Anduril: Amusement Park for Engineers

Summary

This article features first-ever photos taken from inside Anduril’s R&D facilities in Costa Mesa, California. All photos by Ryan Young. On a Saturday afternoon in April 2024, I was on the rooftop pool deck of a Marriott hotel, setting up radar equipment aimed above the Hollywood Hills in Burbank, California. My five-year-old son, still damp from swimming, darted around as I calibrated the system. “What are you doing?” he asked, touching the electronics with wet hands. “Tracking … flying objects,” I said, carefully moving his hands away from the sensitive equipment. “It’s a special radar that will help our drones find targets better.” Working on a thousand-dollar radar that could potentially transform a landmark missile platform during a father-son weekend was fairly typical in those days. The technology that my son wanted to touch, and which other poolside guests gawked at, was a throwback to the AGM-114 Hellfire missile system from the 1960s—a simple direction finder that could be guided by a ground system that paints targets with radio frequency (RF) instead of lasers. If we could get this to work, we could reduce the cost of our Roadrunner system—a reusable, twin-turbojet, vertical-takeoff-and-landing microfighter—by 30x. Between trips to the pool and Chick-fil-A, I eventually managed to collect enough data to prove the concept worked: We could detect aircraft at 10 kilometers with a thousand-dollar sensor. It was the kind of breakthrough that could change how we approached reusable weapons and low-cost solutions for air defense—an ongoing R&D project I remain consumed by. It wasn’t company-sanctioned work. I was officially on family time, having left Anduril as SVP of Engineering the month before to start a robotics company, Physical Intelligence (PI). Yet Anduril was never just a job; it was part of my identity. My badge still worked, I continued on in an emeritus role, and I still spent around 15 hours a week working with the engineering team I’d helped build....