Howdy, folks. Welcome to the 161 fresh faces who have joined us in the last seven days. Last week’s essay struck a chord, and it has quickly become one of our most popular and most-shared pieces yet. If you missed it, find the link below. Catch up, then pass it on.
And happy Reindustrialize to all who celebrate. If you’re in Detroit this week for the conference, our very own Dan Goldin will be in attendance — look for a well-dressed, slightly irreverent Bronx bomber wearing cowboy boots. Ask him about The Sandwich (you’ll see what we mean shortly).
Wherever you’re tuning in from — on the ground in Detroit or elsewhere, consider this a reminder: the renaissance in hard pursuits is no longer hypothetical. It's happening across the country: in factories, test sites, shop floors, and yes, even conference halls. If you're reading this, you're already part of it.
P.S. If you know someone who should be a part of this, then forward this newsletter to a special someone. If you’re that special someone, subscribe here.
Where’s the Meat? Around these parts, we like to draw our audience in with comfort food. And Dan Goldin (Per Aspera cofounder, ex-NASA chief, Bronx-bred straight-shooter, and honorary Texas boot-stomper) has diagnosed America with a dietary problem: The Great American Sandwich is too starchy.
HERE’S WHAT WE MEAN BY THAT…
(With apologies to our vegetarians in the audience… sometimes a meaty metaphor just tastes right…) We’ve kept both slices of bread but tossed out the meat. And America still bakes two superb slices of bread:
Top slice (invention). Here, we have R&D, IP design, and invention: chip layouts hatched in Santa Clara, fusion breakthroughs spawned in Princeton, wild propulsion schemes scrawled on a Huntsville whiteboard at 2 a.m.
Bottom slice (commercialization): Down below, we have capital markets, world-class marketing machines, and distribution/sales.
The missing middle (manufacturing, assembly, etc.): the hands-on manufacturing craft, materials mastery, and supplier networks.
Take a bite and you taste nothing but starch. The key (and obvious) insight here is that without that middle layer, which includes the meat, fixings, and so on, you don’t have a sandwich. Ideas remain prototypes, supply chains snap under stress, and national power erodes one outsourced widget at a time.
WHAT’S MISSING?
One interpretation of the two charts above: we stopped making our own sandwiches, and started eating too many starchy ones! (Image source: NYT)
The protein and fixings should be thick: fabrication, machining, assembly, materials processing, tooling, test, and supplier know-how. But we off-shored this layer to whichever port offered the cheapest labor and fewest environmental rules. Not only did we lose a set of physical capabilities, but we severed the living feedback loop between mind and matter.
When designers can stroll ten paces to the mill room, a tolerance issue dies before your coffee can cool. Push that mill room across an ocean and progress crawls through customs, jet lag, and IP paranoia.
Let enough cycles slip and you don’t just slow down, you forget how to run. We’re re-learning shop-floor basics our grandparents took for granted, and trying to keep lines alive without a single gray beard on call.
Semi fabs in the American Southwest won’t matter unless there are enough tradespeople to tune EUV steppers and enough stateside chemical plants to supply photoresists. MP Materials can mine Mountain Pass until the hills are hollow, but unless the neodymium makes it into magnets in Texas — and those magnets make it into motors in Michigan — we’re still one embargo, pandemic, or shuttered Suez Canal away from a national stall-out. Even software depends on hardware that must, at some point, get bent, etched, plated, or forged.
THE GOOD NEWS…
The Mountain Pass mine in California, operated by MP Materials, North America’s lone operational rare earth miner. Image: MP Materials
The deli is restocking, and the protein aisle is finally making front-page news. In the last week alone, we’ve seen headlines that the Pentagon will become the largest shareholder in MP Materials (as its rare earth magnet facility scales in Fort Worth), and invest significantly to build out the nation’s own drone supply base. Calling for end-to-end industrial capability isn’t an exercise in nostalgia, but the shortest path from idea and execution. And the distance between these two is destiny in the 21st century. Every dollar that drags the build closer to the brainstorm compacts the loop; compounds the learning; and hardens our strategic spine.
The bottom line: Until manufacturing and fabrication stand shoulder-to-shoulder with invention and commercialization, every great American idea remains a sandwich you can’t sink your teeth into. And, if you’re still wondering why we’re so fired-up about the sandwich, circle back to our founding Manifesto…
“IDEAS” shares the sharp, interesting or simply fun ideas we’re seeing from across the country, and from you all, to accelerate the Renaissance. Today’s IDEA comes from Ethan Copple, who’s pursuing a PhD in Industrial Engineering & Anthropology and has been described as “one of the most thoughtful young men in manufacturing in the U.S. today.”
Soft infrastructure is the operating system of reindustrialization — the data rails, capital flows, talent signals, and shared narratives that make hard assets hum. As Ethan notes in his thoughtful essay, many U.S. regions don’t just lack factories; they lack the institutional and cultural scaffolding to act with coherence. The result: misaligned incentives, stranded projects, and hard tech that never gains momentum. Without this backbone, talent misfires, capital clogs, and infrastructure decays into performance. Reindustrialization isn’t just about what we build — it’s about whether the system behind it knows how to move.
