Not a selfish decision, but a decision about what's best in the national interest.

What would you do if you discovered the wrong bolts on a missile just hours before launch?

With two governments waiting on your call.

Someone put the wrong bolts on one of the fin structures of the missile.

Well, today we'll hear from Mitch Stephenson, President CEO of Front Grade Technologies, who made that decision under pressure.

And most leaders can imagine the threat.

Can get lucky one time.

We have to be perfect every time.

In this episode, Mitch reveals how to lead under extreme pressure, make impossible scenes, decisions, and turn failure into fuel.

If you focus on everything, you're focusing on nothing.

So what would you do if you discovered the wrong bolts on a missile just hours before launch?

Welcome back to Lead the Team.

I'm your host, Ben Fanning.

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This was when I worked for Raytheon.

We were flying the first Block 2 test mission.

It was an international program and people forget, you know, we're, we're taking products that are developed in Japan with products that were developed in the US and we're putting them together in integrated fashion and we're doing the first flight test of this missile ever.

And when we got to the flight test, we were actually at the range in Point Magoo in California and, and discovered that someone put the wrong bolts on one of the fin structures of the missile.

You know, I had to go into leaders from the Japanese delegation, from leaders, you know, from the Missile Defense Agency, a three star admiral, and explain why I thought we were still good.

You know, yes, it's the wrong bolts, but, you know, from a thermal analysis, from an analytical approach standpoint, the mission profile would say that we're fine, we're not going to have an issue.

And you have to, as a leader, be able to push through these risk factors and be able to make those decisions.

And I'm not saying I made that decision by myself.

I was the one that briefed it for sure.

But, you know, you have a big team behind you that looks at it and, and does all of the work to say we're going to be successful and we.

The great thing was I always look for the takeaway.

What's the positive Takeaway here, our quality people were doing their job.

I mean, to catch that, you know, when you think about, you know, thousands and thousands of parts that have to come together to make one of these very complex systems, and yet we caught the fact that somehow the wrong bolt got in the system and got put on the missile.

So again, you can look at it as a setback.

I looked at it as an opportunity to talk about the robustness of the system, the system's ability to deal with something less than what we optimally want on the system.

And by the way, you know, decisions were made that were both political decisions and, and, and decisions that, you know, you had to appease both the Japanese government who, you know, who were very, very knee, they needed this mission to be very successful, and then the US Government who was wanting to move the system forward to get it deployed.

And a lot of hard decisions were made there.

But ultimately we were successful in flying that missile, despite the fact that there were some, there was some operational issues in the assembly of the, of the actual missile that flew.

You know, this is one thing that I was taught very early by my mentors.

You know, failure is not failure.

Failure is a learning mechanism in which we improve the system, which we improve our designs, which we understand the environment that we're trying to, you know, we're trying to be successful within.

And you know, I can talk about space for hours and hours and hours, but it's a very, very difficult environment.

And we understand and learn more about space every day that, that we go on, whether it's the radiation effects there, the, the, the gravitational or lack of gravitational effects on systems and, and how systems have to be able to be designed to perform better.

And any leader would want to be a part of what we're trying to do there.

Although many will say we can't do it.

I have been too many, part of too many programs where people started with we can't and, and that motivation of someone telling you can't is what makes engineers and operations people and quality people more, more motivated to be able to prove them wrong.

And I believe with golden dawn, with time and the right kind of investments, we're going to see that construct for missile defense.

And I'm excited to watch it.

Love that.

Breakdown now fast forwarding to today.

Frontgate technology is on spacecraft, satellites, defense platforms.

Most people don't even know it.

What's one space mission that your team has touched that you're especially proud of?

Front Grade is literally on almost every satellite that is flying out there today.

You know, it's some, in some cases at the component level, you know, you think about controllers or processors at the system level and the subsystem level.

Front Grade has capabilities that are flying on almost every satellite out there.

Part of Front Grade technologies is a, is a Swedish entity that we bought a number of years ago called Gosler.

