Missiles are having a moment, and a new startup out of Texas wants in.
Earlier this week, missile-making startup Galadyne formally launched with a lofty goal: Founder Chandler Luzsicza and his team want to completely rethink how missiles are made. And, lucky for them, they’ve raised $4.8M in pre-seed funding from Andreessen Horowitz, Pax Ventures, and others to get things started.
Boom bust: To beat a dead horse: The US has a missile production problem.
Supply chain issues, production delays, and delivery timelines in the missile industry have been fleshed out in war game after war game. That’s what got Luzsicza’s attention.
“I didn’t have much context on missiles [coming from commercial space], but this past summer, I was looking into it and found that there are a ton of problems,” he told Tectonic. “There aren’t nearly enough. I think the number that scared me most was from a wargaming study [that found] we have eight days’ worth of missile systems if we were to go fight in Taiwan right now.”
Rocket man: So, he decided to do something about it.
Luzsicza may be new to the missile game, but he is no stranger to rockets. Before a stint at Saronic, he cut his teeth as SpaceX’s lead propulsion engineer on Starship. He wants to take that SpaceX speed to build a vertically integrated missile company with Galadyne.
“What we’re after is truly solving the supply chain, production rate, and cost problems with a completely new approach to missile systems that hasn’t been done for 40 or 50 years,” he said. “Our baseline plan is to develop the rocket platforms entirely, including the launch system.”
Liquid launch: Most missiles use solid fuel propulsion, which is plagued by supply chain and production bottlenecks. But the Galadyne team—inspired by Luzsicza’s time at SpaceX—thinks liquid propulsion is the key to scaling production.
“We’re indexing the company on using liquid propulsion to take a completely different approach to the process, delete all of that reliance on traditional energetics, and go really freaking fast,” he said. “I genuinely think that the only way to impact the problem we’re after is to make a shitload more missiles at a drastically lower cost.”
Baby steps: Making “a shitload more missiles” is no easy task, and Galadyne is a long way from mass production, but the startup is taking things step by step.
According to Luzsicza:
- Right now, they’re first focused on designing and building a boost vehicle and a seven-meter-long strike platform with a 1,000km range and a 50kg payload “that can serve as a target platform for the [Missile Defense Agency] and the Army to use at test ranges.”
- Next, he says Galadyne will “take that boost vehicle, engineer an exoatmospheric kill vehicle with a payload inside it, and fly it like an interceptor.”
- The third step is mass production. Easier said than done, we might add, but it’s hard to doubt someone who engineered spaceships.
Hot launch: Luzsicza and his team are currently wrapping up the design of the boost vehicle and ramping up component manufacturing in their Texas facility. Their first static-fire test of the vehicle is expected by the end of March, followed by a test launch of the full-scale platform in June.
Needless to say, Galadyne is coming out of the gate pretty fast, and $4.8M will just be rocket fuel to the fire. That fresh capital will not only help the startup build out its engineering team, but, more importantly, “it’ll buy us not only the engine testing infrastructure, but likely three to four test vehicle launches over the next calendar year,” Luzsicza said.
Galadyne’s ultimate goal, he added, is to “make these things like a f*cking car, and do it at similar rates.”
We like a straight talker around here.