The DoD, sorry, DoW, has really gotten a taste for critical minerals. On Monday, rare-earth magnet maker Vulcan Elements announced a whopping $1.4B partnership with the Pentagon, Department of Commerce, and ReElement Technologies to scale their vertically integrated rare-earth magnet supply chain. Sounds like the meeting with Xi wasn’t that good. Rare air: Drones have […]
Everything’s bigger in Texas, especially the explosions. On Monday, Aeon, an Austin-based smart missile startup, announced in an exclusive release to Tectonic that it has successfully completed all-up live-fire tests of its Zeus missile platform for the US Army Transformation and Training Command (T2COM) and the Army Applications Lab (AAL) ahead of schedule. Talk about […]
For everyone who thought we were done with the tiny plane mania for a while, think again. Anduril is back, baby. On Friday afternoon, the defense tech megalith announced that its YFQ-44A prototype for the collaborative combat aircraft (CCA) program has officially notched its first flight in California. “Anduril and the U.S. Air Force began […]
Well, it’s been quite the week for the German defense tech scene. Yesterday, the Financial Times reported that the country plans to award a whopping €900M contract for kamikaze drones to three homegrown producers: STARK, Helsing, and Rheinmetall. Under the contract, according to the FT, each producer would supply the German military with about 12,000 […]
The era of France’s main exports being wine and cheese may be coming to an end, at least if Alta Ares has anything to do with it. On Thursday, the French counter-drone software company, in partnership with an undisclosed Ukrainian startup, announced it had kicked off mass production of its X-Wing interceptor drones for Ukrainian […]
Well, looks like the sailboat drones are getting a major, deadly upgrade. Yesterday, USV company Saildrone announced that it’s secured a $50M investment from Lockheed Martin and that it will build a whole bunch of the prime’s weapons onto its boats. Saildrone CEO Rich Jenkins also told Tectonic that the two companies will work together […]
In the near-future battlefield, and today in Ukraine, swarms of friendly drones will be deployed as fast as enemy ones come in. For counter-drone tech, knowing which ones to shoot down can be hard. On Wednesday, Allen Control Systems unveiled a solution to this conundrum: A cryptographically secure, radio-silent identification friend-or-foe (IFF) system that tells […]
There’s a lot of hype around both drones and space-based tech, and Radical Aero wants to capitalize on both. The Seattle-based stratospheric aircraft startup emerged from stealth after a $4.5M seed round last April and is making autonomous solar-powered drones that fly at high altitudes for months at a time. And on Wednesday, the company […]
Strap in. We’re taking another trip to outer space, friends. Yesterday, SATCOM company ALL.SPACE announced that it’s teaming up with connectivity company and Google spinout Aalyria to combine the former’s Hydra terminals with the latter’s Spacetime network orchestration software. Now, why do we as defense tech nerds care? Well, in layman’s terms, this means that […]
In case you’ve been living under a rock, Germany has done a pretty sharp U-turn on the whole “we’re pacifists” thing it’s had going since the end of WWII. In the past few months, the country has placed some big-time defense orders, passed a bill introducing voluntary military service and potentially conscription, exempted defense spending […]
