This morning, I was on the road with the Symphony engine team, shopping for scalable industrial capacity to build jet engine parts. "Getting that part will take 18 months best case," we were told. Why?? The answer was a stunning revelation about the non-obvious ways China has hollowed out American industrial capability. And what it will take to reverse it. It turns out the long-lead item in engine parts is tooling. By tooling, I don't mean screwdrivers or hammers; I mean precision custom industrial molds. These are as complex to design and manufacture as the parts themselves. It used to be that tools were designed in the US, leveraging western-made software (like high end CAD), and then fabricated by talented artisan machinists. China started by ripping off the CAD software licenses. This alone represented a double-digit percentage decrease in tool engineering costs. Add on top of that reduced labor costs, and quickly it became far cheaper to design and make tools in China. American tool and die designers started losing their jobs—just as manufacturing became low-status in the US. Fast forward a couple decades, and it's quick and easy to get tools made in China but slow and expensive to get them made here. Worse, when we export tooling work, we exported the design of the parts themselves. E.g., the design of a jet engine part is right there in the mold that makes it. I.e., the ability to rip-off western products starts with pirated software, leads to pirated products, and eventually leads to a complete ripping off and hollowing out of the American industrial complex. Oof. How do we fix it? First, we need to make building things sexy again. This is where the work of companies like Anduril, SpaceX, Tesla, and Boom is culturally critical. But also: the best path is not to re-create capabilities of the past, but to invent the leap-frog manufacturing capabilities of the future. These realizations about China make me even more motivated not just to invent new jets—but also make manufacturing sexy again and invent new and better ways to make things (in America).

Boom! We cracked it! Today we are introducing Boomless Cruise—supersonic flights up to 50% faster with no audible sonic boom. We quietly (har har) demo'd this on XB-1's first supersonic flight—three times actually. 🧵👇