JetZero

great segue to my next question.

I've long said that one of the most consequential acquisition decisions the U.S. Air Force made was to award Jet Zero and its partner, Northrop Grumman, a contract to develop and build a blended wing body aircraft as a possible future tanker that in turn could revolutionize air travel, right? Just like the Air Force did in investing in the KC-135 Stratotanker that in turn became the 707 Jetliner, which revolutionized passenger air travel.

What would a next generation blended wing body aircraft like the one that Jet Zero is designed and continues to refine and indeed build a prototype with Northrop Grumman now, right? Scaled composites is working that.

What would that mean for air refueling if this demonstrator performs the way everybody thinks it will?

As part of our study, we focused less on the specific planform designs and more on the attributes that we need in the future tanker fleet.

We did use a medium-sized blended wing body design as the exemplar that we highlighted.

And specifically, we were using a medium BWB that would be capable of carrying 300,000 pounds of fuel.

And we consulted a range of different performers in selecting that design, including, as you pointed out, Jet Zero.

Then he charts them out and says, who has more federal obligations than they did have capital raised? And he found only eight of them had more obligated than raised.

Raft, Govini, Slash Air, I guess they changed their name recently, Crossbow, Jet Zero, Lunar Outpost, Vannevar Labs, SimSpace, and Think Orbital.

And the rest were...

Did not.

So this is definitely a program where you need to test the facts against the eligibility rules before assuming it's a fit.

For me, a great example is Jet Zero.

Jet Zero has the first blended wing aircraft that is coming out of development and going into service.

And they are online to get a $500 million project.

EXIM funding.

Two Blue Origin, Mitsubishi, Bluebird Carrier, Unified Legacy, Hyundai, U.S. Steel, Westinghouse, Pirelli Tires, U.S.

Forged Rings, Avio, Boeing, LG Electronics, Jet Zero, Korea Zinc, And it just goes on and on and on and on.

And I wonder, did they have a total of how many jobs? So, oh, the shipyard is 10,000.

That's for our Navy.

10,000 jobs just for the shipyard alone.

Jet Zero, 14,000 jobs.

Boeing, 13,000 jobs.

Pirelli is $1,000.

They choose winners.

They chose Jet Zero, the Z4 blended wing design to... to invest a lot of money in that.

They kind of chose the boom aerospace overture because there's an investment in that, because that could be a government plane as well.

And now this, of course, you know, it's, I hate to say that 2.9 million is spare change, but it is kind of spare change, but it's something, you know, it's a gesture and it shows that the FAA is on board with what heart aerospace is doing.

Um, and you know, they've done well from, from Queensland to Texas.

But that was the other thing I noticed in all of this, uh, there was Gridsite, HEO, Jetzero, uh, to round out the top 10.

So there's a lot of deep tech in there.

It's not all AI.

You have Rocket Labs, which is kind of the big competitor to SpaceX for, um, rocket launches down there.

You have JetZero, who's one of our partners, which is building a very innovative new kind of jet plane for the future.

It's a next generation jet plane, which is shaped like a delta.

It's very innovative.