Welcome to Main Engine Cutoff. I am 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 native once-in-future homeland, New Jersey, to Marotta Controls and up to their Montville, New Jersey facility where they do a lot of the 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 valves company that we always joke about. So I 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 Murata, to understand a little bit of the story of the space side of the business. on the Marotta 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 Ippolito, 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 forward-looking 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. 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 Murata. 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 he's, they're just like 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 along 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, you know, 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 setup 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. like 3000 PSI and then five or 6,000 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, it was a really fun day. Got the drive up and like I said, tore through the whole facility and talked 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.
Major thank you to all of you who support Main Engine Cutoff. This kind of trip is only possible because you support the show. 100% listener supported. It 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 Astrogators at SE, Joe Kim, Fred, Pat from... KC, Natasha, Sakos, Joel, Theo and Violet, Russell, Jan, Pat, Ryan, Tim Dodd, David Dashnott, 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 going to hear you as part of the tour. It's, you know, an hour coming up towards the back end of the show that people will be hearing you pop in and 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 is like, trajectory and inflection points follow the space industry at large so we've been around since the 40s and we were in you know saturn program and on shuttle and all those things but you know 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. We try to be less dependent on Bob, although there are still Bobs around. We met a couple of Jims on the tour. We have to get some name diversity, I guess. Just watching the organization scale over the past 20 years. 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 um the legacy products that are like basically what we landed on the moon evolve get new materials uh 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. 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 uh from the tour it certainly looks like you guys got like
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, you know, World War II era. Was there sort of like a culture adjustment that needed to happen or? Was it something that instantly kind of 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 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.
What was really cool to see for me was there were a lot of people in the space industry, you know, through the 90s. And, you know, I'm sure you've read like, you know, when the heavens went on sale and all that stuff that were ready for this moment. Right. So that we had, you know, engineers that had been working on. you know, kind of traditional paced space programs for a long time in their career. And they were just ready to turn and pivot, you know, use an overword.
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 we're all just trying 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 here, you guys do tons of other stuff to 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 puppets are and all that kind of stuff. We hear from other sections of the industry that build hardware that the difference in today's space industry is more like relaxed tolerance either.
It's something that doesn't need to be radiation hardened and we're just going to fly a bunch of them and they're really cheap so we can fly more of them or we can add more redundancy or 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 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 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 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 a little bit more sensitive to how they're operated in systems. And I think that good propulsion engineers still will make mistakes 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 be...
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 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 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 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, you know, somebody that's not super inside the industry in terms of hardware perspective to know like 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 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 particular part's job is. So 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, 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 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 automotive talks and defects in parts per million
And we don't make a million. So it's hard to get to parts for a 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, 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 valve's fault. The vehicle was fine. The valve screwed up. And then I talked to people on mission teams, you know, current past missions. 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...
You know, 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 Murata's Vals 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 vowel failing, you know, especially if it's something, even if it's not your vowel, right? You don't like to see that because... They are nuanced products. And to be open, valve companies screw up too, right? Nobody's perfect. There are times where...
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 to 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 what people were going to do originally and how ConOps...
evolved through mission or even through like the design of a vehicle and that pushed things out of a boundary that just didn't work. Um, and as long as, 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 the valve. Because at the end of the day, the valve is a thing not working. So to me, the interesting thing about that is you see all of these new starts come to make new valves because they're like, oh, all the valve guys are all just screwing this up.
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 um 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 their 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. But sometimes like getting a high enough.
description high level enough description of like the failure mode it kind of absolves the 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's a weird aspect that you don't really hear that much about other subcomponents 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 of 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, Anthony. Yeah, that's that's really my goal here. Thank you. Yeah. Yeah, so let's see. I mean, 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 Murata. So is there anything else particular that context-wise you want people to know going into listening to the tour that we took last week? I think... You're going to hear a lot of cool applications and hopefully you hear some thruster firing and we get to do... That's awesome. So I hope you... People will 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.
We certainly liked 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 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, um, sort of the, you know,
tremendous growth that Murata 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 because some of the competitors have been pivoting away to hypersonics or going towards different mega constellations, vice versa, yada, yada.
