Well, good morning, everyone. Looks like everybody's here early, so we might as well start a little early. Exciting panel we have ahead. Really appreciate having our presenters here today. My name is Suji Desilva. I'm the Semiconductor and Intelligence Systems Analyst for Roth Capital, and really have had the privilege of working with some of these companies that are making space and defense and all the things that are needed. A very interesting investable opportunity for all of you. Thanks all of you for coming, and I'm gonna thank our presenters in advance. To my immediate left here, we have Benjamin Wolff, Ben Wolff of Palladyne AI Corp, Chief Executive Officer there. Next to him is Chris Edmonds, Chief Financial Officer of Redwire. Next to him is Phil De Sousa, who I just had a fireside with. He's the Chief Financial Officer of Voyager Technologies. At the far end is Chris Donahue, the President and Chief Executive Officer of Applied Energetics. Gentlemen, thank you all for coming. Really appreciate having you here. With that, let's just get right into it. This is a defense and space infrastructure panel. You would think these could be two separate panels, but they are morphing in some levels. We're gonna have to talk about them, you know, kind of, on top of each other. Let's just talk about the government and what they're trying to do here with the U.S. military. Let's kinda keep this kinda high level. We got a lot of detailed firesides. What does the military see as threats and opportunities now from where you sit that are pressing, you know, near term, six-month, 12-month needs that you are helped with? Maybe Ben, we'll start with you, and kinda we'll work our way over. Sure. Is it on? No? All right. Is it on? Yeah, it's on. Can you hear me? Can you turn it up? Yeah? Yeah. All right. Great. The question was, what are the defense needs in the near term? Correct. The pressing ones that are coming up, yeah. Well, the pressing ones, obviously, we're in the middle of a war. That is true. We are finding that we have these exquisite and wonderful weapons that cost a lot of money, and we're having those weapons have to go up against things that are not quite so exquisite, but are far less costly. You know, the words of the day at the Pentagon are low cost, economical, attritable weapons. That is what we're in the business of trying to support with our artificial intelligence software. We're in the business of trying to support this mission of low cost, attritable weapons with swarming software for drones that allows one soldier to be able to manage a fleet or swarm of drones, but not just to manage a fleet or swarm of drones from kind of a set it and forget it perspective, where the sole purpose is to avoid collisions, but rather to enable these drones to be able to think autonomously, to respond in real time to what's going on in the air or on the ground, and to work collaboratively as a mesh network, a series of nodes on that network, so that they can share information from their sensors and be smarter about how they adjust in real time to the mission that they're tasked with. We are the intelligence that rides on top of the autopilot and the operating system that is on all of these different drones. We have partnerships with some of the quadcopter companies today like Draganfly and Red Cat. We're in the process of talking about putting our software on many other drone OEMs. The beauty of our software is that all of those drones can then collaborate and work together even though they're from different OEMs. That's what we see our mission is as trying to support the near term needs and the medium term needs of being able to deploy these low cost, attritable weapons. Yeah, that's great. Chris, any perspective on what the pressing needs are? Certainly, the Iran war is very pressing. Yeah, I mean, I think, yeah, well said on that. I mean, as we see it, we see modern warfare is changing. We're seeing it where you're needing, as Ben was mentioning, multi-domain, but a balance of low-cost solutions where you don't have all of your value in one particular asset. For Redwire, we play in really all domains. We've got spacecraft that are in GEO, LEO, in the emerging space, in VLEO, as well as we have a Group 2 drone asset that obviously plays very prolifically here in, as has been said, in the modern warfare. What we're trying to do is provide solutions that allow for a very cost-effective solution that aren't necessarily balanced into one particular asset. If I could just add, and I think both gentlemen, you guys highlighted some of the lower costs, or I should say, evolution, if you would, of our adversaries' capabilities. The other thing that we've seen clearly demonstrated, and if you just think back last year, the onset or during the Ukraine or Russia conflict, you also saw the emergence of newer, and I would say higher cost major threats, hypersonics. Hypersonic missiles were already utilized, I think, for the first time in that domain. The United States recognized that as obviously a mission critical threat to us. I think even here recently with Iran, demonstrating their low or say longer range capabilities, I think that's a significant eye-opening event for us as well. Over the course of the last two years, I mentioned this in the panel before, we've seen a significant depletion in our missile defense capabilities, missile defense stores. United States today absolutely faces a significant threat. Having to replenish this with a supply chain that has been able to build up that supply over the course of decades, but being able to replenish it over the course of months is far more challenging than has ever been realized. From a Voyager perspective, we're trying to, if you would, answer the call on both ends. We're investing in capacity to support missile defense programs, both existing as well as next generation missile defense programs. Things like Next Generation Interceptor and other Golden Dome, if you would, umbrella missile defense programs, which I believe in conjunction actually with these other threats, you end up with this mesh of a capability to defend ourselves. Chris, any thoughts as well? Yeah, sure. From a conceptual level, I think what you're going to hear a lot about on this panel is about scale, scaling, and that's scaling drone production, scaling hypersonic production, scaling missile production, scaling counter drones, scaling the sensing networks to achieve some of these missions. To do drone warfare at the scale that is happening in Ukraine is going to take a lot of advancements in the U.S. industrial base to deliver against that. Scale is one key concept that I think we'll talk a lot about on this panel, and the second key concept is autonomy at the edge. If you're going to scale these types of systems, you have to decentralize the command and control and push it out as far as you can. That doesn't just