Gosler partners very, very in depth with the European Space Agency.

And primarily, you know, it, it is focused on space exploration.

And recently, you know, within a year ago or maybe a little bit more than a year ago, our processor, a processor that was designed, developed and produced by Gossler in Europe, flew on a mission into the sun.

And you know, when you say into the sun, we literally know was part of, we were the, the processing element that flew a mission into the sun to understand the effects of radiation and in thermal and all of that as you get closer into it.

So not only was it a space exploration success because we were communicating until that system burn up, we were still communicating.

Shows the, the, the, the capabilities, the survivability of the, of these comp, these processors that we put on the system as it's flying in the sun.

Secondarily, it shows what the environment was and as we continue to learn more about space radiation and what we need to do to, to protect ourselves here on Earth from space radiation and as we put more assets in space, how do we protect that?

That learning is going to continue to, to be used by scientists for years to come.

Today, if a threat were to attack the United States, the satellites that would initially detect that launch have front grade technology all over them.

The satellites that would then discriminate that threat going through the exo atmosphere conditions of space have front grade capabilities all over them.

Once the system, the threat system begins to re enter, you know, we are on many of the interceptors that are there, whether it's standard missile three, you know, whether it is Patriot pack three, whether it's thad, we, we support all of these programs.

So I tell our team all the time that you, you and we and me have to understand that everything we do has to work every single time it's needed to work because the threat can get lucky one time.

We have to be perfect every time to ensure that we're protecting the assets that are here for us to protect.

And we take that very, very seriously.

At front grade, as a matter of fact, we've kicked off an initiative called Mission Pride and it is all about understanding that every component, every module, every subsystem that we build has to work Every time.

And yes, we're going to have developmental challenges and yes, we're going to struggle.

But when we deploy that, when we hand that capability over to a customer, that customer needs to know that it's going to work.

Yeah, because if your technology fails, the other missile will get through and then we got a whole other set of problems.

So the amount of pressure, that's the.

Pressure that we want to put on ourselves.

And look, imperfection, there is no perfection.

I mean, that's a hard, that's a hard thing for people to understand.

We strive for perfection, but we're humans, we're going to make mistakes.

And I tell our customers all the time, the key for us is catching those things with our quality processes.

When that heritage, that deep heritage space capabilities that had to be, you know, designed at the perfection, near perfection level, all the way to deploying that, that heritage comes through even when we're trying to go faster now, we're taking a little bit more risk and we're building systems that are not as radiation hardened as, you know, our heritage systems are.

And we're becoming more involved in terrestrial capabilities because we see the terrestrial capabilities and the space capabilities blending in what their requirements are.

And I think that that creates a great opportunity for companies like us who are able to go across these multi domain constructs and bring the best of both worlds together to ensure that we have the right kind of reliability.

But we also have the speed and the cost perspectives that allow us to proliferate the systems for our customers.

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You guys specialize, of course, in this term radiation hardened electronics.

What is radiation in space?

Why does it matter so much?

And why do we have to really be so focused on that as a human population into the future?

When you think about space physics, the sun is creating and it's the biggest emitter of radiation.

Although there's deep space radiation, there's other things out there, but the sun is constantly emitting radioactive components.

And if you think about it, I tell everybody, when you're outside and you get a sunburn.

Our atmosphere blocks more than 90% of the radiation that could enter the atmosphere.

But once you get out of the atmosphere, it's unattenuated.

So what you see out there is electronics are susceptible to particles that could hit a processor and latch it.

Meaning.

Meaning lock it up where it can't be recovered.

More often you see interrupts, what we call interrupts, where a particle will hit electronic component and cause it to interrupt and maybe skip, and then we can recycle it and get it back to where it needs to be.

But there are situations out there where space radiation can actually kill us out a lot.

It can make a satellite inoperable, and we lose that capability out there.

Yeah.

And these satellites are multimillion dollars.

They're huge.

Right.

The cost of these things are enormous.

Years ago, and not that many years ago, you know, the average cost of a satellite was probably, you know, three, $400 million.

