The process could potentially take-place relatively near the front lines of a fight, cutting time-to-user and other logistics challenges. rapid reconfigurability and future-proofing in mind. The Tempest's Lego-like digital design was conceived with low cost manufacturing, COTS components. The company essentially intends to be able to share the Tempest’s digitized design with additive printer subcontractors/assemblers who can slot in electronics and payloads. While in its infancy (the startup is about a year-old) Firestorm has yet to stand up its own production line but Magy says it has “100 printers in the American southwest” which it can call on within “a couple days’ notice” to start printing its airframes.
“We can scale elastically using a network of additive manufacturing printers that are available around the country and around the world,” Magy explains, “turning them on or off depending on demand as opposed to just having our own production line.” Tempest’s digitized design simplifies manufacturing and assembly with attendant time and cost advantages.īoth Magy and McCoy stress that de-centralized production is key to Firestorm’s low-cost, large-quantity strategy. Scalability is another benefit of this approach and Magy indicates that the commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) modular component-mix which Firestorm has chosen for Tempest is the company’s secret sauce. His emphasis has been on ensuring that Tempest is a completely modular, open architecture UAV, both for the purpose of future-proofing it and quickly adapting it to new missions/roles. While serving as director, McCoy says he learned a lot, “but I learned that we could also go a lot faster than the government is going.” Magy is joined in Firestorm by Chad McCoy, a 20-plus year USAF Special Forces veteran who most recently served as the director of the Air Force Research Laboratory-affiliated Doolittle Institute which develops and commercializes munitions technologies. Army’s Rapid Capabilities and Critical Technologies Office (RCCTO) to develop the Army Multi-Purpose High Energy Laser (AMP-HEL) system for integration on small ground vehicles. In 2021, the company was purchased by BlueHalo, another counter-UAS firm which recently won an award from the U.S. Naval Special Warfare Command in 2016 and used in Syria during the anti-ISIS campaign.
Dan Magy has launched four previous hardware/AI venture-capital backed companies including Citadel Defense in 2015.Ĭitadel was a counter-UAS company whose anti-drone system was adopted by U.S. His experience in additive manufacturing is helping the startup produce a new iterative design for the Tempest every 30 days according to Magy.įirestorm is not its CEO’s first rodeo. Among the small Firestorm team is the former head of aerospace and defense for 3D printing giant, Stratasys SSYS. Additive manufacturing is a key enabler in producing the Tempest 25 quickly and cheaply.
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