Ethan Thornton

speaker

1,249 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Aug 2026 last heard 4 Aug

Ethan Thornton’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.

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The Way I Heard It with Mike Rowe · 497: Ethan Thornton—I Like a Lotta Problems · 4 Aug 2026 podcast

Um, it's generally the same architecture and that proves, proves to the customer that you can fly it and then proves to ourselves that we know how to fly that architecture.

And these each happened in like three months.

So we designed this, we went from program kickoff to flight in 71 days on this aircraft.

How big is this?

That aircraft is about nine feet long.

Okay.

Yes.

So it's, it's a, I shouldn't disclose exact payload.

It's smaller than a thousand pounds, but a thousand miles.

Okay.

And so now the one we are assembling right now on our factory to fly in the next few weeks, which I'm pretty excited about is the block two.

So the way we think about block two vehicles is full performance.

And so the block two will look very, very, very different than this one.

So this one took off from a runway.

That one will use a solid rocket motor to launch, has folding wings, has folding tails.

It's more of like a tube launch thing.

So block two is when you can do first kind of full performance.

These actually work on the battlefield.

And then generally you do a third redesign, which is when you bring it into rate manufacturing.

When you're in the prototyping process, you don't want to obsess too much about rate.

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