apply to drones, but it also applies to programs like the Golden Dome program. As many of you are aware, Golden Dome is a national missile defense system, but it's not just about missiles, it's about Group 3 drones, it's about hypersonics, it's about other air-breathing threats. In order to deliver that type of system, it's gonna take a whole of industry approach that is going to include the primes, but also capabilities from companies that are represented on this panel as well. We all have to come together to deliver a completely integrated system if that system is going to be successful. From an Applied Energetics perspective, we are focused on using a special class of laser called an ultrashort-pulse laser that is specifically designed to take out electro-optic sensors nearly instantaneously. We can do that at any altitude, from the lowest level, Group 1, Group 2 drones, to as high as you want to go. Certainly the higher you wanna go, the more important size, weight, and power becomes a critical parameter of that system, and ultrashort pulse lasers are specifically designed to be able to take out strategic electro-optic sensing capabilities and tactical electro-optic sensing at any altitude. Great. I mean, I think, Chris, you started touching on this, and I don't want the panel to go one, two, three, four. Please, guys, pipe in and kinda have it be a free-flowing discussion. You hit on some of the technologies you think are important. You guys are all technology companies. What are some of the two or three or four key technologies that are really gonna be important right now? 'Cause the investors can then hone in on watching those going forward. I'll start. One of the things that we're obviously focused on is how you have a force multiplier. If you wanna talk about having thousands of drones in the air, we can't have thousands of soldiers managing thousands of drones. You know, you can produce the lowest cost drone or the lowest cost weapon system, whether it's, you know, Group one, Group two, Group three, it doesn't really matter. At the end of the day, how do you take it out of the, you know, the domain of a one-to-one relationship between a soldier and a weapon system if you're gonna launch thousands? We don't have thousands of drone pilots that can manage these drones. We have to lighten the cognitive load, and that's why we are firmly focused on, you know, entrenched really in this idea of putting intelligence on each machine, so the machines can do a lot of the thinking and lighten the cognitive load for the human. That ties to Chris' concept about scale. Thoughts from the panel as well in terms of key technologies? I think from a Voyager perspective, one of the other elements that we attribute and address, you mentioned it's being able to process information on the edge. We've talked a lot about kinetic opportunities or if it were kinetic defenses. One of the other important elements of our portfolio is the ability to, if you would observe and intel, so signals intelligence, reconnaissance, extremely important. Sadly, traditionally, a lot of this information is observed, recouped, brought back into, say, SCIFs, processed, and by the time you actually figured out what it is that you thought you were observing, the threat is either potentially moved or dissipated or is no longer there effectively. At Voyager, we've made significant investments in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and, you know, that's highly complementary to our already existing signals intelligence business. I think as AI and machine learning continues to evolve, I think that becomes a bigger and bigger capability driver in the defense national security as well as the space sector for sure. Yeah. Now we're hearing edge and we're hearing scale, edge intelligence and scaling. Chris, any adds there? Chris Edmonds, any? For us, one of the interesting developments that's happened over the past six-12 months is the administration redefined what its critical technology areas are. Under the Biden administration, they laid out 14 critical technologies. The current administration reduced that down to six. Directed energy was one of the 14 original critical technology areas. Directed energy is one of the critical technology areas in the new six, but they added a specific qualifier to directed energy. They called it scaled directed energy. The biggest problem with directed energy since the laser was invented in 1960 is not that you couldn't build a laser that could deliver really cool effects against threats. The biggest issue has been these systems are not scalable. If you want a 100 kW laser, it's gotta go on a tractor trailer, and that's just not logistically feasible to deploy in broad scale. The approach that we've taken, again, using an ultrashort-pulse laser is specifically designed to be a scalable system. Our laser is not a 100,000 W laser, it's a 100 W laser. But we divide that laser up into thousands of pulses. We compress those pulses to trillionths of a second, and you get peak power that's measured in the billions of watts. Billions of watts inside the optics of electro-optic sensor is instantaneously devastating. The second key technology that they also qualified in the new six is scaled hypersonics. That's another area where it's been a lot of experimentation, but there hasn't been a whole lot of scaled production of those systems. I think as you're looking at the technologies that are important to modern warfare today, take a look at those six critical technology areas and then try to find investment opportunities that align well to those six. Yeah, scaled edge intelligence, mesh kind of connectivity and portability. It's a new battlefield. I wanna switch topics a little bit and shift over to your dealing with a large customer, the government. The audiences and many investors are familiar with the traditional primes, the government contract, the large program, cost plus, sub cons. How is your relationship with the government kind of an example of how the government is changing how it's working with the investable corporate companies? Any of you guys can kick off, please. I mean, we're seeing it right now where there's absolutely an interest in companies leaning forward, investing in capabilities with their own dollars, right, IRAD dollars, bringing an asset to the market, and then selling that. You know, we're seeing an administration that is not interested in reimbursable contracts like they were multiple decades ago. We're having to design things ourselves, obviously in concert with our end customer so that we're designing solutions that fit the mission set. There absolutely is a need for us to invest early, invest often, and bring solutions to the government that they're interested in buying. I think we're seeing a lot more receptivity to working with smaller companies. There's a lot of risk in that because the Pentagon