As for price, every Military Leonidas unit at the moment runs within the “low eight figures,” Lowery instructed me. Protection contract pricing could be opaque, however Epirus delivered 4 models for its $66 million preliminary contract, giving a back-of-napkin value round $16.5 million every. For comparability, Stinger missiles from Raytheon, which troopers shoot at enemy plane or drones from a shoulder-mounted launcher, price a whole bunch of hundreds of {dollars} a pop, that means the Leonidas may begin costing much less (and preserve capturing) after it downs the primary wave of a swarm.
Raytheon’s radar, reversed
Epirus is a part of a brand new wave of venture-capital-backed protection firms making an attempt to vary the best way weapons are created—and the best way the Pentagon buys them. The most important protection firms, corporations like Raytheon, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, and Lockheed Martin, sometimes develop new weapons in response to analysis grants and cost-plus contracts, during which the US Division of Protection ensures a sure revenue margin to corporations constructing merchandise that match their laundry listing of technical specs. These applications have saved the navy equipped with cutting-edge weapons for many years, however the outcomes could also be beautiful items of navy equipment delivered years late and billions of {dollars} over finances.
Somewhat than constructing to minutely detailed specs, the brand new crop of navy contractors intention to provide merchandise on a fast timeframe to resolve an issue after which fine-tune them as they pitch to the navy. The mannequin, pioneered by Palantir and SpaceX, has since propelled firms like Anduril, Defend AI, and dozens of different smaller startups into the enterprise of warfare as enterprise capital piles tens of billions of {dollars} into protection.
Like Anduril, Epirus has direct Palantir roots; it was cofounded by Joe Lonsdale, who additionally cofounded Palantir, and John Tenet, Lonsdale’s colleague on the time at his enterprise fund, 8VC. (Tenet, the son of former CIA director George Tenet, might have impressed the corporate’s identify—the elder Tenet’s mother and father had been born within the Epirus area within the northwest of Greece. However the firm extra usually says it’s a reference to the pseudo-mythological Epirus Bow from the 2011 fantasy motion film Immortals, which by no means runs out of arrows.)
Whereas Epirus is doing enterprise within the new mode, its roots are within the outdated—particularly in Raytheon, a pioneer within the discipline of microwave expertise. Cofounded by MIT professor Vannevar Bush in 1922, it manufactured vacuum tubes, like these present in outdated radios. However the firm grew to become synonymous with digital protection throughout World Battle II, when Bush spun up a lab to develop early microwave radar expertise invented by the British right into a workable product, and Raytheon then started mass-producing microwave tubes—often known as magnetrons—for the US warfare effort. By the top of the warfare in 1945, Raytheon was making 80% of the magnetrons powering Allied radar internationally.
EPIRUS
Massive tubes remained the easiest way to emit high-power microwaves for greater than half a century, handily outperforming silicon-based solid-state amplifiers. They’re nonetheless round—the microwave in your kitchen counter runs on a vacuum tube magnetron. However tubes have downsides: They’re scorching, they’re large, and so they require repairs. (In reality, the opposite microwave drone zapper at the moment within the Pentagon pipeline, the Tactical Excessive-power Operational Responder, or THOR, nonetheless depends on a bodily vacuum tube. It’s reported to be efficient at downing drones in assessments however takes up an entire delivery container and desires a dish antenna to zap its targets.)
By the 2000s, new strategies of constructing solid-state amplifiers out of supplies like gallium nitride began to mature and had been capable of deal with extra energy than silicon with out melting or shorting out. The US Navy spent a whole bunch of hundreds of thousands of {dollars} on cutting-edge microwave contracts, one for a undertaking at Raytheon referred to as Subsequent Technology Jammer—geared particularly towards designing a brand new strategy to make high-powered microwaves that work at extraordinarily lengthy distances.
Lowery, the Epirus CEO, started his profession engaged on nuclear reactors on Navy plane carriers earlier than he grew to become the chief engineer for Subsequent Technology Jammer at Raytheon in 2010. There, he and his workforce labored on a system that relied on lots of the identical fundamentals that now energy the Leonidas—utilizing the identical kind of amplifier materials and antenna setup to fry the electronics of a small goal at a lot nearer vary reasonably than disrupting the radar of a goal a whole bunch of miles away.
