Essays
Notes on building the operating company for B2B media, from Kerri and the publications we run. Essays published to our Substacks appear here automatically.
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Cleveland Lands A Submarine Repair Center
Plus: $6.3B for SM-3 interceptors, a $555M Blue Origin factory in Texas, and a $2B GlobalFoundries deal with TSMC.
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Machines that Make Smaller Machines
A new manufacturing method takes its first steps, orbital data center economics, decades of engineering wisdom decanted into 25 rules, and more.
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45 Laws for Spacecraft Design (and Life)
Akin’s Laws of Spacecraft Design, the AI spending supply chain, two ends of manufacturing from bootstrapped devices to Starlink’s megafactory, and more.
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Bay Minette Rolls Its First Coil
Plus: 890 nuclear megawatts for Google, a $1.5B loan offer for Wolfspeed, and $200M for fusion in Tennessee.
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Toast for Factories
What restaurants can teach us about manufacturing, how DJI captured the drone market, implications for the future of CAD, and more.
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Ohio Redraws the Pharma Map
Plus: Anduril's $6.6B Baltimore shipyard, a $4.2B nuclear uprate loan, and a $24.4B SM-6 deal.
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How Ohio's Workforce Landed a $2.2B Bayer Campus
Ohio built a workforce pipeline from the classroom to the clean room. Bayer followed.
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The Quiet Reindustrialization of North Dakota
Home to drones, robots, and abundant energy, the new industrial economy has arrived on the Northern Plains
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Supply Chain as a Moat
The shifting electronics supply chain, Starship’s payload capacity, Dyson’s toothbrush defects, and more.
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Newport News Gives Truman a Second Life
Plus: a $22.3B Texas energy campus, a $3B shipyard, and $251M for Varda.
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Jacksonville Sends A Power Grid To Orbit
Plus: a $20.7B missile award, $240M in solar orders, and $150M for physical-AI chips.
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Robotics Data is a Broken Business
The business of robotics data, the engineering behind Raptor 3’s simplicity, giving idle industrial equipment a second life, and more.
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Renegade Engineering
Wearables that don’t need a charger, building hardware with tiny teams, datacenter land use in context, and more.
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Inola Unveils A $4 Billion Aluminum Smelter
Plus: an $876M jammer award, a torpedo fired from an unmanned sub, and 2,500 electric trucks on order.
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Pine Bluff Lands a $2.2 Billion Munitions Campus
Plus: a $6.5B pharma groundbreaking, a $1.2B missile award, and new capital for batteries, water, and uranium.
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Bitter Lessons in Hardware
The bitter lesson meets hardware’s brittle lesson, a year of cooktop failures, the many ways engineering teams can get to production, and more.
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On Benchmarks
Making sense of engineering benchmarks, Skunk Works on prototyping, solar installation robots, and more.
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Albany Builds A Quantum Foundry
Plus: a $205M satellite raise, a rad-hard chip line, and fresh capital for the physical economy.
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Will This Be the Navy's Next Public Shipyard?
The Pentagon Owes The White House a Plan in 90 Days
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Old Tricks for New Robots
The chasm between demos and useful robots, a new entrant for silent speech, the basics of quantum computing, and more.
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Let’s Talk Navier–Stokes
CFD in the Boeing 787’s design, the foldable smartphone market, an open-weight model for investment casting, and more.
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Blacksburg Builds A Magnet Plant
Plus: Covenant opens a missile factory, Austin scales counter-drone production, and subsea robots get an autonomy retrofit.
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Missouri Moves To Recycle Magnets
Plus: Seasats lands $24 million in orders, HII lifts shipbuilding pace, and Austin adds a chip lab.
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$399 Robot, $412 Worth of Servos
Teaching robots to walk through simulation, Formula 1’s forbidden materials, the gap between a promising battery and a viable business, and more.
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Chip Design Meets AI
AI in the chip design flow, FreeCAD and KiCad demos using GPT-6 Astra, a tour of automated fish processing, and more.
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Winchester Is Building A Hydrogen Fleet
Plus: a $600 million aerostat order, U.S. energetics lands $10.3 million, and Bristol brings 5G module production home.
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JetZero Fuels Factory1
Plus: the Army scales Virginia titanium, U.S. lithium locks in a 10-year buyer, and dry-coated batteries win a $50 million push.
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Inside the Idea Factory
Moonshot factories, Hugging Face’s robot duck, reverse-engineering rocket engines, and a primer on cable testing.
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Claude Learns the Factory
Standardizing factory test infrastructure, the slow collapse of optical disk drives, graduating from a garage machine shop, and more.
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Canton Turns Up The Heat
Plus: Lam grows Oregon chip R&D, BAE modernizes USS Boxer, and SiFly raises $20 million for U.S. drone production.
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Georgia Closes The Battery Loop
Plus: an Army tactical power grid advances, a $65 million medical-electronics tender lands, and Colorado adds stored-energy manufacturing.
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Open-Sourcing the Inkjet Moat
The most hated machine, a field guide to adhesives, additive manufacturing for eyeglass lenses, the basics of cost engineering, and more.
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Can America Still Make Things?
A grill scrubber’s view on reindustrialization, an intuitive guide to energy, retrospective on the smart home, and more.
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Blackbeard Extension
Plus: 3,000 AI-hardware jobs head to Nevada, an Army howitzer line lands in Alabama, and Utah terbium clears a commercial qualification.
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The Pentagon’s New Sandbox
Plus: a Mach 1 test track opens in Indiana, Tomahawk production gets a seven-year runway, and maritime nuclear power moves into site assessment.
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Physical AI and the Factory Automation Trap
Apple’s failed experiments in robotic automation, reconfigurable assembly lines, chemically etched sheet metal, China’s jet engine bottleneck, and more.
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AI Chips Need Liquid Cooling
Google’s liquid-cooling buildout, a map to control theory, and the history of Delta Electronics.
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Can Anger Fuel a Nobel-Winning Idea?
Blue LEDs, the rise of LFP batteries, sixteen years of electronics lore, and more.
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DARPA & The Impossible Frontier
DARPA’s heavy-lift drone competition, explosive vegetable peeling, multi-modal sensing, and more.
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Welcome to the Kerri blog
Notes on building the operating company for B2B media: the model, the software, and what we are learning as we go.