can talk a good game, but if you don't see some dollars behind it of some kind, it's just talk. At the end of the day, we're dealing with limitations like what's really in the President's budget that Congress approves, who's really got the authority to spend that money, lining up what the war fighter wants with what's been appropriated. There's You know, although it is way better today than it has ever been for small companies, it's still a challenge, and I would encourage any investor that's interested in this space to make sure that there's some indication of real interest from the Pentagon at some level, whether it's R&D contracts, whether it's investments in OTAs with small initial volumes, something that indicates that there's actually a match between what the company is developing or delivering and what the Pentagon wants to buy. Yeah, I would just add a couple of other points to this. I have an alter ego. I'm also a co-founder and the executive chairman of the board of a nonprofit called the Silicon Valley Defense Group that tries to bridge the venture capital community and their portfolio companies and the national security complex, from the elected officials to Pentagon officials as well. When we started SVDG 10 years ago, the amount of dollars that were dedicated to innovation programs for companies like ours was measured in the tens of millions of dollars. 10 years later now, it's measured in the billions of dollars. There's a caveat. When you look at where that money starts to flow, the technology has to be proven in a relevant environment. If you look at the department's research and development budget, the 6.1% and 6.2% early stage budget, the basic research and applied research budgets have been going down by 20% a year, and they only total $10 billion in total funding. Compare that to when you reach a technology readiness level of 5 and you're able to tap into the 6.3% budget all the way up to the 6.7% budget. The amount of R&D funding from 6.3% to 6.7% is about $120 billion, and that has been growing at 20% a year. What you're seeing in this trend is the Pentagon is essentially outsourcing early-stage resource. They want us to develop those capabilities on our own and show up to them as a customer with a system that has been proven in a relevant environment. They'll either let private capital or venture capital get you there, but they want you to show up with something that has been proven already. When you get there, the amount of funding that sits in that part of the budget and the number of innovation programs that are set up to help accelerate these technologies has been growing dramatically over the last 10 years. That availability of funding is very motivating for folks like you to take a chance on building a technology that you can show up with. Right. That's a very good sort of structure for this. Let's talk about domains of operation. Clearly, it's airborne, and we're going to VLEO, LEO. Talk about how space as a domain plays into the defense arc. It's not just a clean line of terrestrial, if you would, and space seeming to blur with multi-domain comms and others. Maybe you guys can talk about how we should think about space in the context of defense now. We recently announced that we had a new contract with the Air Force that is intended to demonstrate how our artificial intelligence on drones interfaces with a space-based sensor network. Obviously, with you know, different types of satellites, you've got different types of sensor capability. What the Air Force wants us to develop now is to take the edge-based artificial intelligence that we've got on the mesh basis with our drones to then be able to incorporate what the sensor grid in space is able to tell us about what's going on in the operating environment. That'll be a first time that you've seen the kind of interaction between space-based assets and drones to be able to change the scope of the mission, the parameters of the mission, the objectives of the mission in real time based on what the satellites can see. I said this earlier today. I think space is the ultimate high ground. I don't think that comes as a surprise for anybody here. Whether it is surveillance, signals intelligence, monitoring, we talked a little earlier about space-based interceptors as a new element to the Golden Dome umbrella, so think kinetic energy from space. There's another element here too. Just human presence in space has taken on an entirely different flavor. For the last 20-plus years, the United States, Europe, Japan, Canada, and its allies, we've enjoyed a human presence in low Earth orbit, effectively represented by the International Space Station. Most of you should know. If you don't, I encourage you to find out more about it. There is another space station floating around up there. It's owned and operated by the People's Republic of China. Really? The Tiangong space station is the next generation space station. It's only been visited by military astronauts conducting we don't know what on the space station. As what typically has been a International Space Station designed, developed, with the intent of obviously a multinational, if you would, a consortium, if you would, of goodwill for research and development. But there's absolutely a national security priority to maintain human presence in orbit. At Voyager, that's why we've not only been supporting national security and defense terrestrially, but we're also looking to it beyond beyond Earth, and certainly looking at the low Earth orbit. Starlab, our first, if you would, venture into replacing the International Space Station, is intended to be, make no mistake, a research development laboratory, if you would, environment to replace the ISS. We see significant opportunity for potentially other space stations that might not just be, with the commercial market in mind. Well, kind of playing off that, ultimate high ground, I love that statement. You know, the thing is, there's multiple altitudes of which you play, right? At Redwire, we make spacecraft in really all three categories. That's GEO, you're way out. It's LEO, as we referenced, with human habitation, and it's VLEO. Having a layered level of defense allows for if there was a certain altitude that were to get knocked out by an adversary, right? There was debris, there was weaponry that was eliminated that layer, you've got alternatives, right? It's about having alternatives, whether, you know, you're dealing with, you know, deep space with the GEO comms, or you're dealing with something with VLEO, which is a relatively new space of which we're developing a spacecraft, our SaberSat spacecraft, that plays really close to the Kármán line, allows for improved mobility and great latency given the locations. It's about having multiple different spacecraft in case one of those areas is rendered inoperable. Phil, do you know when the Chinese space station