That has come down to probably 40 million.

And now, I mean, so tenfold down.

And now we're seeing satellites that are being built for 3 or 4 million, 5 million.

That is partly because we're taking more risk.

We're putting so many of them out there.

The con.

The cost of launch has come way down, and so we can put more out there.

So the trade now is, do I deal with the effects of radiation through proliferation, putting more assets out there and realizing that a few of them are going to fail, or do I move towards that radiation hardened by design capability, which is far more expensive with fewer assets?

And I think that the answer is it's going to be a blend of both.

You need some of that radiation hardened by design capability, because there are systems out there that just can't fail.

I mean, we have intelligent systems, we have other systems out there that if a.

If it fails, you put people in harm's way, you put our military members and our allies in harm's way if they don't have that asset ready for them in space.

But then when you get down into some of this more proliferated capabilities, the challenge I think that's going to come, that we're only beginning to talk about now, is you're proliferating.

You're putting far more satellites into space than we ever have in the history of the world.

And the United States is the biggest proliferator of space.

But as assets begin to fail, you're going to have a logistics problem.

You're going to have to figure out how to clean that up, because there's so Many of them out there.

And there are a lot of great conversations about can we repair satellites in space?

Can we refuel satellites in space?

Can we, you know, can we put assets out there that can push them down and burn them back into the atmosphere and just have them burn up as it comes back in the atmosphere?

All those things are being talked about, but not very much is being funded right now.

And as we continue to put assets in space, this conversation is one that is going to have to be had more in depth and some resources put behind it.

It reminds me of like the 80s, 70s and 80s where there wasn't a lot of focus on cleaning up the environment on Earth.

And then we realize, wait a minute, we have to be a little more thoughtful about what we're doing here in space.

It seems like it's, it's back then.

Yeah, great, great analogy.

I mean, it really is.

Again, you know, people frequently say space is big and it is, it is, it is enormous.

It, you know, but at some point, if we're going to be stewards of, and users of space and, and going to more prolifically use space, we have to be good stewards of space.

While today people are willing to make the trades to get lower cost assets out there, at some point we're going to have to think about what is that real?

I'll call it a happy medium that we're going to, to be able to move forward with to ensure that we are being good stewards of space.

But, but the good news is the conversations are happening and I've heard both from defense leaders and commercial leaders in space that is at the forefront of people's thoughts.

We just now need to move forward with how do we actually want to make that a reality?

If you're advising the next generation of aerospace innovators, what's the one big opportunity that no one's talking about yet?

Is it cleaning up space trash?

So much is being talked about right now.

I would be hard pressed to answer that question on what isn't being talked about.

Everything is being talked about.

I would just maybe reframe the question a little bit to the next generation of space innovator.

You need to think and we need to think.

And maybe I'm at the end of my career and there's a lot of folks at the beginning of their career.

You need to think a lot more like these new entrants into space today.

And that is take more risk, be willing to bet your badge on success and being willing to accept failure and move beyond it.

I Mean, I look at, you know, whether you like people like Elon Musk or not, he's changed space.

I mean, he fundamentally has changed space.

You know, thousands of these Starlink satellites are out there now and, and they're being very successful.

And so his mentality to take that risk and go with, you know, a little bit more risk acceptance to move these systems forward and proliferate his systems has been successful and it's changing the way we look at things.

His ability to launch, you know, has his own launch with Falcon, his own launch platforms that have, have dropped dramatically the cost of, of launch in space.

I would say the next generation generation innovators need to understand that he didn't do that just because he was smart, although I believe he's a very smart gentleman.

He did that because he was willing to take that risk.

And I think that to be that innovator, you have to be able to be much less risk adverse.

You have to be willing to put it on the line every day and your decisional processes.

And back to where we started this conversation, you have to want to have that responsibility.

The first time I heard Elon Musk speak, it was years and years ago.

I was still in the military as a matter of fact, that long ago.

And he had a vision about going to Mars.

It's still his vision to really commercialize space and push out from where he's at now.

