have doing that all the time? That's our expression too, because we have three guys on first shift, two guys on second

shift polishing all day every day to be able to... They have to output 400 of those a week. So we've developed other technology that we can try to do this faster. So we have another robotic arm here that can feed into a machine that can do some of the polishing. Not running right now, he might be playing with it. But essentially there's some wheels that are there to do the polishing, trying to do more controlled fashion without the inspection of a guy under a scope.

We've been very successful, we've had one part number run through without problems, we've built up stock, we're ready to do the next part number. So again, looking at manufacturing technology that can help us continue to build faster, better, more efficient things that need to maintain the quality. So does something built here, or is is this you're buying certain industrial pieces and bringing it in together?

We're marrying up the system. So we're buying industrial pieces, we are doing the programming and we're making it happen here. Nobody buy, nope, there's no robot on the market to, you know, polish a poppet. Yeah, call up Universal Robot and be like, hey, I need a poppet. And they say, what the hell are you talking about? So does Jim come over this way and be like, nah, this robot could be better at these parts.

There is some man versus machine going on. Well, it's just, I mean, between that and the x-ray, you see a lot of people that have learned this stuff and have the inherent experience to know by look when something's off. Correct. And so when you're doing this, you're gonna want those eyes on that same output, right?

Exactly. But the robots will never replace anyone, right? So we have enough volume now that we have people over there. They can be working on other onesie-toosie stuff that we have going through a different volume and just have the robot handle the high volume or you know 90% of the work and then he can kiss it up again, whatever it may be. So when we were in the conference room before we were talking about how this place was a schoolhouse, right? And then you know 1943 or whatever it was. And we continue to add on space as we go. When I take kids on tours, I usually tell them every time the floor changes,

you can see where the Maranas have invested into a new part of the building. Where we're at now, this is obviously an older part of the building that's been here for a long time. And then this extra 30,000 square feet that we're about to enter, you see that the floor changed. So we ended up adding another building that was very empty five years ago to support the

ongoing manufacturing and the increased volume that we were seeing throughout the space market. So this room is basically split between the Naval Systems business unit and space. The space manufacturing side here is different than what you saw in the Core cell, because these guys are doing higher mix, lower volume. So we're still going back to the Heritage space station, hey, I need three of these, I need four of those. Very different environment as opposed to,

hey, I'm gonna make 20,000 of these, split up the mix. So technicians back here have a different work setup because they've got a full kit. So instead of in the core area where there's five of us trying to build and test these 40 units, it's we're going to give, you know, Duante is going to take his five piece job, he's going to see that to completion through build, through test, through right through final. Then, you know, Nick's going to have his full kit from build to test to final. So it's much more ownership on a single work order rather than a team effort.

So what you see behind us- What's the break point when something ends up on this half versus that half? Typically 100 units a year. Which we flirt the line with depending on workload and capacity and who can handle what and maturity of product line. So typically if we're doing more than 100, it's going over there in the volume center.

If it's less than a hundred we'll do it here. These guys have a similar matrix as I talked about before as far as skill set of you know you can work on this and you can work on this but it may be different because not everyone has an opportunity to build on this because the mix is or the volume is so low. So we're only getting two work orders a year. I don't have 15 technicians that are all qualified to support that effort. What you see behind us is an effort to manufacture an active refueling coupling valve. So essentially satellite in space needs fuel, tanker along hooks up to it hooks the valve up pumps more propellant into dead satellite and then it goes on its life how big of a satellite are we talking? So mostly like geo bus mid-size or geo bus size so not little guys this is more big chemical propulsion systems people invest a couple hundred million dollars in something and they wanna extend the life

another five years. If your CubeSats dying, I mean, they're designing the CubeSats to come back down and burn up, but where you've invested a lot of money and you want it up there for a while, that's definitely something you wanna get on. This is John's baby. So the test apparatus that we have here,

so this is like super critical, the cleanest stuff that we're doing, level 50 cloniness or tighter. And it's insane. Looking under microscope for fuzzies all day. And the test apparatus that we're seeing here is we have thermal and we also have vacuum setups. So we have a big bell jar floating around

with these big Faraday cage looking things that are going on here. We have, we're making three units. And right now I have six dedicated people full time on this project. So, over there I'm making 19,000 units and I got a small army of 48 guys. Over here we have six to support three. So the labor content is just different.