You know, you've mentioned when we were talking the growth of Murata 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 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 spaceflight, 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 going to have to continue to grow exponentially as we've seen it. So I think we all kind of knew in industry that there was going to be a bunch of these startups that were going to 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 Murata 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 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 a special case that leads to Murata 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, you hit a billion dollars in industry or in the internet and you're...
going to come over and make a rocket company. You're not like, I'm going to make a rocket company and I'm going to start by making the valves first. No one goes into rocketry like, oh, you know what I'm going to do? I'm not going to do the thrust engine or the thrust chamber. I'm going to 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 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...
Like, what's that short story that's like how to make bread and it's like split hydrogen and oxygen? Remember that? Like, how from scratch are we talking? Yeah, yeah. Because, yeah, to the same extent, it's not like SpaceX isn't going out there like mining their own aluminum.
creating the aluminum rolls coming in the door. So, I mean, there's, it's always like, you kind of know it 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 because of the other industries that Murata 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 there was such an institution already there? Or is it not necessarily as one-to-one as that? 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 like acquiring new customers or expanding your current customer base? You know, is it staying on top of whether she's going and making sure that you're in conversation with the new entrance as soon as they're there or, you know, it feels like.
some companies can be in your position and the risk is they are so incumbent. And like, you know, you've guys got the Falcon stack under your, you know, lifting the sales of Murata because of the volume that they're driving at. So how do you not just like...
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 and someone else will. So, I mean, 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 vowels because we had so much work and a lot of the stuff was passive. So 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. 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 going to go out on their own, they're like, oh, I should.
call the people that did really good job the last time or what is that? 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, you know, ex ULA. guys or people that have seen stuff on test stands or old NASA hardware like yeah I had that Murata valve that thing worked really good I should call them up again
Um, we often hear stories of people in the field that have like the one Murata valve that they just like cherish and they keep in the corner and the test guys are like, don't touch that Murata valve. That one's mine. If you're going to run a dirty setup, go run something else. Cause you know, the stuff that was made in the fifties and six.
were like unbreakable and they still wanted to use those. We still get phone calls for rebuild kits from stuff that's been like 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, that's, it is... kind of interesting when you look at that positioning right because we went we saw so much hardware that you're working on this new versions or new part numbers and but at the same time you have those relationships still with people that have been running hardware for a long time and
You know, 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 or new processes come along. 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 on where to take a company.
existing 50 years outside 60 I don't even know how many years outside of that structure you would 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 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 family-owned mentality and the desire to continue to innovate. 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 like 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, you know, beautiful.
factory in long beach or something like that that's like fully end-to-end seamless you know there's a little bit of like 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 had 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 you know it's like uh yeah it's just such a unique place so i'm glad i could uh
come up and see what it's like in person. Yeah. The polished concrete is all the craze, you know? So anything done in the past five years is polished concrete and everything that was 20 years ago was battleship gray floors. So we just keep putting more gray paint on the floors and no one will know the difference. What is the thing in the next 5-10 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. 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...
you know, the quarter inch to half inch line size on deeper space vehicles, we'll be doing all right. 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, you know, 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 listened 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 up front 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? Are people actually doing work? Very fast-paced and chaotic, borderline chaotic environment. Tons of work going on. Really interesting place to go and tour through.
Like I said, audio in places are going to get a little bit weird. There's some noisy rooms that we go through. But generally, I think it's a good time. So enjoy. All right. We are here on the tour. Can you introduce yourself so everybody knows there's going to be a bunch of voices on the show? you start i'm brian ipolito 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 Murata. 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 the 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. that are 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 Murata. 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 going to 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 different 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, a 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, hey, your test failed, and here's how you're going to fix it.
So they'll come back with redline 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 Murata. 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 in detail that we have in testing, unless you've 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 market maybe coming?
