As for price, every Military Leonidas unit at present runs within the “low eight figures,” Lowery advised me. Protection contract pricing may be opaque, however Epirus delivered 4 items for its $66 million preliminary contract, giving a back-of-napkin worth 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 tons of of hundreds of {dollars} a pop, which means the Leonidas might begin costing much less (and hold 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 corporations attempting to alter the way in which weapons are created—and the way in which the Pentagon buys them. The most important protection corporations, 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 checklist of technical specs. These applications have saved the navy provided 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.
Reasonably than constructing to minutely detailed specs, the brand new crop of navy contractors purpose to supply merchandise on a fast timeframe to unravel an issue after which fine-tune them as they pitch to the navy. The mannequin, pioneered by Palantir and SpaceX, has since propelled corporations like Anduril, Defend AI, and dozens of different smaller startups into the enterprise of struggle 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 dad and mom have been born within the Epirus area within the northwest of Greece. However the firm extra typically says it’s a reference to the pseudo-mythological Epirus Bow from the 2011 fantasy motion film Immortalswhich by no means runs out of arrows.)
Whereas Epirus is doing enterprise within the new mode, its roots are within the previous—particularly in Raytheon, a pioneer within the subject of microwave expertise. Cofounded by MIT professor Vannevar Bush in 1922, it manufactured vacuum tubes, like these present in previous radios. However the firm turned synonymous with digital protection throughout World Warfare 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 called magnetrons—for the US struggle effort. By the top of the struggle 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 sizzling, they’re large, they usually require repairs. (In actual fact, the opposite microwave drone zapper at present 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 a complete 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 have been in a position to deal with extra energy than silicon with out melting or shorting out. The US Navy spent tons of of thousands and thousands of {dollars} on cutting-edge microwave contracts, one for a venture at Raytheon referred to as Subsequent Era Jammer—geared particularly towards designing a brand new technique 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 turned the chief engineer for Subsequent Era Jammer at Raytheon in 2010. There, he and his group 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 tons of of miles away.