Currently on our second build, first one was fully through acceptance testing, qualification is there as well. The big machine in the back, that's the helium mass spectrometer, so they have pumping in helium and it's counting how many molecules are coming out. And then we also have the apparatus here are the, these are the coupling and uncoupling mechanisms for simulating in space, hey we're gonna link up the satellite, we're gonna delink, make sure you don't leak before and after. It needs to tolerate some level of misalignment so that, you know, just slightly askew and leak all the hydrazine out.

So is the idea with something like that that it migrates from this side of the building to the other side at some point in its lifespan? If somebody wants to make 100 a year, we'll go for it. But I mean, if you're working on a refueling thing, right? Like... If the volume is there, it'll happen. Yeah, right.

Some things will and some things won't. Some things will be low-rate production. There's going to be DoD satellites that are specialized that's going to continue to exist. And then some things will go off to the races. Constellation level production. But do you ever start over there? It's clear on day one that a part is going to just end up on the site. Yeah, we've had the PLV623s where people are like, yep, I want 400 of these right off the

get-go. And we're like, all right, let's go. So you work it in the stat development lab over there and it flows into the production side. Yep. But, so this is, now is that a skill set difference in the people on this side or people on that side or just roles that you want? Roles or responsibilities are different.

I mean, we have people bouncing around from, hey, I wanna work on that product line, I wanna work on this product line. We have a lot of flexibility from the human resource standpoint to hey I want to try something new or you know we've had people transition in and out of the you know naval business unit so like hey I want to go work on something over there it's different it's a large thing with

a bigger wrench small thing with small wrench. The physics is no different. Let's see if Jim's got something in a cryo dip. We got a frosty one in there. Let me see if Matt's available, see if Jim's here. So Jim is one of the lead technicians in this area. He is testing cryogenic PV25T. So cryogenic valve, we have to ATP test down to minus 320 degrees Fahrenheit So Jim's gonna put on his fancy PPE to make sure he doesn't burn himself with the cold stuff

Did you already dunk it Jim or 30 submerged Cool yeah, if you want to get in there, Anthony, go for it. So Jim, the cart to the left here is fully pressurization system, right? This is all tests? Everything, this is all connected. Each part can be separated, but I do it so that while I have downs on with waiting for the cryo, I can still keep working on other valves. So it's all pressurized, it's all hand valves control with each different things. I can switch pressure to any port at any time

with the different hand valves. And then you're pressurizing the unit under test that we liquid we submerge in liquid nitrogen. We pressurize it, we actuate it, we measure leakage at every point, the in port, the out port, the actuation port, and through the vent port, and we also do response times. Cool. And that's all recorded on this setup, recorded in the ATP, passed back, and then? We use the DAC Express. DAC Express.

Now I'm learning. This records the actuation times. This one's actually hooked up right now. I can actually show you that. Cool. So that's got 3000 PSI there. So we have 120 on the in port. So he's loading up these regulators that will pressurize you to under test.

And that's going to cycle through this valve on the actuation port. Pressure hits that piston in there and causes the valve to open. And we can record it all in here. You got a muffler on? Yes. So you see it on the screen, Anthony to the right? So it's picking up the voltage traces as they go, right? So it'll be able to cycle this thing on the test and then see if it's acting anomalous

in a cryogenic environment, test like you fly, things will be really cold. So it shows us the pressure coming out of the valve, when the voltage happens, when the pressure rises, and then over here it shows when the voltage drops out and then when the stuff actually stops flowing. And then Jim, you'll test it on a bench at ambient first. At ambient, we do this, we do it at cryo, we do it in thermal. And these go to vibe as well?