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 is that 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.
yeah what about like um what's the right word i guess like turning off old product lines either decommissioning yeah is there there are 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 right so we're making things to order so stuff that you're going to buy if you're going to give me
purchase order for 20 units, we're going to go buy 20 units. I'm not saying, no, I think Anthony's going to buy 20 of these later. 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 um there's 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. All right, let's see some hardware We're going in this aquarium we're going in this aquarium this It feels like an aquarium. It's great to work. All right, we'll put glasses on. Hey, Mikey, how you doing? How's it going? What's up? 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. actually see what it looks like on the inside there uh but yeah so it's just like uh this is a challenging product for me because we have thousands of psi held back by a flexible pressure element basically
It's all metal, ceramic metal sealing interfaces, that kind of stuff. So 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 as currently under. underserved by heritage contractors in the valve space.
And a lot of this is about consistency across temperature ranges. So right now we're testing at negative 60, negative 80? Negative 80 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.
The vacuums of space and thermal and all that. Right, so the helium one is for chemical biprop and then xenon is for EP systems. Cool. You want to see what else we have going on? Yeah, thanks. Thanks for letting us bother you. Oh yeah? Adam, I can put this up, right? 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 Murata's bread and butter. That's what we make most of. So this is for a crude space capsule. I don't know what this exact unit is. It must be a past test article. 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 whole thrust 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.
You want to 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 pop at specific inlet pressure. This feeds a main relief valve, so these are fuel and ox tank relief valves. These are set at like, you know, 60 psi or so.
and they prevent the fuel inox tanks from exploding if there's a runaway event. Pressuring gas? Yep, pressuring or autogenous fed, depends on the vehicle. We make these for a couple different customers. Cool. Paris had a thing half apart. Troy's got a 25T. Buzzing today. Bothering everybody in the room today. Mike's working on a, this is at Mars.
Mars mission valve. This is a fuel shutoff valve for a hydrazine prop system. These basically like when the Mars lander lands they terminate fuel flow to the main engines, the landing engines. So 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. Let's see if Mike's wrist deep in that valve right now. Yeah. Sorry.
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. And then this one here is the Xenon unit. So similar in time, just different set points, very different set points. It's so steampunk in here. Yeah, a lot of stainless and aluminum, right? This is Steve Sepp and Farring Sepp Manifold. One guest of the customer.
So this one here is a series and parallel redundant manifold. These, hang on. He's going to make some noise. So these are the pilot valves. These are Murata PLV 34 LTs. 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. high pressure tank upstream and downstream there's just a piston pusher so for stage separation and ferry 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 spit your bearing halves and have them not hit 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. It goes to the front 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.
So that's just for fairings or also for stage step? You said it's both? It's the same one for both? Same part number for both, and then they actually stack them because they wanted more redundancy, so they have two of them stacked together.
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 pressure that you need for both, yeah. I would never guess that. Duh. Yeah.
Yeah, who would have known the relative weights of these things? Well, and it's like, you want the stage separation to happen pretty aggressively, otherwise you get a, like, Falcon 1 situation, right? Or the Astro Kool-Aid man. Or Astro Kool-Aid. 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 what 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
the flow is and then this is overkill for what they need, the amount of flow that they need. As far as electronic power, you know, electrical power, it's all just taking 24 volts and an amp, so it's not taking much to drive these. A lot of that's fed by requirements. Yeah, each solo wants about 24 watts. 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, you know, keyboard jockeys that are hanging out. Max likes to find more toys. Yeah, apparently.
so we're talking about uh stage one acs oh yeah so oh damn look at that thing we get this directly from our customer printed and then we this is a like immediately post printing and when we machine all the valvey stuff into it both four of those pilots onto the outside and then ship it back to them for ACS. Wow. Why don't you do the machining? We do do the machining. We do the machining, 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 you know so the challenge with printing and 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 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 billow aluminum? So that's been the trade-off. We actually have a variant of this that is just billow aluminum. Actually, this is what we have.
Yeah, we're going to go look at that later and fire it. I think I'm wondering why they ship you this part. They wanted to print this. Okay. It's a desired 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... Murata said, we can do this without printing it. That ship had sailed. Pun intended. Flown? The ship has flown? The ship has flown. There's Todd.
Yeah, about 20 minutes we'll be back there. We can push a button. Cool? Alright, so behind you here is our space stock room. 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 stockroom. 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. That's wild. That'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 touch my phone etc etc if you know they have to do something they can step off you know d down and then go back as needed so
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 flow benches is the new evolution of technology. There's also one person in there versus... She... It 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 cleans and 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.
