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 · last 12 months

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

You want to make sure you're like not breaking any manufacturing principles, but you don't want to be obsessing about like every single bolt the same way you would be when you're mass manufacturing.

So the second one is important because we can actually start selling it.

It's just more expensive to produce.

More importantly, we can start deploying it on the battlefield and having an impact.

And then the third one, and generally like the goal is to do these every three months.

I think block two will be done on about that timeline.

Block three, once you're in manufacturing, takes a bit longer and hopefully we compress that over time.

How much?

How much time?

What do these things cost?

Oh.

So the goal is hundreds of thousands of dollars, and that really depends.

A lot of your cost is in the jet engine.

A lot of your cost is in the solid rocket motor that launches it.

The actual airframe itself is very cheap.

And then most of your cost is in the avionics and warhead.

So for certain applications, you have super, super simple avionics.

For applications, so like if the adversary is not jamming you, if you can access GPS, then your avionics are super simple.

If you're fighting China and they're jamming you and they are like...

other things we probably shouldn't talk about, like then your avionics get significantly more sophisticated.

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