And they get tested at ambient in between each one. So when it goes to cryo, then it gets tested at ambient. Then thermal, so okay cryo then it gets tested at ambient and Bermel and ambient and vibe do we test do we cycle in vibe or no no vibe is just a pressure just just shaking cool you have to describe this Anthony because I'm not gonna I don't know if I can there's a thing with smoke on it the Brian said it was cold I don't know if I can. There's a thing with smoke on it. Brian said it was cold. I don't understand.

It is very cold. Very science class over here. Liquid nitrogen. So right now... It's coming up to 12. It was at negative 320. You can see the lines are frosting up, there's the moisture from the air. Yeah, it's going to, sitting there, it's going to build up about a half an inch of snow and ice on it, just from the moisture. Just like the lip of the Dewar.

And so you said earlier you kind of have two carts set up so you can test one here while you're waiting for that to get down to temperature. So yeah, so once we dunk it in there it takes a half an hour to dwell. Make sure the internals of the valve are at temperature. Then we do some actuation tests and we have another half an hour to dwell and then we do all the leakage tests. And so you're actuating it when it's in there? Yes. Okay, that's crazy. And then these are the ones that you're doing at ambient? Either they already have been in there or they will be in there sooner or something. This hasn't made it there yet. These are ambient testing. So we have to do a bunch of leakage testing. Then we put in a bake out,

bake out all the moisture inside of the bag, inside the valve. And then we can do the cryo test. When we started doing cryo testing, we learned very quickly that if we don't do that, then we just fail the test because everything's frozen. and the valve is fine. It's just filled with moisture Atmosphere of moisture the humidity will make it freeze up Make sure your valves are clean no FOD and dry

Public service announcement and so it's basically entirely different test structures that you're hooked up to here as opposed to the rack that goes into the trial chamber? Everything is the same except I changed a couple of the gauges out because they're different structures. Okay but I mean the actual like contraption that you have that dunks it. Oh yeah that's completely different. You kind of rig it up on there when it's time to go. That's just taking it and adding the hoses to go in there. To go in there, yeah. Yeah the hoses can't go into the electrical. Yeah. This is awesome. So different than what you saw in the core cell where everything is standardized, everybody's working on the same thing.

Jim basically makes a new setup every day, made these carts to support this just because we're doing medium volume on these cryo valves that we need to think that we can reuse all the time, but it's not dedicated and taken up a bench all night every day. Very cool. Modular.

All right, let me get out of your way. Thanks, Jim. Thanks, Jim. Thank you. Everybody's Jim. We've got a lot of Jims. Jim from Alta. We've got two Jims.

Two Jims, I just talked about in sequence. 900 people here, two Jims. All right, you got Todd. He's our only Todd. Todd, this is Anthony. How's it going? Good right, you got Todd. He's our only Todd. Todd, this is Anthony. How's it going? Good to meet you. Todd's gonna make us a noise.

So we talked about the ACS thruster pod that we saw floating around the 3D printed manifold. That's a real one right there. So we have an aluminum machined version that Murata has designed and developed. And we also have a fixture that is to mimic thrusters during an actual stage one firing. On the actual vehicle this is like integrated into the side of the top of the vehicle but we made this to simulate that so that we can do the testing.

This is the Marada product that's a shippable thing that is the valve that controls ACS on the way back in on reentry and landing. So you got a rocket going up, you got a rocket coming down, we have roll pitch yaw and a settling thruster. So some people like to give a little boost to keep the fuel at the bottom of the vehicle such that when you want to relight, the fuel is ready for you. Cool! Ullage. It's not an umlaut. So we can fire it. We can fire it at any pressure.

You can stand wherever you want except for where you are. I'm probably going to stand right here. No, that would be bad. We can be in the box. I don't know how your audio is going to work. That seems like the coolest spot. I mean, you want... Well, I mean, where do you stand?