The actual assembly area is also behind that wall. This is just the cleaning portion. Gotcha. We have a couple of screens. I saw the camera, yeah. Yeah, so this is showing not that room that you can't see. Gotcha. Next to it. There's a couple of... Okay. I can accommodate like five or six. people before he gets a little bit up. It's a little warm and a little bumping at the elbows. I mean, not compared to that room over there. Oh, wait till you get it 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 going to mess 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 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 Murata 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 going to 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 fluid 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 screwing 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 the... sub 4 ra 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 puppets 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, hands them off to Max, Max puts them into the stock room, and then John pulls them out later, goes to build it, and all of a sudden there's scratches on everything. So we have to develop processes and fixtures to prevent that.
So what we're seeing here is one of our fixtures that I can rattle this thing around, and these components are not getting damaged anymore. Ten years ago, if I saw someone doing that, they were getting slapped. Is this what a poppet is? It was a hot poppet summer.
last year. I don't know if you know about that. We're all about the poppets. There was a lot of talk about poppets. Nobody knows what that means. This is what a poppet is? You guys know what that means. Nobody knows what that means. There's about 10 people that are listening right now. 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 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. Tell me how it fits into stuff, right? Is this the thing that's...
going in and out. So if you set a spool, it may be more applicable. 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... thousand psi eight thousand psi whatever it is from going down the out pipe so
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 the 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 this time into...
picking it, putting in the stock room, cleaning it, getting 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 puppets in this fancy case and the seats are under like a little piece of whatever that is? 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 where 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 you want to 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...
of course l um we didn't talk about this about 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 oh 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. 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 you know customer calls up and says i need something in two weeks we're going to bang things around so you have some digital systems as well as some paper based systems where we can shuffle around work load us
as accordingly to meet customers' needs. Typically, we're trying to manufacture things in best economic order quantity, so I'm trying to build things in four piece. 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. It might be easier to see. And in that case, are you talking like even across customers? That could be the case? No, so...
um 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 going to cut a work order for 50 of them we do have components where we are building the stock now so i'm going to build a hundred generic ones i'm going to throw them all in stock and i'll split
50 to max and i'll split 50 to anything you know whatever 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 yep would you try to find another customer that also needs 30 so you can do a whole batch okay you still will 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. 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. They should have already bought them or something. Of like 36.
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 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 uh we'll get the kit to the floor right puppets 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 oh 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 clean room 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.
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 his bench has been properly cleaned. That's 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
I mean, I can hear it. The filters on the bottom are pulling air through, and the positive clean air is pushing it out. 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 had something? Oh, I just want to, this is another pop-up.
So this looks very different than the other puppets. See, this is why nobody knows what these things are. Yeah, this is a... Okay, so just a different... I got it. Let's hear it. Those are what we call direct acting puppets. So those are the only thing in the flow path. These are pneumatically actuated. So that little... is going to open and feed gas to the back of this big poppet to open the valve for a larger full capacity valve.
A lot of poppets. This is what I came here for. So this is good. Now I feel, I get it now. Do you have a checklist that said learn about poppets? Check. There's at least three people that I'm going to call and be like, I know what a poppet is now. Smash that light button if you know what a poppet is.
so that's about it so you know our ratio of builders to testers there's there's testing happening on the on the non-clean benches so after they're clean 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 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 got it 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 that are shown there are filtered as well
So then the internals is then what you're talking about there. We're protecting everything. 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 filter on here you can't really see it but there's okay
A filter in there with a billion little holes on it. But that part isn't actually part of the park? 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. This all takes a long time. Yeah, so a 40-piece job. So each one of these, the technicians are taking, they do like 10 a day.
So they're doing an hour of Albon test or two hours of Albon 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 at 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 it doesn't really matter who's working on what kind of valve here? 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 it rolls up here, they can tackle. We try to avoid that Bob has to be here to do this valve. Like the Bob call out. Bob from Vals Inc. He's 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. 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 if 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 going to 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.
