Why Hypersonic Missiles Need New Materials Now? | Ep. 83 [Ed Pope]

Hypersonic technology promises speeds beyond Mach 5, but there’s a critical problem most people overlook: the materials. In this deep-dive conversation, Dr. Ed Pope shares over 30 years of experience developing advanced ceramics and composites designed to survive extreme environments. From reusable heat shields to next-generation carbon-carbon materials, he explains what actually happens when systems are pushed to their physical limits, and why most materials fail.

Beyond the science, this episode explores the gap between innovation and adoption. Why do defense and aerospace companies continue relying on decades-old materials? What’s stopping better solutions from being used today? And how can engineers and founders bridge the “valley of death” between lab breakthroughs and real-world deployment? This is a must-watch for anyone interested in the future of advanced technology, manufacturing, and high-performance materials.

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Transcript

Dr. Leeanne Aguilar 0:07

What if the biggest constraint on hypersonic propulsion and next gen turbines isn't the design, but whether the material can survive 2200 to 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit in the real world? Welcome to Industry Ignited, the podcast where we explore the leaders driving transformation across industry, manufacturing, and breakthrough technology. I'm your host, Dr. Leanne Aguilar. And today I'm joined by Dr. Ed Pope, CEO and founder of Mattech and Supercarbon Composites Technology, a world-renowned technologist and subject matter expert in high temperature and ultra-high temperature ceramics, ceramic fibers, and ceramic matric composites for extreme environments. Dr. Pope, welcome to Industry Ignited.

SPEAKER_00 0:52

Thank you so much, Leanne. It's a privilege to be here and to participate in your outstanding podcast series.

Dr. Leeanne Aguilar 1:00

Well, thank you. I'm excited to learn all about material science today. Now, you earned your BS, MS, and PhD in material science and engineering and then founded Mad Tech in 1989. What pulled you from academia and research into building a commercial materials lab? And what problem were you determined to solve from day one?

SPEAKER_00 1:24

Well, I decided to create Mad Tech for a couple of reasons. One is I didn't feel it in the structured corporate environment, like the large research labs that they had at that time, I'd have the freedom to be able to innovate new technologies and also time it. For those who are old enough to remember 1989 was about the time that the Berlin Wall came down. And we saw a lot of cuts in defense spending. So many of the companies who were actually eager to hire me back then, it turns out they probably would have been laying me off in about six months to a year anyway. And I knew that. And that's why the United States was able to leap ahead of everyone else on the planet in terms of the innovations at the universities. But by 1989, that era was fading, and it has faded since then. Anyway, I thought MathTech would be a way to innovate, and I think it was the right choice. I'm very pleased with that decision. And uh it's allowed me to work on a number of startup companies, spin-off companies, if you will, and work on so many exciting challenges across material science and engineering, optics and electronic materials, high temperature materials, fibers, composites, aviation materials, propulsion materials, heat shield materials, all sorts of things. So it's it's a great, it's been a lot of fun. Then just in the last few months, I launched Supercarbon Composites Technologies, which is focused exclusively on carbon-carbon composites.

Dr. Leeanne Aguilar 3:44

Yeah. Now, like you mentioned, you've worked across a lot of different types of materials across glass, ceramics, fibers, and composites. Was there a defining inflection point where you realized extreme environments materials would become mission critical across defense, aerospace, and energy?

SPEAKER_00 4:01

Yeah, that was about the mid-1990s, mid to late 1990s. Looking at what DOD was working on had in its arsenal at the time, new materials were going to be needed. And also, DOD, now DOW, uh recognized that too. And through the course of the 1990s and 2000s and early 20s, the US has spent many tens of billions of dollars on new high-temperature, high-performance materials for defense applications. Tremendous amount of materials, including materials at Mattech.

Dr. Leeanne Aguilar 4:40

Yeah. And you've served as an adjunct professor and also built industry programs. How did teaching and mentoring shape how you communicate complex material concepts to decision makers who aren't material scientists?