But he's taking those logical steps and the logical risk profiles to be able to get to where he ultimately wants to go.

But if he didn't have that early vision of being an innovator, of not wash, rinse, repeat what everybody's been doing for years, he wouldn't be where he is today as a leader in space.

And I think all innovators need to think that way.

And I could look at, you know, what Jeff Bezos is doing, Blue Origin and others out there, you know, that are less known, that are also pushing the envelope with respect to the future of space, which is going to be important for us.

There needs to be a balancing effect at some point, and that's my personal opinion, to ensure that we have both the high, high end capabilities that are that our defense systems and our structures around intelligence, our need.

But there also has to be some risk taking to be able to push the capabilities forward at a much greater speed than we have in the past.

What capabilities do you think would surprise leaders that are going to be sooner on the horizon than what they realize?

When I look at what we're doing at Front grade and our ability to really miniaturize capabilities.

You really think about the systems that are being deployed today largely are based on technologies that are 10 years old.

I mean that, that's just the norm.

I mean, to get a system deployed.

If you're betting on technology that's being developed today, you're probably going to fail with the speed that we need to be going today.

So most of the technology is 10 years old.

I see the size of satellites, you know, being greatly reduced because of miniaturization and that is moving at such a rapid pace that it is almost eye watering to me that, you know, we talk about micro capabilities and nano capabilities.

That is going to be a wave that is going to allow us to do even more with less.

And I don't use that.

I, you know, I used to hate that term do more with less.

But that is the reality.

As we go to software defined systems and miniaturize electronics at the nano level, you're going to be able to put up very, very small packages that are going to have the capabilities of some of these very exquisite big packages that go up today.

And, and I think then you couple that with the processing capabilities that we're seeing being created, the speeds that we can move things, you no longer really need to downlink a lot of things back to earth.

You can do the processing in space because we miniaturize those processing capabilities and that rapid miniaturization.

If I look at what we're developing, what we're working on here today at front grade, 10 years from now, that stuff is going to be deployed and it's the, the, what we call swap size, weight, you know, and power is going to be so much less that the small satellites that are going up today, 10 years from now are going to be big satellites.

So the smaller, the more effective from a cost perspective.

You can have more going up, you can deploy them more rapidly and there'll be more testing, quicker innovation.

And so what's available to the average business CEO in terms of what they can access is going to be far greater.

Yeah.

Is there an industry or two that you've got your, that you've got your eyes set on?

You're like, hey, these industries are really going to be transformed over the next 10 years by, by leveraging space more?

I don't think there's going to be any industry that is not going to use space.

You know, we said this, you know, back 20 years ago, plus when I was still in the military, that, you know, every asset, every Capability that, that we were developing in the military and were actually using.

The military relied on space and now that's translating into everything that we do.

I mean again, the world is instantaneously connected now because of all of these space capabilities that are up there now.

That will only continue to evolve to a point to where the cost is going to continue to go down and making it accessible for almost any industry out there to be, utilize the capabilities.

I have a daughter in law who is a, is a medical doctor.

And you know, I can look at their ability to analyze data now.

They can go around the world to doctors around the world and do collaborate, you know, collaboration on cases.

And before that would have been limited to a state or two away here in the U.S. but now it's, I can go get the best, the best minds, the best brains and bring them together instantaneously.

Even I look at things like automotive, you think, okay, well how does automotive change?

Well, if we're going to go to autonomous cars, guess what?

You know, the navigation capabilities that are going to be brought about are, that are out there now and will continue to evolve from a space standpoint, whether it's gps, but I even think it goes beyond that.

It's going to be the optical capabilities that these autonomous vehicles, whether they're used for commercial use or military use or other kind of applications, you know that the ability to see things from space that could cause collision avoidance and things of that nature, you're going to see all of that come to fruition.

And maybe I'm being too futuristic here, but the speed of technology and the miniaturization of these capabilities are going to make them even more affordable, even more proliferable.