Mark here is pulling up one of the units that's in there. Computed 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 map. So, thanks Mark. On the right there, this is one of the components that we saw being built over there. It's a PLV34LT. And then you get this live image of the things that we want to expect.
from a quality standpoint. And it builds a 3D model of it too. So it's, and that's like rotatable. You can, you can turn off certain things and see inside the valve to make sure everything's in there correct. And we use this to, you know, just check for manufacturing defects or various other 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 through 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 we're checking everything that you would not be able to check from an external inspection Is that like automated to any extent?
Mark is the automation. Your brains and 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 computers 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 as 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. And we can say, this is how we shipped it to you. Maybe something else went awry. Or 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. We've done it before. I could 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 want to see the actual unit. Yeah, I was going to look in the window. It does exist. It's not just a video we have running on loop.
It's not just a fancy demo. Like a speed movie. It's just like rotisserie style in here. It's going full rotisserie. Yeah, it is. Is that not? Okay, that's a fair description. So we also have this machine so that we can do larger volumes. 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. Hi.
but we actually have this tower set up where you can put 10 of them at 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 yep so where actually Mark wants to race the robot and see if he can beat it, but I think we're convinced he will. 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 Expressions over there. There's space for standing under here.
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 a 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 like the volume was enough so we have two separate areas a and t is just strictly space geyser space and the marine business and so the split off was that more like workload management versus as you said the individual technicians are Drain. 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 was talking about the boat tail. That's actually on a tester here. Okay. So those are for, those are dynamometers. So they're measuring load output from the different motors for the missile pin steering.
test the whole unit at once. You put it in, you plug it in, and then it runs through a sequence to make sure it's going to be able to steer the missile correctly. And it's one particular kind of missile? It is that one in Hellfire. I don't know if I was allowed to say that. Crazy. You can see the tail heads there.
Okay, so it sits 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. Yeah, right, right. Also make this, which is the power supply for this missile. You'll see those somewhere else. That's awesome. So it's gonna 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 poppet seats actually being manufactured. 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 maintain form fit or 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 lathes. We showed you the seats before. This is another example of them. These are the pre-machined 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 Papa 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 a 19-piece job. He's typically running 100, 200-piece, a 400-piece job just to maintain the volume and 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. All right, how are you? So here's more poppets. So these are actually post-machine.
Jim is grabbing some memory 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've 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 the Bob from Valve jokes come in. 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. That's awesome. 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 always look at it. That's legit. That's awesome.
So are these, you already finished this set? Those are not long. Oh, those are, okay. So these are going back to the trays again. Ah, see, almost like we drew it up that way. I'm putting it together. Almost like we drew it up with the trays, you know. 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 wow and you know if you don't look under the microscope those look a lot similar but you know jim will tell you those are all crap because they're not cleaned up yeah that's awesome
Very important. Thanks for letting us bother you. Cool. Thanks, man. Thanks, Jim. Have a nice day. How's it going? How are you? This is the bar fed machine I was talking about earlier, so essentially to make those... those puppets they're going through the bar getting fed through this machine okay he's cutting them this one's actually getting set up for plastic you see this little piece of yeah plastic's picking out there he'll machine it next one will pop through
That's crazy 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 You get used to the machine oil and then if you're away for a week or two, you come back and you're like, wow, is it always going like this? The difficult part for us is that we were making the poppets and seats 20 feet from where they're testing them.
I go home and tell my wife, like, oh, you know, we get the parts over there, 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 there, yeah. You know, this goes to 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's doing yeah over there 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, right? 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. It's like an apartment. It's all just tools and holders, right? So these are all just tools that I can use to do different machining ops and it can automatically switch between them. That's crazy. Yeah. And all the work is done inside of here. So actually, the work is done in this 4x4 thing. So the rest of that is just power and tools and everything else that's happening. Wow. What Max is unrolling is the ACS pod that we were talking about earlier. Oh, yeah.
um in the pre-machined configuration so we get it from our customer in these pelican cases and then it goes to the machine shop here and we're up to the races what's this part This is a shipping fixture, so this goes on the bottom when it ships back out to protect it so that the sealing surfaces won't get damaged. I've seen more fixtures than the R-valves.