SPEAKER_00 4:53

Well, Einstein said it best: keep things as simple as they can be, but not simpler than they ought to be. And another role model or someone I looked up to and I had the privilege of meeting and knowing many, many years ago was Dr. Richard Feynman. And he was absolutely extraordinary in his gift to take some of the most complicated ideas, concepts, theories, and communicate them in a way that intelligent lay people could understand. And it's uh it's something vitally important uh in teaching and inspiring young people, inspiring the next generation of young minds to go into material science. Because material science is actually extraordinarily complicated and it crosses many disciplines.

Dr. Leeanne Aguilar 5:51

Right. Yeah. And with 30 plus years in the field, what's one assumption about advanced materials that you believe early in your career and later had to revise as the industry evolved?

SPEAKER_00 6:04

Well, I'd say there's two things that perhaps when I was young, I was naive about, and I'm certainly disappointed about now at this stage. And one is the unwillingness of the major prime defense contractors and to adopt new innovations. There is a desire to hang on to the legacy materials. I was frustrated that you know, back in the 90s, NASA, Department of Defense, and other agencies were using uh so many materials that were developed in the 1950s, 60s, and early 70s. And why weren't they using newer stuff? As I said, DOD recognized this and they funded tremendous innovations. And here we are in 2026. And for the most part, the prime contractors just don't want to adopt stuff that's new. It costs too much to qualify it, it takes too long, it's a lot of bother. Uh the program executive offices at DOW, I mean, still getting used to the new title, right? Uh at DOW, Department of War. They keep going back to legacy materials as well. And it's like, why did you spend all this money developing incredible materials? And then your instinct is to not use them. Right. Yeah. And uh that's a frustration as well. So those are two things that I don't know what I would have done differently. Uh become a lawyer. I don't know, in in recognizing that, but it's certainly been a source of frustration, and not just for me, for everybody who's in the business of innovation, is surprisingly the lack of innovation when it comes to materials overall.

unknown 8:00

Yeah.

Dr. Leeanne Aguilar 8:00

And do you think that's primarily because of budget constraints, or is it because of the risk factor and in fear of trying new or time? Is it because of the length of time it would take to test out the new materials? What's driving that?

SPEAKER_00 8:15

Well, it's a combination of everything you just listed. You said it beautifully. You've got in in any group of people, a corporate structure, a panel of blue ribbon experts, you have a risk aversion. You know, it's just the way humans are built. You put a bunch of people around a conference table, and who's the guy that's going to raise his hand and say, Well, I want to go. I propose we take this really risky new thing over here that'll make our missile or capsule perform so much better. People tend not to want to raise their hand and do that. And I think that's part of it. But the other is when we do finally address a concern, hypersonics is a perfect example. We were ahead. The United States was way ahead of everybody. The Soviets, later Russia, China, anybody else, the Europeans, Iran, you name it. We were ahead of everybody. And then Obama came into office. And for whatever reason, pretty much all hypersonic work in the U.S. came to a grinding halt. And I know that personally because I had a phase two SBIR program with NASA on hypersonic materials, working with Boeing. And we were set to receive this phase two award and contract, and that the hypersonics budget just got wiped out. And in DOD at the time, DOW now. The same thing happened. And so 10 years later, President Trump came in the first time, Trump 1.0, and he said, Oh, wow, we are really behind everybody in this. We've got to catch up fast. And that was right. He was absolutely right about that. And he said, we've got to catch up fast. So an order was given out of the office of the Secretary of Defense, no new materials. We only want to fly legacy because legacy has been proven. And if it doesn't perform as well as we need, we'll just engineer around it. We'll take a systems engineering approach because we got to get these things airborne fast. And that haste put all the advances, it basically took 35 years of advanced materials and pushed it off the cliff in terms of being considered for those programs. I understand why that was done, but I think in the long run it's very short-sighted. But that's under Biden. Interestingly enough, a lot of things changed under Biden from Trump 1.0. But a lot of things just went on autopilot, and our developmental work and hypersonics just kept moving along. And pretty much under the same guidelines, they started looking at a few things, you know, dipping their toe in the water on a few advanced materials that had been around a long, long time. I think only now they're beginning to realize that if you want to go Mach 12 in a hypersonic cruise missile, you're going to need some new stuff.