🔧 How would you rate America’s soft infrastructure readiness for reindustrialization?
While others build a piece of the communications stack, CesiumAstro engineers the entire architecture. Its systems span antennas, radios, SATCOM, and satellites, all designed to work together or on their own. Every product is developed in-house, built vertically, and made to scale.
Since 2017, CesiumAstro has tackled the hardest problems in space connectivity. Its phased arrays, processors, and flight-ready spacecraft already support commercial and government missions across air, ground, and orbit.
What sets CesiumAstro apart isn’t just what it builds, but how: modular design, commercial components, and a delivery-first culture that skips traditional defense timelines.
At CesiumAstro, the stack is the product, the playbook, and the path forward. And it’s shipping now.
Hey, it’s Jeff Crusey, your Resident Investor at Per Aspera. Last week, I told you about Castelion, a hypersonics startup I met and basically backed right on the spot in 2023. Why? They possessed what I call the special right to win — the hard-tech trifecta of insight, access, and execution:
Insight: CEO and cofounder Bryon Hargis knew the history of hypersonics like the back of his hand. In plain English, he could explain why Castelion’s approach avoided each misfire we’ve seen over the last few decades.
Access: Years running government sales at SpaceX meant he was already embedded within his target customer base. They were contacts, not cold calls.
Execution: Castelion had a clear solution in mind: build better, faster, cheaper. And through SpaceX-style vertical integration (motors, guidance, flight computers — all built in-house), supply chain agility, and rigorous execution, they’ve executed with momentum you could set a watch to.
That triad let Castelion raise $100M+ from Lightspeed, a16z, and others; hot-fire engines like clockwork; and land an Army flight demo next year — all in under 24 months.
Takeaway for founders: earn your special right to win. Master the history (and physics!), position yourself where the buyer already is, and prove you can iterate faster than anyone else. Do that, and the capital will chase you. (And while we’re here — if you missed it, last week we went deep on the state of hypersonics.)
A dispatch from the Lone Star State
We were lucky enough to attend the recent Texas Venture Gala (full recap here). Across a couple days of good conversation, it’s clear the Texas venture scene is evolving: the capital firehose has slowed in the state, with generally smaller checks and sharper conviction, but we’re still seeing a healthy serving of enthusiasm for sectors like energy and defense that lean on Texas’s heavy-industry backbone. It’s a healthy recalibration of expectations, but smart founders and investors are still building with long-term conviction. If you’re part of this next chapter (or want to be) join us Oct. 2 for the Texas Venture Fest, with 3,000+ Texans, 20+ venues, and 15+ cities participating.
$FLY, Firefly, Fly…
Firefly Aerospace filed its S-1 on Friday, aiming for a New York Stock Exchange debut under the undeniably perfect ticker $FLY. If you’re new around these parts, don’t mistake this as a typical “rocket startup chases Wall Street glory” story. Firefly’s path has been anything but easy: nearly wiped out by ownership drama and written off by many, the company refused to fold. Fast forward to today: it now has an orbital rocket, a NASA lunar lander contract, a $1.1B backlog (nearly 2× YoY), and the Pentagon’s rapid launch playbook has Firefly’s name written in. The books are still a work in progress — $176.9M in cash, $173.6M in debt, and much of the IPO proceeds tagged for paying down loans — but the revenue mix is already shifting: more is coming from spacecraft (Blue Ghost) than from launch. Firefly’s filing is proof that a relentless refusal to quit can outlast almost any setback, and it’s rare to see in a sector that seldom affords second chances. (We remember who bets early on hard things!)
Firefly’s Blue Ghost lander captured this image during its third lunar orbit maneuver on February 24, which inserted the spacecraft into a near-circular low lunar orbit about 100 km above the far side of the Moon — just days before its historic landing on March 2.
Elsewhere in the space beat: Varda Space Industries has closed a $187M Series C, bringing its total raised to $329M. In just the past five months, Varda has launched and landed its second and third capsules, is flying its fourth (and first fully in-house build), and has W-5 on deck. What once sounded like speculative sci-fi — brewing high-value pharmaceuticals in microgravity, then reentering them at Mach 25 — is fast becoming routine (much like the regular launch, landing, and reuse of rocket boosters). And while we’re on the topic of reusable rockets, secondary trades now price SpaceX at ~$400B — valuing it well above the foundation model provider powering a million AI app wrapper dreams (OpenAI @ $300B) and the purveyor of the all-powerful TikTok algorithm that’s atomizing Americans’ attention spans (ByteDance @ $215–$230B).
Rather than fixate on valuation, we’ll note a deeper bifurcation in the market. In a world where it’s easier than ever to spin up a $1M ARR “AI-powered” SaaS app, or go viral overnight, these short-term, non-durable wins can be undone as quickly as they appear. Real, lasting, and compounding value is accruing to the real-world builders: those who bend metal, launch hardware, own their supply chains, master operational complexity, and deliver physical products/infrastructure for the next century.
What’d we miss? Have something others participating in the Renaissance should know? Hit reply and drop us a line at [email protected]. Otherwise, we’ll see you back here next week.
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