We're going to be able to broadcast and see more capabilities that will support every effort in the, in the, the domestic and the international marketplace.

From a industrial standpoint, you've seen a lot missile space.

You've seen, you know, you've seen a lot out there.

What scares you the most?

Like what are the things that keeps you up at night, if you can even share them?

Unfortunately, mankind is never shown a propensity to really truly embrace peace.

There's always conflict.

There's a desire to expand our geographics and ensure that we have freedom of navigation, to be able to ensure that our industrial complex can trade worldwide and all of those things.

And that is always going to cause the potential for conflict.

What scares me is that in many cases I have seen recently that, you know, it appears that our potential adversaries are moving faster than we Are.

That's not just in developing capabilities and deploying capabilities, that is in the areas of actually technology development.

And we, we, the United States, have to come to some understanding of our position in the world today is that of a leader in technology.

I still believe we hold that.

That lead.

I still believe that our underlying capabilities are far greater than any country out there to be able to develop these constructs.

But we lack focus.

I tell our team often, if you focus on everything, you're focusing on nothing.

We need to really get focused on a few things to ensure that we are competing economically and that we're competing the right way from a security standpoint.

Now, on the other side of that equation, just to be very clear, I'm not, you know, I'm not, you know, not sleeping every night because I'm worried about this.

Right.

It's just human nature.

You read history, you understand what the potential are.

You know, the potential things that could happen are.

I mean, we've lived through them numerous times in the evolution of civilization.

But what on the other side of that is because we are now more connected, we are far more dependent upon each other.

I see the potential for a different type of.

Of a competitive race that is more supportive of each other's mutual needs versus, versus adversarial.

And again, we're connected.

We could use China as an example.

We do a lot of trade with China and, and China does a lot of trade with us.

And, you know, we can talk about the imbalance all the time, but we're more and more becoming so connected in our need for each other that perhaps the race on the other side of the equation for dominance becomes less important, and it is more about a coexistence that is brought about because of the technological advances that have happened and are happening in the world.

Well, that's a great place to wrap up here.

It's like it's a huge threat and it's a huge opportunity, you know, all at the same time.

Depends on.

And I like how you took it back to leadership.

Where are we going to focus?

Where are you going to focus your team?

And that's going to tell the tale for not just your company, but our country and ultimately the world.

It's a growth place.

So I guess the question I'm taking away is, where is my focus?

Where is that for my team and how am I helping them see that?

What's your parting thought for our listeners today, Mitch?

I'll just tell you what we're doing here at Front Gray.

You know, how are we focusing, you know, we see that the marketplace, whether it is space exploration, our defense capabilities, it requires more speed than ever.

And we're taking a very commercial approach to that.

You know, we're not waiting for the government or our customers to come tell us develop this capability.

You know, we're developing the capabilities.

We're getting out ahead of that.

We're self investing much more commercially, anticipating that the market is there, realizing that guess what, we're going to miss on a couple of these things.

But we're going to put out new products at a far greater pace than this company has ever done before because we know we need to support the ecosystem in moving things forward.

And we're not going to sit, we're not going to sit out there with our hands out asking our customers to fund our development.

We're going to self fund it.

We're going to act commercially.

We're going to, we're going to really knock it out of the park on a few of them.

We're going to miss on a few of them.

We're going to be right down the middle on a few of them.

But that is about being commercially minded and focus on products, focus on getting what we believe is needed to our customers, to our potential partners and to our supply base for a consistent ecosystem that is going to be market driven, not program by program driven.

And by the way, today when you see a lot of uncertainty about programs, you know, in particularly the Defense Department, I believe that any company that's going to be successful as a products company like we are is to focus and get ahead of it.

Don't wait for it to happen to you.

Love that man.

So proactive.

And it ties beautifully into the whole theme of this about being willing to test, to take a risk.

And you said bet the badge on what you believe as a leader.

Mitch, thanks for joining us on lead the team.

Sir.

Thanks for having me and appreciate the opportunity and all the best to you And a great holiday season for all of you and your listeners.

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