Dr. Leeanne Aguilar 11:23

Yes, exactly. So, like you you mentioned, I mean, it it's short-sighted in the way that, I mean, for the time being, there's a certain administration, they're saving the costs and they're doing what's what's safe and moving forward. But in the long run, we may fall behind because we don't have new RD letting us know what's going to work for new innovation and the future.

SPEAKER_00 11:49

Yeah, I mean, I think that's a risk. It's certainly a risk. Before you need Mach 12 hypersonic aeroshells and nose tips uh for a hypersonic cruise missile, that's a particular class of hypersonic weapons. Uh, there's two other classes that already go at extremely high velocity that innovative new materials like supercarbon composite technologies is offering can make a big difference. Hypersonic cruise missiles, the biggest limitation there is right now is propulsion. Being able to propel these missiles at greater than Mach 5. And you saw uh there was work just demonstrated recently with Lockheed and GE on a new propulsion system that's getting up to about Mach 5 and 6. Rotating detonation scramjet, I believe, is the technology. So they're making progress, and they're gonna make a lot more progress. A rotating detonation rocket engine will be able to get to much higher speeds, and that definitely is gonna need a new class of materials in what they're using today. Yeah. So it's it's coming. It it's inevitable that if we want to have weapon systems that far outpace our adversaries, we're gonna have to move in this direction.

Dr. Leeanne Aguilar 13:10

So now you specialize in the 2200 to 5,000 degree Fahrenheit regime where normal materials engineering breaks down. When you evaluate a candidate material for an extreme environment, what are the non-negotiables like oxidation resistance, ablation behavior, creep, thermal shock, emissivity, microstructural stability? Where does your mind go first?

SPEAKER_00 13:35

Well, the first and foremost is ablation resistance. In other words, when you're heating something to 5,000 F, uh, how fast does it ablate in the mission environment, whatever that is? Uh but the second is uh reusability. You know, how uh one of the keys to ablation resistance in some materials, like in Matx uh carbon zirconium oxycarbide, uh carbon zero, as we call it. This is a straight nose tip. It's designed to go to 5,000 F for uh for a missile. Um one of the reasons that material has an extremely low ablation rate, almost it's really reusable material. It would be classified as a non-ablative, uh as opposed to the heat shield on Orion, which is highly ablative. Yeah, two different ways of dealing with lots of heat, uh, both very good, but depends on what you're trying to do. For uh a system where you want shape to be maintained, like a nose tip, and you want to fly with as low a weight penalty as possible, then you want a non-ablative material. Truth is, everything ablates. There is no such thing as zero. Uh and, you know, I mean, we mathematically we say there's infinity as well, but you know, everything asymptotically approaches infinity, and everything asymptotically approaches zero. But in any event, to have a non-ablative heat shield, one of the things you need built in is some form of protection. And that's key, and that's one of the innovations of Matx Carbon Zero heat shield technology, is it forms a very thin, highly adherent, and very protective zirconia layer on the outer surface that helps uh reduce any further recession. As far as high temperature creep, that's very important. But when you're looking at a heat shield material and you say, okay, I need it to withstand 5000 F. Well, here's a piece of material. As you see, it has a thickness. This is about a half an inch. This is carbon carbon. Anyway, this surface gets super hot. This surface is pretty cold. Most of your material that bears the load as a structural heat shield is much cooler than 5,000 F. So that's not as big a deal as people think it is. But where the action is, is on the surface. That's where things ablate. That's where things don't ablate. It depends on the material and its properties.

Dr. Leeanne Aguilar 16:30

Okay. So you've created a heat shield, though, by putting additional material on the outside that helps prevent that.

SPEAKER_00 16:39

Actually, I don't put additional material on the outside. It's engineered to form this protective zirconia coating in use in situ.