was launched? What year? About four years ago. Wow. Okay. I think, you know, when Google searches, like, a word doesn't exist, and then it shows up all the time, Golden Dome is one of those words or phrases. We'd like to understand for you guys what. You know, we read a lot about Golden Dome. We wanna know what Golden Dome means from your perspective. You guys have your feet on the ground, see the reality of what is and what isn't, what could be and what can't be. What is Golden Dome as a concept and an opportunity for your companies, I guess? I think I already covered mine. Okay. We IPO'd last June. I talk about Golden Dome representing about a $2.8 billion defense national security opportunity, specifically missile defense programs representing about $2 billion to Voyager. Half of that specifically to tie it to Next Generation Interceptor, which is our flagship, if you would, program of record with Lockheed Martin. We view that missile defense, other programs going through this next gen phase, as critical to the Golden Dome branding. Make no mistake, these initiatives for next gen were already in process. The one additive, if you would, since the Golden Dome was introduced by the administration, is in fact this idea, this concept of a space-based interceptor. We see a lot of activity, a lot of traction around that. Voyager specifically is playing with, you know, say, multiple vectors, if you would, or multiple customers, both primes as well as neo-primes. Great. In that regard, we think that that's gonna be an interesting growth opportunity, not just for us, but for the industry and the market itself. Great. We've been talking to some of the primes that believe they will be playing a major role in Golden Dome about how our software, our intelligence on the edge can play the role of a common intelligence layer across a wide range of different weapon systems that are deployed in Golden Dome. Kind of the unifying intelligence that creates a mesh in all of these different domains, be it space or airborne or even on the ground. I think there's multiple ways that Redwire participates and wins in the Golden Dome environment. The one that I'll probably highlight with the most interest is our orbital drone, Orbilio. I think that could be a very interesting solution to that network, again, given the location in which it plays in. That's great. I mean, one of the enablers has to be cost, right? I guess launch cost of deploying assets, and the assets themselves. What are you seeing as the most important sort of cost enablers that are coming along to enable the things you said, scale, the intelligence, and the multi-domain capabilities? What are some of the key cost elements that have to be watched here? You know, one of the critical things, and we talked a lot about scale at the onset here, is the ability to actually invest in and build out that capacity. Absolutely. For Voyager become a public entity, tapping into the public markets for that investment capital, was critical for us last year. It was also critical to us to replenishing for the balance sheet late last year. We entered the year this year with about $700 million of liquidity on our balance sheet, relatively clean balance sheet that we can invest in. We're stepping up that, if you're from an investor perspective, both in CapEx and innovation. IRAD, as Chris mentioned, or excuse me, not Chris Edmonds mentioned earlier, is critical. For years, we have benefited from customer-funded research and development. We see that as not, if you would, a light that you wanna necessarily wait on and stand on, to kind of move out. The ability to deploy your capital efficiently, effectively, I think, is not a cost challenge, but in this case, a cost advantage for us, especially at the speed at which, typically speaking, the lower or smaller size companies- Sure. ...which you have here, can actually move out. That, typically speaking, also means we can move out with a cost advantage. I mentioned earlier dual use technology as well as leveraging our commercial model to deploy that into national defense applications. That's also critical in terms of reducing the ultimate or the overall cost of these programs, not just for the primes, but ultimately for the end customer, us, the citizens of the United States. I just said the interest in this is pretty massive. One of the reports that Silicon Valley Defense Group publishes is the NatSec 100, which is an annual ranking of the top 100 venture or private equity-backed companies. When you look at the percentage of those companies that are tied to space-based applications, it's continuing to grow every year. Those range from SpaceX as number two on the list down to companies that produce components and enabling technologies to allow incremental improvements to other people's systems. It includes payloads, it includes satellite buses, both large and small sats, maneuverable, different types of orbits. It's just amazing what we're seeing in terms of the VC capital that's pouring into this space. My one observation on this is, you know, space is very big, but it is getting more and more crowded, and there are things that you have to be very careful of. You know, I am a fan of making sure that the U.S. has dominance of the space environment, but you do not want that environment to turn kinetic because if it turns kinetic, you risk entering a scenario of this situation called the Kessler Syndrome, where you've created enough space debris that you now deny the entire globe access to space. I hope we do this rationally, but I also hope we win. Great. Any other thoughts? No, it's certainly a lot going on here. The one of the topics people have also been reading a lot in the papers is about space data centers, certainly. I think that's probably an over-intellectualized concept in terms of imagining a terrestrial data center in space. There's probably a lot between here and there. Maybe you guys can talk about sort of the steps toward a compute capability in space and which would fall under the moniker of a space data center trend. You're out of my league. Okay. Yeah. No. We should have Elon on here, right? I guess, right? I mean. We had a great question on that on data centers during my panel before. It's a topic that comes up in various investor meetings and conferences and has become a growing topic that comes up for us to address. I'd say from a Voyager perspective, no better evidence that it's something that's certainly interesting and worth looking at than the investment we've already made. Mentioned earlier during my panel, we actually own a component of the International Space Station that sits on my balance sheet. It's called the Bishop Airlock. It's the only privately owned real estate in space or tied to the International Space Station, I should say. On that Bishop Airlock today is actually a data center. We've actually deployed that on a mission