You don't have to make me stand in some box that you don't stand in. Well, we're all going to leave and you you're gonna stand here. Just push that button whenever you're ready. Yeah you can look through the glass if you like and you would uh we can charge her up. You tell me I'm not in charge. Geez. All right 6,000 PSI. Let's hit it with a cool three, Todd. How about that? Oh, no. Oh, no. You stand behind the door, I'll stand behind you.

The cocks, why don't we go in the box? We can go in the box. I'll stand in the box. Yeah. You wanna do 3000, Todd? I'll do three. Is there a lock on this? Alright, where are you guys going?

Just wondering. Hello, it's me again. Headphone warning, we're getting close to thruster firing. I dipped the audio, but still you know if you don't want to Hear about it, then skip a couple of minutes ahead, and you'll probably be beyond the thruster firing I don't know exactly where I'm gonna drop this in the show, but here you have it It's a loud noise coming soon it sounds like a cold grass thruster on top of first stage because that's what it is and it's amazing and I hope you enjoyed just a little piece of what I got to experience live last week

is and it's amazing and I hope you enjoyed just a little piece of what I got to experience live last week. You will be able to see shock diamonds coming out of the door. Okay I should stand on this side. Max you go there because I got a microphone. I should leave the mic out the door. You want me to just lean out? No, no. I'm at this.

I'm not scouting. Buzzers. This is exciting. It's going to get hot in here. Do we get any warning? Or is this just going to scare us to death? Yeah, it's just going to scare us. Okay, nice. It's gonna get hot in here. Do we get any warning? Or is it just gonna scare us to death?

It's a scare us. Okay, nice. We have pictures of it firing at six grand, you get a full shock diamond. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha It's a proof chamber. It's like a reenvent of holds. So we typically roll things into here to pressurize them. And the safety standard is you can't. Lots of giggling. Yes, that's so good. Cool? You want another one?

Yeah. Uno mas? And that was only half of whatever you said they couldn't do? Yes. Oh, they should do the full thing. That was awesome. Fire the forward one. No, you want to fire it downward so it doesn't jump off the table.

Yeah, we were worried about all the racks downstream of the forward one. Everything else is going to fall off the table. Yeah. We blew that TV off the wall at one point. We're going to test this out again. 5,000 psi or did he wave high? Five seconds. Five minutes exactly. Wow. Alright, I clenched. That's awesome. So that's when it takes the steer of the big rocket. That was awesome.

Yeah, we're 10 feet away. That's amazing. 10 feet away from shock damage. Thanks Todd. This is worth the price of admission. That was crazy. So this is where they're controlling it? Should we charge for tours?

Actually, this is a good thing. Thank you sir, appreciate it. This is where they were standing to control it. Was it loud out here? Yeah. No, it was solid. Wow. So recently we got a call from a car manufacturer

that wants to put thrusters on the back of their cars. So they're gonna use the same ones that the rocket people use. All right. Imagine rolling down the street in your electric car with that thing. Man, that's crazy. We're going to go back that way.

Don't fire it when we go back that way. And so how often does that get used? So we just manufactured, we're making a handful of them for another customer now. Typically, we don't run those in ATP. Can I go out that door't run those in ATP. Can I go out that door? Get those an alarm? So this is our nitrogen farm.

So these are our tanks that we got. This is the fun noise to be in the room with. So that's pumping from the helium tanks here throughout the rest of the building. And then if you step over here, you can see the nitrogen tanks that are just boiling off because it's nice and warm out today. So they'll just suck all the boiled off nitrogen,

pump it back throughout the entire building. And then we have a separate tank over there to feed another part of the building. So they were, they use that test cell, like when a new one is produced or as acceptance testing. So we don't do that every time. We don't do that acceptance testing every time. We had a toy. Qualification testing. Yeah, okay. New version, tweak, something like that.

Yep. Configuration change must work. So we get these back. So these like we described before, this is staged up and fairing set. This one particular one goes in the fairing. Fairing goes in the ocean. Bell gets covered in water. We get it sent back and have to make it space worthy again. Every time it comes back or? So they actually, it depends on the seas. So when there are higher swells in the seas, it takes them longer to get to the fairings

and the fairings fill up with water faster. So the valves look a lot worse. In the summer when the seas are calm, then the valves look a lot better and they don't come back as much. But they actually have a protocol, like off specs for how much water is on the valve, do we have to set it back to Mirada?