Dr. Leeanne Aguilar 16:50

Oh, okay. So tell me about that.

SPEAKER_00 16:53

Yeah. Well, zirconium oxycarbide is the matrix phase. In extreme environments where there's some oxygen around, of course, it's going to form an oxide zirconia, in this case, a stabilized zirconia, that becomes a very thin, very protective adherent film. If you get some form of damage to the surface, like a scrape, well, it's going to form new protective zirconia on the surface. Much like it's it's basically engineered to be like stainless steel. You know, we all deal with stainless steel. Most people don't realize that stainless steel, because of the chromium that's in the alloy, forms a chromia layer that's thin, it's transparent, you can't even see it. But that's why it's stainless, is because of the chromia. Now, what's great about it is if you should uh wipe that off or scrape it off, the material that's exposed underneath immediately heals and forms new chromia to produce. Which is why stainless stays stainless.

Dr. Leeanne Aguilar 18:02

Uh-huh. So interesting. Okay. So for ceramic matric composites and UHT systems, what tends to be the real limiting factor in the field? The fiber, the matrix chemistry, the interphase, joining coatings, or manufacturing variability, and how do you prioritize trade-offs?

SPEAKER_00 18:24

Yep. Um, I think the biggest limitation for certain applications is temperature. The challenge for those of us who develop and make materials for customers is the insane regulatory environment required to qualify anything to fly on anything. We have become a horribly bloated bureaucratic state in this country. It's just you understand that for human passenger travel, like an aircraft that you and I will get on to go to a conference or go see our relatives. You know, obviously you want to make sure everything's safe. You want to make sure all the parts that are critical on that vehicle aren't going to catastrophically break, endanger our lives, and so forth. Got it. We all know that. For military hardware, the Pentagon has become, in the last 30, 40 years, insanely risk adverse. This has bloated the cost of all of these defense programs. They take decades instead of years. They cost hundreds of billions instead of a few billion. And it takes forever to get innovation fielded. We talk about the incredible technologies that are in the field today that we're seeing, you know, like the B-2 bomber and how it effectively neutralized the Iranian nuclear sites, you know, last summer. And we talk about, you know, when they captured Maduro, there was a sonic weapon that was used to paralyze the soldiers, the Venezuelan soldiers whose job it was to protect Maduro. Well, they were on the ground grabbing their ears because of this sonic weapon. Well, that's new. At least it's new for us, you know, to know about. And it's great. You know, the B-2 bomber is ahead of anything anybody else has, and that's wonderful. But that's old technology. That was commissioned in the 80s by Ronald Reagan. Right. Most people listening to your podcast weren't even born during Ronald Reagan's presidency. Um I'm obviously a little older. Ronald Reagan was the first president I got to vote for in 1980. Anyway, the thing is, this is cutting edge compared to what a lot of countries have, but it's still way behind what we could have. And, you know, if you've ever been to Dayton, Ohio, which you probably wouldn't go there unless you were going to visit the Air Force Research Lab at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, which I've done many, many times. They have an Air Force museum. It's very fascinating for people who are aviation buffs and geeks, people like me, to go through it and see the. They have every plane that was ever commissioned by the Air Force from the very first planes up to the present day. But one of the things that struck me, you look at the pace of change in aviation in the teens, the 20s, the 30s, the 40s, the 50s, and 60s, it's remarkable. They would go from a blank sheet of paper and an idea to having a prototype at a base flying. In two years. We can't do that in 20 now. Wow. Something's wrong here. Right.

Dr. Leeanne Aguilar 22:07

And is that because of budget primarily?