last year. Today we are collecting data. We're processing data on the edge, if you would, and communicating that data back. It's, if you would, early stages of us not venturing into data centers, but really seeing what capabilities Voyager has organically as well as inorganically meeting with our partners to venture out into that space. I think it's an interesting space of interesting area for significant growth. I don't see the growth as being right in front of us, perhaps in the next 12, 24 months necessarily that could be truly monetized in any kind of scalable way. Again, we also are just a couple of years from putting in orbit a space station. We didn't start working on that just yesterday. Yeah. A t some point, you actually have to start making the investment in discovery, and that's effectively what we're doing today. That's great. Any other thoughts? Yeah. I mean, I think to plan on that, how does Redwire win in that environment? You know, thinking about the componentry that will be needed for infrastructure for data centers in space, we make some of the largest solar arrays on the planet. A roll-out solar arrays could be a really interesting power solution for a very big power-hungry type data center. We're watching it closely. We think there's obviously some technical issues to solve for heat exchange. You know, how do you radiate the heat out of the compute? Redwire stands ready to supply you know, big solar arrays as that opportunity develops. Yeah, no, I had the privilege of visiting Goleta and the Redwire facility where they make the Roll-Out Solar Arrays, and it's furled up. Think of Saran Wrap or something with unfurled, full out, flat out. It's as long as a football field. Very amazing technology, but you can send it up rolled up, which is pretty amazing. Since I did mention Goleta, let's talk about manufacturing footprint. This is obviously a key element to scaling out. These are being built up or already exist. Maybe you're outsourcing manufacturing individually, maybe you're building your own, and maybe you can tie in the concept of onshoring, how important that is to the government versus overseas capacity that's being leaned on now. Any of you guys can start off here. Yeah. A lot of the components that go into our laser technology are based on commercial telecom fiber- Right. ...components. Exactly. You know, that does present a problem from a supply chain perspective. We have had to weigh options of how much vertical integration do we need to do to bring onshore things that are not necessarily available domestically today. We will work through that over time. You know, the manufacturing technology that we need today for what we do, there are certain components that are just very hard for us to get. It's something we'll be able to overcome. Right now we have transitioned from 2025, we moved out of the research lab into demonstrator hardware. This year, the focus is on moving from demonstrator hardware to production-ready prototypes that we can start to scale. We're having the internal discussion now, how much do we invest in our own organic manufacturing capacity, and how much do we consider outsourcing to a contract manufacturer to help with that. It makes me a little nervous when I have this recipe that has taken me six years to develop for this architecture, for this laser. Handing that over to someone else to build. Yeah. Makes me a little nervous, but it also might be the most cost-effective option as well. Great. Any thoughts on manufacturing? Sure. From our perspective, although we are primarily an AI company, we believe that our future is very much tied to the ability to have high quality but low cost weapon systems that can utilize our artificial intelligence. With that eye to the future, we have acquired last year a couple of manufacturing facilities that are in the business and have been for many years of making precision components for everything from the F-35 and the F-22 to the Abrams tank and missile systems and propulsion systems and everything in between. We also acquired an engineering team that is one of the best in the world at designing missile systems, propulsion systems, even space vehicles. that was very intentionally done so that we can, as we evolve our artificial intelligence capabilities, we can also pair that with systems and components that are designed from the get-go to take full advantage of what our AI is capable of. We believe that the Pentagon is increasingly focused on domestic manufacturing. You hear more and more talk about our defense industrial base. You know, five years ago, you couldn't get anybody at the Pentagon to talk about your defense industrial base. There actually was a secretary or an undersecretary that was in charge of monitoring our defense industrial base, but it was just a monitoring job. There was no investment that went on. Now there is significant dollars going into supporting advancements in our defense industrial base, and it is a major area of focus for the Pentagon and the White House. With that idea of reshoring, you know, making sure that we have the ability to keep supply chain going in our country, which obviously during COVID, it fell apart completely. Thank God we weren't in the middle of a major war at that time, but we are today. Even without COVID, we're finding that components that used to take three weeks to get are now. You know, I just had one of our suppliers tell us it was 45 weeks instead of three weeks. That's a problem. That's a problem for our entire defense industrial base. We're doing what we can to try and support the war fighter by making sure that we've got the ability to manufacture everything from machine parts to avionics, components and everything that leads up to a full complete system that will then leverage our artificial intelligence solution. Manufacturing thoughts? At Voyager, I'd highlight we're already in the investment phase here, as we are looking to scale on some critical programs. I mentioned Next Generation Interceptor is a critical one. We've been through design phase, critical design review, passed that last year with Lockheed Martin. As we plan to move into low rate and high rate production in 2027 and beyond, we're already building the infrastructure to support not just that program, but the other Golden Dome programs that we're highly confident. In this case, Voyager is investing not ahead of the demand signal, but because of the demand signal. We're doing that here in 2026. We're also doing it from a technology perspective. We just recently announced a significant footprint here, we'll call it Space Beach, up in Long Beach. Looking forward to sharing space with some of the larger DoD primes in the space as we look to innovate and develop new technology. That's what we've been doing from that perspective. Then we mentioned onshoring, and this is a critical element too. Major national security