American Hardtech Weekly Roundup #6

Here’s the weekly roundup (due to travel, this is coming in a day to the right, thanks for your patience):

U.S. HARDTECH
- The Army gave AeroVironment $464.8 million for LOCUST X3, the first laser weapon in US history to move from prototype into production. It's a 30-kilowatt beam that burns drones down for under $5 a shot, against the six figures a missile costs, and it rides on trucks and pallets rather than needing a fixed site.

- The Air Force is accelerating a cheap replacement for the MQ-9 Reaper after losing 45 of them against Iran, roughly a quarter of the fleet. The new program targets about $10 million per aircraft versus $30 to $50 million for a Reaper, with at least 180 fielded by 2031.

- The Army moved TITAN into production with $192 million split between Palantir and Anduril, eight units over 18 months. TITAN is a truck-mounted ground station that pulls in feeds from drones, aircraft, and satellites and turns them into targeting packages for artillery and missiles.

- NASA's Roman Space Telescope launched Sunday on a Falcon Heavy, with both side boosters flying themselves back to the Cape. Roman carries a Hubble-class mirror with roughly 100 times the field of view, letting it survey huge patches of sky at once, and it went up well ahead of the date NASA committed to.

- Fuel loading started at Palisades in Michigan, putting Holtec's plant on track to be the first US reactor ever to restart after being slated for demolition. The core takes 204 assemblies, and Holtec wants it running before the year is out.

- Google signed for 396 megawatts from Fervo's Cape Station project in Utah, the largest geothermal power deal anyone has ever signed. Fervo uses the horizontal drilling and fracturing developed for oil and gas to make hot rock produce power where conventional geothermal can't work, and the plant comes online in 2028.

- The Pentagon signed seven-year frameworks with Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics to triple Patriot production and quadruple THAAD interceptor output. CSIS estimates the US has burned through about 65% of its Patriot stock between Iran and Ukraine.

- Tennessee issued the country's first license for a commercial fusion plant, going to Type One Energy for a stellarator at the retired Bull Run coal station. A stellarator is a twisted magnetic donut that holds plasma steady without the pulsed current a tokamak needs, so in theory it can run continuously.

- Critical Materials Group raised a $10.3 million seed led by Overmatch Ventures to build modular production lines for energetics, meaning the explosives and propellants inside munitions. That's the tightest bottleneck in scaling artillery and missile output, and the Austin company is pitching capacity that bolts on beside the legacy plants.

- Seasats booked more than $24 million in orders in a single month, roughly 100 of its Lightfish uncrewed boats for the Navy and Marines. The Lightfish is an 11-foot solar-powered vessel that runs about $250k and can stay out six months, and Seasats has raised $40 million total.

ALLIED HARDTECH:
- Germany's Isar Aerospace put satellites into orbit on Spectrum's second flight, becoming the first commercial European company ever to reach orbit. The first attempt crashed under a minute after liftoff 17 months ago, and this one flew from Andøya in northern Norway.

- The UK certified Open Cosmos as a supplier on TacSys, a defense communications framework worth up to £8 billion through 2034. A framework isn't a guaranteed order, it's a pre-approved pool the Ministry of Defence draws task orders from, and Open Cosmos is pitching a low orbit constellation with laser links between satellites.

- Spain's iPronics raised a $125 million Series B led by Maverick Silicon and Light Street, with Nvidia and Bosch Ventures joining. The Valencia company builds a rack-mounted optical switch that reroutes light paths inside AI data centers on the fly, keeping more of a cluster's chips busy instead of idle.

That's the week!