And then we can pop over here and see some more fun stuff. So I imagine your first impression when you see the pop it 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. 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 of that nature. Maintain the quality. So there's something built here or 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 buys no there's no robot you can buy on the market
Polish a pop-it. Yeah, call up Universal Robot and be like, hey, I need a pop-it. And you 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 like, you know, 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 going to want that.
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 twosie 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 Maranis 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 a rat as opposed to hey i'm going to make 20 000 of these split up the mix so technicians back here have a different uh
work set up 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 DeWante 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 Nick's going to have his full kit from build to test to find him. 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. Okay. Which we flirt the line with depending on... work loading 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 to the volume center. If it's less than 100, 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 mixes 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 comes 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
geobust mid-size or geobust size so not little guys this is more big chemical propulsion systems people that invest a couple hundred million dollars in something and they want to extend the life another five years If your CubeSat's 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 want to 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 cleanliness or tighter. It's insane. Looking under a microscope for fuzzies all day. and the test apparatus that we're seeing here is we have thermal and we also have vacuum set up so we have a big bell jar floating around we have these big faraday cave looking things that are going on here we have we're making 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 hour, 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. These are the coupling and uncoupling mechanisms for simulating in space, hey, we're going to link up the satellite, we're going to de-link, make sure you don't leak before and after. It needs to tolerate some level of misalignment.
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? If somebody wants to make a hundred a year, we'll go for it. But I mean, we're going on a refueling thing, right?
If the volume is there, it'll happen. 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 uh production but do you ever start over there like it's clear yeah we've had the plv 623s where people are like yep i want 400 of these right off the get-go all right let's go so you work it in the
that development lab over there and it flows into the production side. 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 and responsibilities are different. I mean, we have people bounce around from, hey, I want to work on that product line. I want to 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 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 a small thing with small wrench it's fair 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 going to put on his fancy PPE to make sure he doesn't burn himself with the cold stuff. Did you already dunk it, Jim, or it's already 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 down time with waiting for cryo, I can still keep working on other valves. So it's all pressurized, it's all hand valves controlled, 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 get down to minus 320. We pressurize it, we actuate it, we measure leakage at every point.
the import the output the actuation port and through the vent port and we also do response times cool and that's all recorded on this setup recording in the ATP fastback and then use the Dak Express Dak Express So this records the actuation times. Okay. This one's actually hooked up right now. I can actually show you that. Cool. It's got 3,000 PSI there. So we have 120 on the end port.
So he's loading up these regulators that will pressurize, you know, under test. And that's going to go 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 under test and then see if it's acting anomalous in a cryogenic environment, test like you fly, things will be really cold. 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
It actually stops flowing. And then Jim, you'll test it on a bench at Ambien first. We do it at Ambien. 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 in ambient, then thermal, then ambient, then vibe, then ambient. Do we cycle in vibe or no? No, vibe is just the pressure. Just shaking. Cool.
You have to describe this, Anthony, because I'm not going to... 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. It's very science class over here. Look what nitrogen is. So right now it's coming.
It was at negative 320. You can see the lines are frosting up as 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. 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 dwell, and then we do our 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 soon this hasn't made it there yet these are ambient testing um so we have to do a bunch of leakage testing then we put in a bakeout
and take out all the moisture inside of the bag, inside the valve, and then we can do the cryotest. When we started doing cryotesting, 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. Even the atmospheric moisture, the humidity will make it freeze up. Make sure your valves are clean, no thaw, 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 biode 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 that's completely you kind of rig it up on there when it's time to go Taking it and adding the hoses to go in there to go in there. Yeah, the horses can't go into 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, you know, medium volume on these cryo valves that...
We need a thing that we can reuse all the time, but it's not dedicated and taking up a bench all day every day. Very cool. Modular. All right, let me get out of your way. Thanks, Jim. Everybody's Jim. We've got a lot of Jims. You met two gyms. Two gyms? I just talked to both in sequence. 900 people here, two gyms. All right, you got a Todd. He's our only Todd. Todd, this is Anthony. How's it going? Good to meet you.
Todd's going to 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 Murata product that's a shippable thing that is the valve that controls ACS on the way back in on re-entry 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. It's not an umlaut.