risk. It's not just the supply chain componentry if you had smaller elements, but energetics period. Probably less well understood is that the majority of the energetics used to actually fuel our missile defense programs comes from overseas. Not only just missile defense, but think 155 round rounds, things that are commonly used by our military today. The vast majority comes from overseas. That is a national security risk. It's also a national security priority to onshore this. Voyager acquired just last fourth quarter a company called Estes Energetics. This is a business that if you had bought for a horizontal through an M&A strategy to move into energetics more significantly. We're already also planning significant investments to increase their capacity and as you mentioned, actually working with the government too to make sure that the government's also doing its part to actually fund this as well. Funding it, yeah. Estes has received, if you would, effectively grant funding Title III, DPA funding in the past. We'll continue to have those discussions with the government to make sure that the government's supporting its national security priorities with dollars as well as their intent from a contract perspective. Great. I think a lot of investable opportunities in helping this onshore manufacturing become a reality because it's vital, it sounds like. Well, the government is certainly playing its role. Right. You know, when the government starts buying dirt and supporting companies to bring back critical minerals. Yes. Critical minerals mining and processing, and they're doing it in the hundreds of millions of dollars. They're certainly putting their money where their mouth is to try to support that onshoring or reshoring effort. Yeah, that's right. There's an element, critical minerals gets a lot of attention. There's also a list of critical chemicals, that would highlight that becomes one of the onshoring, initiatives, for the U.S. government as well. You know, there are things that most of us in the general public don't really realize are supply chain constraints that affect our military. This doesn't have anything to do with my business, but I learned not long ago that 99% of the shipping containers that we use in the United States, whether it's for Amazon or whether it's for the military, come from China. 99%. We use 2.5 million shipping containers a year in this country. The U.S. military needs 40,000 just to be able to ship stuff around the world. What happens when China says, "We're not gonna sell you shipping containers anymore"? Our supply chain truly comes to a stop. There's all kinds of things that as you kinda start peeling back the layers of the onion, as an investor, you know, you might think about where are really these pinch points and who are the companies that are trying to solve them? That's obviously not a business that I or any of the rest of us on this panel are in, but there's things that you wouldn't really normally think about, gunpowder, cellulose manufacturing. You know, there was only a couple of manufacturers of cellulose and gunpowder in this country. A lot of it comes from overseas. A lot of our ammunition comes from overseas. There are all kinds of things where the U.S. has to figure out how to improve our manufacturing here so that we're not dependent on foreign sources. Yeah, the investment opportunities that it's come on so quickly versus maybe five years ago, this wasn't a consideration. I wanna really kinda come back to drones for the audience and for myself, because I think 10 years ago, we weren't really talking about drones in any of this context, and now it's something we have to really think about a lot. I'd like to really have you guys think about maybe five, 10 years from now, what does drone warfare look like and how are you gonna help us be prepared for what that even looks like? 'Cause I don't know if we can even imagine the first half of my question, let alone the second half, you know? Yeah, I wouldn't even call it drone warfare anymore. We are- What's another name for this? ... entering the robotic warfare age. Robotic. The whole point of robotic warfare is to push the human away from the point of conflict. Replace that with machines that will be fighting each other. That is a trend that's going to continue. It's happening in the air, it's gonna happen on the ground, it's happening on the surface of our oceans, and it's only gonna continue to proliferate, because you are seeing so much investment in scaling production of these types of systems. You know, from our perspective, we see that as a juicy, target-rich environment, because all of those drones are going to rely on sensors to achieve their mission. They have to supply data back to the humans in the command bunker, so that they can understand what the state of the war is. The ability to defeat sensors in general is the degrading capacity that can tilt the scales a little bit, because if it's just pure machine on machine, then it just comes down to who can build the most machines. If you can add a layer on top of that is about sensor destruction and sensor denial, you can tilt the table in your favor. Great. Any other thoughts from the panel? I mean, I think, you know, the evolution of things that are autonomous. Autonomous. Whether it's drones or, as you said, you know, vehicles on the ground or under the ocean, whatever it may be, it really is the future, and I think it is going to be more altering to the battlefield than when we first started producing aircraft that could, you know, engage in warfare. Unfortunately, one point I might disagree with is, it's not just machine on machine, because ultimately, the way you're going to win is when you inflict enough pain and damage on the other side. I think the ethics of warfare are going to become a bigger and bigger issue when you're relying on autonomous machines. We're very focused on ethical, what we call ethical embodied AI, that will do what you just referred to, which is to give the human the ultimate decision on when to make the go, no-go choice about whether you're gonna deploy a kinetic solution. I don't think that many of our peers in other countries are going to be as concerned about that. Okay. I think we're gonna have to figure out as a nation how we deal with that, both offensively and defensively, because the other side isn't gonna fight fair, the way we think of fairness. That's gonna be a big issue for us, and we as citizens and taxpayers, all the way through our elected officials, are gonna have to figure out how to deal with that. Our focus is on enabling machines at scale to be able to do most of the work for humans, so that when the human is making that go, no-go decision, they really have the ability to focus on just that decision instead of trying to understand everything there is to know about the operational environment. I think we're going to