Interesting. So if you want to touch a piece of space, right, this is all the schmutz that was in space. Oh yeah, what is all that schmutz? That's the engine. Okay, that's crazy. This is during flight, right? You got engine soot everywhere.

Yeah, so that's why the fairing has to fall off. So what are they looking at to then determine, they're just saying the amount of water in the fairinging or is there a particular thing on here that they're looking at? So there'll be a water line in the fairing. They can tell when they fill the fairing out where the seawater ended and whether it got to the bowels. It looks like probably some saltwater. And so what do you do? Clean it up and we'll actually gut it, clean it, put new pilots on it. So these these components will fully be replaced. We'll actually gut it, clean it, put new pilots on it. So these components will fully be replaced. We'll clean it as much as we can

and we'll re-certify it to our regular acceptance test levels. Wow. It's like bringing a carton mechanic, you know? It's just a space manifold. Yeah, you think about it and you're like, man, shipping it all the way back and then... It's a lot.

And so how many come back at a time? Like one flight's worth or do you get like a whole, do they batch it? So well they needed more replacements so if they can stomach with the supply that we're giving them to support more builds it's not a problem. If they're losing more or not recovering as much as they can they're going to say oh no we got to get more to you. So it's a race between our manufacturing versus how many they're using. I think last year we did maybe half a dozen and I think there's probably a bucket of them.

Yeah, there's probably half a dozen. But they still send a whole batch full in and then you'll send it back out or does it come in as they- It's not that many. Yeah. I mean we're doing four of these a month. So when you get six returns, it's like kind of a lot, but we turn them around in a few months.

That's cool. And this is like the full return rack, which is like not much, you know. You think about last year we sent 16,200 valves out and our returns fit on one shelf. Yeah, this is not a very big shelf at all. But that could be anything, right? Yeah, so these are ground support equipment for other customers that may have a lot of ground pneumatics.

Right. So they do a lot of ground pneumatics. Right. So, they do a lot more refurb, right? People that fly rockets, you don't get them back usually. So these are all generally parts that either were used and you needed to fix something on to use it again or is it like you shipped something and it got there and something happened in transit? They're mostly not warranties. They're mostly what we would call repairs so they you know time and service they

might have been in service for five years they're like cycling a few hundred times a day like things wear out just like a car so some things come back for that we do get warranties from time to time but it's a small portion of what we get back. You know whenever you talk to the valve people you always talk about you know it's not our fault but you know the proper use of the valves right so this one in particular has got a dent. It looks like there's a drop on it. But you know, there's no filters on the return either.

So again, you know, we got to maintain cleanliness. So even want to recertify this, this thing has been open to the ambient environment. Right. You don't know where. You got to rip it all apart. Yeah. So we have to take it all apart and clean it because we don't know what's happened. How often do one of these fairing actuators come back and you can't fix it or repair it? I don't think we've had one that we couldn't do. It's not usually

physical, it's not broken, it's dirty. It's got some water in it. Well, salt water in valves has been a storyline in the industry, so it's not an out of bounds question. Try to keep those separate. Want that Venn diagram completely separated into two circles. Thanks again to the team at Murata for having me up for the day, for showing me around, for doing that thruster firing, which was really an incredible highlight of the trip. Brian and Max for coming on again to talk more.

And yeah, I mean, I think we've been talking about trying to do an off-nominal episode up that way as well so maybe we'll pull that off sometime this summer but yeah this was a really fun show hope you enjoyed listening hope you you know audio is a little bit tricky in parts because it is such a steampunky environment there's a lot of noises but I thought most of it was at least listenable if you're into that sort of thing so yeah if you did enjoy it sort of thing. So yeah, if you did, enjoy it. I thank you so much for the support. As always, mainnichikot.com slash support, and I will talk to you soon.