So we can fire it. Yes. We can fire it in any pressure. You can stand wherever you want except for where you are. I probably shouldn't 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, where do you stand? Don't make me stand in some box. Well, we're all going to leave and you're going to stand here. Just push that button whenever you're ready. And duck.
Yeah, you can look through the glass if you like, and we can charge her up. You tell me, I'm not in charge. Jeez. All right, 6,000 PSI. Let's hit it with a cool three, Todd. How about that? You stand behind the door, I'll stand behind you. We can go in the box. Yeah. You want to do 3,000, Todd? Is there a lock on this?
You can click open and close that door from in there. All right, where are you guys going? Well, I could be outside controlling. Just wondering. Hello, it's me again. Headphone warning. We're getting close to the 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 going to 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 uh i hope you enjoyed just a little piece of what i got to experience live last week you will be able you will be able to see shock diamonds you should stand okay i should stand on this side
Max, you go there, because I've got a microphone. I should leave the mic out the door. You want me just to lean out? No, no. I'm at this. All right. Oh, my job's got my buzzers. This is exciting. It's going to get hot in here. Do we get any warning? Or is it just going to scare us to death? It's just scare us. Okay, nice. We have pictures of it firing at six grand and you get a full shock diamond.
And this box we're standing in, what is the details on this sucker? It's a proof chamber for marine manifolds. 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? Yeah. You want another one? Yeah. Uno mas. And that was only half of whatever you said they could 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, you're 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, yeah. 5,000 psi or do you wave high? So that's what it takes to steer a 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. 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?
So recently we got a call from a car manufacturer that wants to put thrusters on the back of their cars. So they're going to use the same ones that the hockey people use. 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?
are they so we just manufactured we're making a handful of them for another customer now um typically we don't run those in atp can i go out that door that doesn't alarm so this is our this is our next 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.
they use that test cell like when a new one is produced or as acceptance testing or so we we don't do that every time we don't do that acceptance testing every time yeah we had a toy 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 stage step and fairing step. 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 fell up in 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. They actually have a protocol for how much water is on the valve. Do we have to set it back to Marotta? Interesting.
so if you want to touch a piece of space right this is this is all the schmutz that was in space that's that's that's the engine okay that's crazy so this is during this is during flight right you got
So what are they... Oh, that's just straight up. Engines soot everywhere. Yeah, so that's when the fairing has fall off. So what are they looking at to then determine... They're just saying the amount of water in the fairing, or is there a particular thing on here that they're looking at? No, so there'll be a water line in the fairing, so they can tell when they fill the fairing out where the seawater ended and...
And so what do you do clean it up and actually we'll actually gut it clean it put new pilots on it so these these components will fully be replaced We'll clean it as much as we can, and we'll recertify it to our regular acceptance test levels. Wow. It's like bringing your car to mechanic, you know? It's just a... It's just space when 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.
they're losing more or not recovering as much as they can they're gonna 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 will send a whole batch full in and then you'll send it back out or does it come in as it's not that many yeah i mean we're doing we're doing four of these a month
so when you get six returns it's like right 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 where 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.
So they do a lot more refurb, right? People that fly markets, 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 ship something and it got there and something happened in transit. They're mostly not warranties. They're mostly what we would call repairs. So, you know, time in 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. 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.
And, 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, the...
there's no filters on the return either so again you know we got to make sure we maintain clean this so if we want to recertify this this thing has been open to the ambient environment right you don't know where we gotta rip it all apart yeah so we have to take it all apart and clean it because we don't know we'll 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 sturdy. Broken drop damage, yeah, it's got some water in it. Well, saltwater and valves has been a storyline in the industry, so it's not an out-of-bounds question. Try to keep those separate. I 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...
phenomenal episode up that way as well so maybe we'll pull that off sometime this summer um but yeah this was a really fun show hope you enjoyed listening hope you uh you know audio is a little bit tricky in parts because it is such a steampunky environment there. There's a lot of noises, but, uh, I thought most of it was at least listenable if you're into that sort of thing. So, uh, yeah, if you did enjoy it, I thank you so much for the support as always. And, uh, I will talk to you soon.