increasingly rely on both machinery and on artificial intelligence to help our war fighters make those most important decisions. I think the interesting thing is, you know, drones have been in the market for decades. Where we sit today, the speed of development has increased in a rapid pace. What we're seeing, as Ben's talked about and some of the things that they're doing, tremendous advancements, and what makes this really exciting is it's happened very quickly, right? Where we've had a drone that's been, you know, operational for decades, as we think about where we are in the next five years, as you said, I think that's where it becomes really exciting, is saying, "Okay, how do we disassociate ourselves from an individual standpoint," right? How do we have safer warfare from an individual operator perspective? That's really where we're focusing right now. You know, you know, based on our heritage, our Stalker series aircraft's been in production for over 20 years. You look at the advancements that we've made in the last three-four, is in excess of where we were in the first two decades. We're looking forward to continuing to press on that, but we're at a real inflection point here from a technology standpoint. I think you're exactly right. I mean, one of the things that is so important now is the speed from conception of a concept of a UAV or a weapons system to the point that you're able to field it. Part of what allows us to do that faster than has ever been done in human history is the advent of better and more sophisticated software modeling and simulation capabilities. For example, we came up with a concept for a new, lower cost version of a cruise missile, and because of the simulation and modeling capabilities that we have, we were able to iterate that over and over far faster than it has ever been done, and we went from concept on a whiteboard to first flight in four and a half months. That's never been done before, as far as I know, and if you were to talk to some of our peers at the, you know, older defense primes, more established defense primes, they would talk about that being a, you know, fast development cycle if you could do that in three years. That's great. We have just over 10 minutes left. I wanted to throw it out to the audience. I'm sure there's a lot of questions. Sure, go for it. Do you guys have to make really long-term investments? I don't know if the premise of this question is accurate, but I'll ask it anyway. It seems like the priorities of the Pentagon are less institutional and more specific to the individual involved at that level. If that's the case, how do you make long-term investments knowing that these people, they may or may not be there by the time it's? That's a good question. Any thoughts from the panel? It's a challenge. We talked about the priorities that the Pentagon has identified. That is certainly a place to start. The problem, of course, is the priorities can change. I will tell you, I mean, it is a risky business, and the question you ask is one of the reasons why until three or four years ago, venture capitalists didn't wanna touch defense tech. I mean, I was trying to raise money for our company when we were private from 2015 to 2020, and nobody wanted to talk about defense tech. For me it's interesting only because it would seem like three or four years ago, those priorities were, like, more institutional than they seem to be today. If that was a problem three years ago, right, is it an even bigger problem? You know, I'm not sure I agree that it's less institutional. I think there are still clear priorities that the Department of Defense has, and they are trying to encourage all of us, as was said earlier on this panel, to invest more of our own dollars to be able to meet their requirements. There are going to be a lot of people that don't wind up getting revenue from the Department of Defense. I mean, when I say people, I mean companies. It is a risky endeavor. Our way of dealing with that is to make sure that we're not putting dollars into development solely because we think we know where it's going, but rather we're getting some amount of co-investment from the Pentagon, and if we don't have some amount of co-investment from the Pentagon that shows a demand signal, we're not gonna do it. Not everybody can say the same thing. I think, you know, we are in, I hate to say it, don't wanna disappoint people here, but you probably all know it, we're in a defense tech bubble, and there's gonna be a lot of companies that don't get sufficient revenues to stay alive that are venture funded. That's just the way it is. That's true in every industry that I mean, it doesn't matter what cycle you see. We are in a cycle. Let's not kid ourselves. We're in a cycle, but every cycle, whether it was, you know, self-driving cars or whether it was, you know, the internet in the 1999 time period, I mean, you always see this boom and bust cycle, and when it's booming, the venture capitalists throw money at things, and then 95% of the companies wind up going away. That's just the facts. Quickly on that, from a Redwire standpoint, L3Harris, innovation is a core concept. You know, we try to iterate on our past experiences so that, you know, when we think about demand signals, which again talk about infrastructure and capacity planning is a really important thing. You know, to make sure that you have a capability that is on the roadmap and going to be consumed and used is quite important. For us, we focus on where we've had success in the past and trying to press on that innovation so that we're not left holding a capability without an end user. Can y'all speak a little bit about the interplay between lightening the load for the support fighter, logistics, in-country manufacturing, speaking maybe directly to the EU? 'Cause as I think in terms of what their defense tech spend is, I think they've got, like, just under $1 trillion that they're gonna deploy between now and 2030, and what their public-private partnerships are gonna be, in being able to get in-country manufacturing and in-country logistics, the cost of in-country logistics down. Talk about maybe how that relates to logistics, price, EU money, how you do deals with them so that you do have not just everything domestic here, but the ability to capture dollars from them and get partners in manufacturing. Yeah, it's a great question. At Redwire, we saw that coming, and we've got manufacturing presence in Belgium and Riga, Latvia, to be able to hit that very point of having an in-country feel because we have European partners that don't want to buy American assets, and that's. We're starting to see that separation now. It takes time to establish that relationship. You know, we've seen headwind of taking an American flag and trying to plant it in Europe. It needs to be really organic to be able to be successful. You know, but that's something