Space has become a top-of-mind concern for both offensive and defensive operations and will play a critical role in the Golden Dome initiative.
Breaking Defense spoke with Matt Magaña, president, Space, Defense and National Security at Voyager Technologies, about production and manufacturing challenges for critical elements of space infrastructure, new propulsion capabilities and adapting commercial technologies for use in military applications in space.
Breaking Defense: What’s the threat scenario that’s making space the next warfighting domain?
Magaña: Space is the ultimate high ground. It used to be air, but today our adversaries increasingly have the ability to operate in space and gain an advantage there.
We’re seeing more electronic warfare techniques, which makes that space advantage increasingly important. It’s really a question of how we proliferate capabilities and protect our assets, especially high-value assets. We’ve seen adversaries put a number of different capabilities into play that are really turning space into a warfighting domain.
It’s not just the offense, but also the defense side. It’s thinking about how much everything is satellite driven – navigation, sensing, missile tracking, and command and control to name a few. Protecting those assets is critical in a full-scale war.
To protect yourself, you have to understand what you’re protecting yourself from. That’s where a lot of our technologies and capabilities come into play — being able to know where your adversaries are at any given time, understanding all the frequencies and capabilities they have in radio frequency (RF) realms and how they were using those to continue to put effects on us both here terrestrially and in space. It becomes a much more complex environment that we must protect against.
How has Voyager expanded in the national security and defense areas, how do you see expansion in those areas in the near future?
Voyager has grown its defense business over the last two years. Across the board, and obviously led by all of our artificial intelligence (AI) initiatives across electronics, sensing and capabilities around defense propulsion systems, space propulsion systems and across the whole gamut of critical capabilities that are needed by the Department of War (DoW) and intelligence organizations, including Golden Dome activities.
Golden Dome represents one of the most consequential national offense priorities in the next decade. Voyager is uniquely positioned across this whole architecture, not just in one place, but in several places where performance and innovation matter.
What are the key areas of Golden Dome for you?
We’ve been awarded multiple contracts supporting Golden Dome, and we’ve submitted additional proposals – several with teammates – across mission areas. We’re also working insertion opportunities across existing programs where our technologies can bring added capability quickly.
A major focus for us is intercept during the boost and engagement phases. We bring systems including divert and attitude control systems, guidance and navigation, radiation-hardened computing, sensors, star trackers, and data transport and communications. The opportunity for us is really to bring those proven capabilities together and insert them where they can have the greatest impact across the Golden Dome architecture.
How are you able to take advantage of the shift in thinking about adapting commercial technology for military use?
In many cases, there’s commercial applications and capabilities and trying to insert those into technologies, i.e. taking commercial chips and militarizing them to allow us to get to much lower price points.
One of the biggest aspects that Voyager brings is our partnerships. Over the last few years we’ve announced multiple partnerships across different commercial applications and commercial companies, and we’re bringing all that to fruition now. How do you convert that commercial tech into the defense realm and bring that interface into the DoW ultimately at the speed that they need?
Everybody’s at the table on Golden Dome trying to find ways to rapidly get the capability in the hands of the government. But that’s actually really hard, especially when we’re trying to do a little bit of both. We’re trying to take current capabilities and scale those, which we’re doing on the weapons side. Then on the other side, bringing new technology at cost points that I’ve never seen before. In those cases, it’s bringing the commercial capability to bear.
One of your big focuses has been propulsion and developing capabilities there. Tell us about this.
There are a few pieces that we’ve been developing for many years. First, we’ve been investing money into our throttleable propulsion system. We’re demonstrating capability within record time now to go from a clean sheet design to a full DACS hot fire test in less than a couple hundred days timeframe. That’s built off of technology that we’ve been investing in for over 11 years.
Things like additive manufacturing, materials and capabilities that have now been introduced in the industry were never there 10, 15 years ago.
Second, we announced earlier this year the Voyager American Defense Complex in Pueblo, Colorado, that we have been investing heavily into, not just to be able to support our DACs and attitude control systems, but also support the next generation of manufacturing for solid rocket motors. There’s so much demand there right now. It’s how fast can we build and get tooling and equipment put in place to meet the demand and the ramp.
We’ve been working hand in hand with the DoW and folks to do that. We broke ground in February, and buildings are already up and getting all equipment installed and we’ve been delivering booster motors already out of Colorado.
What is it that your propulsion systems are doing that others can’t?
Our propulsion systems have the capability to start and stop, which provides longer engagements on targets, the ability to conserve energy and much more accurate engagements on effects. And we’re always working on new tech. We’re now supporting a newly awarded DARPA program for solid rocket motors, providing tailorable thrust control to meet unique mission requirements.
Solid rocket motor production has a lot of safety concerns, a lot of precision manufacturing requirements. How are you managing manufacturing and supply chain challenges?
As simple as they look and as simple as they are, these are complex systems. If you’ve ever baked a cake before, the sequence in which you do it, how long it sits, the mixing process, if you overmix it, if you undermix it, all those things matter.
Part of our unique capability is that we have a whole part of our business that does critical chemicals, and part of that’s onshoring those critical chemicals. A lot of these things, just like baking, it’s about the chemistry of the solids and the limits and the things that you can and can’t do from a manufacturing perspective in order for us to speed up the process without breaking the process, because there are a lot of things that you can do much faster, but it’s also more costly to do it that way.
For us, it’s finding that perfect balance of innovation and tech where you have limits of chemistry and how chemistry works on solids to ensure that we can ramp and scale these things as quickly as possible. A lot of it is facilitation and infrastructure. At the Voyager American Defense Complex, our infrastructure across the board, whether it’s mixing, grinding, assembling or testing, those are where the pinch points are across the supply chain, in addition to storage.
Storage becomes a challenge with scale. You have to keep finished goods and raw goods. In Pueblo, there are more than a thousand silos available for storage. That enables us to move very quickly, and with the right amount of space to scale our manufacturing and production.
Any other big takeaways from what Voyager is doing right now?
We are in one of the most consequential moments, where priorities are aligned. Voyager is uniquely positioned across the defense architecture. Not just in one place, but across interception and propulsion units, guidance and navigation, radiation, hardened compute, sensor, star tracking, comms and data. We are in several layers where performance and innovation matter most.
We are stepping up to that challenge from a speed and agility perspective. Ultimately this is not just a single program. It is a portfolio of missions and mission threads, each with multiple year funding profiles. We expect growth across our systems, whether that’s teaming with companies as the architecture matures or working directly with the government to bring capability faster and more affordably.