SPEAKER_00 22:11

Well, no, I it maybe uses the rationale for it, but it's not. In fact, what's going on is actually bloating the budget. Why should an F-22 Raptor cost $160 million each? Half a billion dollars for a fighter plane. I mean, yes, it's a wonderful plane. Lockheed Martin did a phenomenal job, yes. But it's half a billion dollars for a plane. That's ridiculous. But it's all because of the sunk costs that have gone into developing it. When it takes you 20 years to develop and field an aircraft, your per unit cost is going to be prohibitive. Right. That's part of the problem. And the whole, you know, Eisenhower warned about the military-industrial complex in his one of his parting speeches as president. And he was right, it was already starting. And I think things are changing. We're seeing a lot more technology being pioneered by newer companies, younger companies in the private sector. And I think it is starting to force a change in the bureaucracy. And I know Secretary of War Heggseth has been pushing to overhaul the defense procurement process from the ground up because things are taking too long, they're costing too much, and it's compromising our readiness when we need these platforms.

Dr. Leeanne Aguilar 23:43

Yeah. So what's the solution? How do we get out of that rut and speed up the process?

SPEAKER_00 23:50

Well, that has to be done at the White House Pentagon level and matriculate down through the contract specialists. I mean, when I got a contract from DOD, you deal with a contract specialist, and it's insane the amount of paperwork is required for even a small contract. And it's a very old-fashioned process to do these contracts, to execute them. And we have a lot of what are called DFARs, defense, finance, accounting regulations, and FARs. And at the end of a contract, you will see pages, they're just lists with DFAR numbers and then far numbers. And all of these regulations are included by reference in the contract. And you are required, because you sign your name, you're required to abide by all of this stuff. The amount of paperwork and overhead involved in doing a defense contract compared with working with a private sector company on a program. I have quite a few private sector clients, customers right now. It's night and day. If you are a defense contractor, you have to have people just to handle this. When Mattech was 12 people, I had one person who did nothing but contracts and regulatory affairs. Yeah, one whole job just to handle that. And it it bloated our overhead rate tremendously. So we need to cut a lot of that.

Dr. Leeanne Aguilar 25:22

Now you've been deeply involved in UHT fibers and composites for demanding applications like hypersonic TPS and propulsion. How do you translate lab success into flight credible reliability, especially when the failure modes are coupled?

SPEAKER_00 25:37

It's really difficult. You can succeed at doing something at a lab bench, and then when you try to translate it into the macro scale and into production, uh it's a it's a whole different ball game. And we see this in medical research all the time. We're constantly seeing a professor at a university somewhere did an experiment with a mouse and he cured diabetes. Yay! And then 20 years later, you're still waiting for that. Well, there were some fundamental problems with whatever it was that prevented it from ever getting scaled up.

Dr. Leeanne Aguilar 26:16

Right.

SPEAKER_00 26:17

And you see that in advanced materials a lot. When you develop something that is very hard to make on a small scale, and then uh you try to make it in bulk and the properties degrade, or there's a fundamental supply chain issue, uh, or one of the ingredients is prohibitively expensive, and on and on. I mean, fortunately, I've had 35 years of experience in dealing with that sort of stuff. And so when I come up with a solution to a problem, what I've tried to do is look at it from the point of point of view of, well, I'm gonna need to make this in bulk. And if it's not me, it's gonna be someone else who's licensed or working with me. So I need to start with an approach that is inherently scalable. Uh today, as important as it's been in the past, but today, more important, fixed supply chain. If there's a key ingredient in uh, well, let's take carbon Xerox as an ultra-high temperature composite. There are certain key ingredients uh without which you can't make the Xerox matrix. Well, turns out those key ingredients are all made in the United States in bulk today. All the key ingredients I need for that zirconium oxycarbide matrix, I can acquire in literally freight car loads. If your facility has a railroad track uh coming up to a dock at receiving day, then you can buy huge freight car loads of the material and bring it to your loading dock. So it's got scale, it's 100% domestic to start with. So scaling this up from that point of view, at least, is built into the technology.

unknown 28:14

Right.

SPEAKER_00 28:14

Same thing when I developed much more recently the fast densified carbon-carbon. It's relying on a supply chain that is already scaled up, domestic, and technology that's already scale a bowl uh uh to make the material.

Dr. Leeanne Aguilar 28:32

Yeah. So considering these from the very beginning, from the RD stage is is important, is what I'm hearing. I think it is considerative.