that we're absolutely seeing, and we're spending a lot of time focusing on it. You gotta have the established relationships going back many years. Going the other direction, from the Pentagon's perspective, we consistently hear that today's administration does not want to be reliant at all, if it can help it, on foreign-sourced supply. Obviously, there's a ton of foreign-sourced supply today, but the way the current administration is thinking about this is, we don't know in the future who's gonna be friend and foe. We have some good guesses, but, you know, depending on how our president decides to refer to, you know, any European country on any given day or which next territory is gonna become the next state, you know, we don't know who our friends are that we can rely on. I think that's a general perspective that the Pentagon has, is they wanna see as much produced domestically for U.S. weapon systems as possible, and obviously, there are some countries that are just flat no-gos anymore. That creates a challenge for us, because often the lowest cost components that make our weapon systems affordable for the Pentagon to buy are coming from overseas, and you just can't make some of this stuff at the same price point that the Pentagon wants domestically. One of the reasons why we're also focused on how do we improve manufacturing with our AI is so that we can take the labor advantage that China has and eliminate it to the greatest extent possible, and increasingly use autonomy to be able to manufacture stuff domestically, 'cause that's the only way we're gonna get the same, you know, even hope for, you know, equal footing with China. Any thoughts? Yeah, I think when I first started covering space companies, Roscosmos had been an issue, and that was one of the wake-up calls about it not just being a fluid global supply chain. Any other questions in the audience? Yeah, Ed. Sure, go. I have a one-on-one question. The other day when Iran launched those two ballistic missiles to Diego Garcia, 4,000 mi range, it was shown on TV later that the missiles achieved a 10,000 mi high peak, and then they're descending. The point of interception was kind of like at that last leg, the 20% down. I'm sitting there watching that missile go down, and I'm looking, why don't we hit it higher? Why don't we hit it at the peak? Because now if I'm Europe, then I'm in their zone now. Why wait until the last minute? How come we can't do that in space? Why can't we somehow knock it down? That's- Hitting a speeding bullet with a speeding bullet in suborbital space is really, really hard. You have to have your interceptors in the right place. You know, in this particular case, the only midcourse interceptor missiles are based in Alaska and in New York, and those are designed specifically to counter missiles coming from other geographies. This was really more of a geography problem of where those missiles were launched from, where they were trying to go versus where we have midcourse intercept capabilities deployed. Now, Raytheon has some very good missiles that can work very well off of Navy ships, but they're not quite the same capability as what you see in the midcourse interceptors and the permanent silos in the northern part of the United States. Ajay, I think you'll hear about. You're talking about the missiles in silos as ground-based interceptors. That's what I was referring to earlier in terms of a Next Generation Interceptor that does help improve kill ratio to kind of bottom line it, if you would. New technologies will help evolve that. The adoption of the technology, for example, that Voyager innovated, created, and is uniquely specced into NGI is currently being discussed in terms of the design concepts for some of these other missile programs that don't launch from these silos, are launched from, say, a ship like a Standard Missile-3, for example. As an example, that's the Raytheon missile he's referring to. There's discussions in terms of adapting this technology to those missile programs. Then you raised an interesting concept, which is why not launch it from space? That is this new layer to the Golden Dome that was introduced by the government just last summer around a space-based interceptor. I don't think we're many years away from that. In fact, I would imagine the administration is looking to have a solution before it exits. This is interesting because you talked about a bubble. These bubbles typically we've talked about, like, usually happen or are anticipated at 20 years before they do happen. Prior to my panel, I got to sit in on the Intuitive Machines, and I met the gentleman mentioned Star Wars, and he's a Star Wars fan. I remember Star Wars as a program that President Reagan introduced in the 1980s. I actually think of today what we're seeing as what was anticipated back then as the future. We're actually living that today. That is space-based technologies as well as terrestrial-based technologies to counteract against all threats that we face. Any last questions from the audience? Can I make a quick- Sure, please. Is the moon the thing? Is that, like, maybe the opportunity set right now? Yeah, please. The question was about lunar opportunities. Yeah. It absolutely is. We talk about kind of capabilities to kind of go revisit the moon, station the moon. I guess the question here for the audience might be how long is your investment horizon? If you're truly long onlys, come talk to me. Certainly. We are actually- True long only. ... investing in and have, if you like, technologies that would not be applicable to just low Earth orbit, but also, lunar installations as well, as I'm sure the other gentlemen here do as well. That is an area to think about a bit more medium to longer term. I don't think you have to wait, if you would, to invest early in those spaces. We just recently made a small minority investment, if you would, into what ultimately can become a temporary to permanent habitat on the moon, and it's with Max Space. We publicly announced that, I think it was two weeks ago. Like Voyager, we cultivate not just technology to cultivate partnerships, and we see inflatable habitats as a longer-term play there. It will be, I'm sure, tested and utilized well before you get to the moon in low Earth orbit, would be my expectation. You can see how these technologies transcend going from terrestrial to low Earth orbit and then beyond. Any other thoughts from the panel on lunar opportunities? We didn't get time to touch on that. That could be a panel in and of itself, I would think so. Any last questions from the audience? Well, I, for one, have to say I thought this was a very informative and interesting panel. I enjoyed hearing the four of you talk about it. It was very educational. With that, I wanna thank all of you for helping us all understand this rapidly evolving opportunity, and I'd like the audience to help me thank them.