SPEAKER_00 28:39

Yeah. I think it's very important.

Dr. Leeanne Aguilar 28:41

Right. And do people do you see think about that a lot from the start? Or is that something that people tend to put off and then realize it's it's going to be cost prohibitive or they're not going to have access to the materials to scale?

SPEAKER_00 28:56

Well, I think industry people think about it a lot more than uh say university researchers. And you would expect that. Right. Because industry makes things in bulk, usually. In a university research, what what's the primary goal of a successful professor? It's training young people to tackle the problems of the future. And it's also making discoveries if they're re if they're in a research university that does a lot of research. They're making discoveries that may not translate into a practical product for 10, 20 years. And that's okay. We have a need for that kind of forward-thinking innovation. There's nothing wrong with that. I think sometimes they want to move it from the university lab bench into production, they think it's valuable, and they wonder why, for the most part, is industry just not interested now, is because it's not mature enough. Right. The way we look at a technology is we rate it as on a uh TRL, technology readiness level scale, one to ten, and an MRL, manufacturing readiness level on a scale of one to ten. And in industry, we look at that very closely, very carefully. And a lot of the stuff uh when it's an initial development, it has a very low TRL and MRL.

Dr. Leeanne Aguilar 30:24

Yeah. Yeah, and that makes sense. So at the university levels, it's conceptual, like you said, the focus is on creating new innovations and discoveries. But then when you take it into industry, it's a different set of considerations that they have. They're looking to how practical it is, how affordable, how scalable, and how can they move it into the manufacturing process.

SPEAKER_00 30:45

The term we just use to describe that uh gap between where, say, a professor or an inventor thinks they should leave off and industry should pick up, and where industry thinks it needs to be brought to before it's willing to pick it up, that gap is called the valley of death.

Dr. Leeanne Aguilar 31:10

Yes, the infamous valley of death. Now, Dr. Pope, you've developed multiple technology families. Which material platform do you think the market still underestimates and why?

SPEAKER_00 31:23

The biggest thing is not listening to the customer. If you're trying to promote your own solution to a problem that the customer doesn't think it has or isn't aware that it has, it's the difference between technology push and market pull. That's the key. I'm pursuing what I think is the biggest market opportunity. The technologies I've developed that I'm not pushing right now, there's a reason. It's a technology push, not a market pull. And I've looked at it and I'm not sure where the market pull would come from. If you're an inventor of materials or anything, I mean, look, Thomas Edison had over a thousand patents to his name.

Dr. Leeanne Aguilar 32:06

Right.

SPEAKER_00 32:07

Yet the handful of things he's renowned for are probably less than a you know 20 patents, maybe. Uh-huh. So what happened to the other 980? They didn't go anywhere. Right, right. It's better to ask the market what it needs and try to fulfill it. One of the perfect example, I mean timely, is the fast densified carbon-carbon composites. The biggest thing that for me as a material scientist, I'm promoting are the benefits of the technology. Carbon-carbon's around. It's a $20 billion a year industry today. It could be larger. I'm promoting that fast densified carbon-carbon will have a higher wear resistance for aircraft brakes, higher ablation resistance for nose tips and missile propulsion. And that's great because that's all true. But when you ask people, and for the last three, four months I've been talking, talking, talking to people, privately, of course, and you ask them what do they want? They want cheaper and faster. Oh, yeah, we'd love better. Better is wonderful. You've got a better carbon-carbon? Yeah. But is it cheaper and faster? Because that's what we're struggling with. The time it takes to make the parts and the cost it takes to make the parts. So uh one of the things I'm announcing it on your podcast for the first time for Supercarbon Composites Technologies, is we do have a way to make carbon-carbon cheaper, faster, and better all at the same time.

Dr. Leeanne Aguilar 33:48

All right. So tell me, tell me about your your technology and the opportunity it brings and the benefits.

SPEAKER_00 33:56

Well, the benefits of supercarbon composites are, as I mentioned, much greater wear resistance for things like aircraft brakes, which translates to time on wing, which is something airlines really care about. Aircraft that are sitting in the maintenance hangar are not generating revenue for the airlines. So the more time they have to be out of service for maintenance, inspection, repair, replacements, the more time they're not making money. And the airlines, as you know, is a very competitive industry. The margins are pretty low. So it's a huge benefit to the airlines who are the consumers of landing gear assemblies that have carbon-carbon. Now, what do the manufacturers of carbon-carbon brake material want? Well, they want an advantage, a technology that makes it cheaper and faster to produce the same brakes they're making now. Oh, we can make them last longer. Well, that's also a competitive advantage. But we don't want to pay extra for that. Most of the time, industry does not want to pay extra for improved performance. It's one of those things. You say, Well, how can that be? And it's like, for the most part, it's true. There are exceptions, but mostly they don't want to pay extra for the performance. But they sure will pay extra if they can make the product cheaper and faster. Right. That's what they want.

Dr. Leeanne Aguilar 35:27

Yeah. Now you've taken 25 products from RD to market, which is rare in deep tech. What does your commercialization playbook look like? Qualification pathway, early adopter selection, manufacture scale strategy, and risk retirement.

SPEAKER_00 35:43

All of the above, of course, but I think identifying what the real market for the technology is right at the beginning is first and foremost. There's no point inventing a solution to a problem that doesn't exist or isn't perceived to exist. You need to solve the problems that the industry is asking for. A perfect example is a product line that I developed at Mattech, fluorescent reference standards. I was approached in the mid-90s by a large company that does assays. When you go get blood tests, uh, particularly the type of blood tests that use polymerized chain reaction, PCR, a viral load detecting HIV, cytomegalavirus, hepatitis B, even if you want to do detailed tests for uh COVID, and many other things, you use PCR, and it's a fluorescence-based assay, and uh, which is wonderful. These machines that this company had, you load a tray, a micro-tider plate with 96 wells in it, with all your little tests, 96 individual tests. You load it in the machine, it goes through all this cycling, and then uh you you know a day or so later, uh you get the results because it has to grow, uh, grow the antigen that it's looking for. Now, what the problem was is they it because it's a medical test, they need some way of referencing it. They need a standard because these machines read these 96 little wells on this plastic tray. Well, how do we know the reading numerically is the same across it? Well, it turns out the instrument was 40% off from one end of the plate to the other. Wow. Yeah, that's pretty big. They didn't I had to make a fluorescence reference standard, a material that would last for at least three to five years. Turns out it's indefinitely, that was uniform, so that there is a coefficient of variation of the absolute intensity of the fluorescence of this tray of uh 1% across the plate. And I developed it and uh launched it as a product. It became uh uh manufactured under GMP Good Manufacturing Practices, which is part of uh FDA, uh licensed by the state of California Food and Drug Branch, and also class one uh 510K examp medical device by the FDA, blah, blah, blah. A lot of quality control management system had to be implemented to do that. Anyway, uh, this became a tremendous product line and uh sold uh over 10,000 or more units of these things, and their price at the time between six hundred and eight hundred dollars, even as high as twelve hundred dollars a unit. And that sounds like you know, okay, that's a lot of money, right? But they lasted indefinitely.

Dr. Leeanne Aguilar 39:09

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 39:10

And uh I sold that entire product line to a company in the UK, uh, which makes them today. Uh, and that that was about 20 of the products.

Dr. Leeanne Aguilar 39:22

Yeah. Well, did you you still have the license for that particular I sold the technology for okay? So the whole technology got it. And did you develop it for them or or was it something you had you had already you just found the buyer?

SPEAKER_00 39:38

No, no, I just uh actually the buyer found me.

Dr. Leeanne Aguilar 39:41

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 39:42

They you see I had developed the technology in the 90s, put it into commercialization by the late 90s, uh doing a lot of sales on it, and I had a whole separate little unit of mattech dedicated only to that product line. And that's great. Uh but the rest of MatTech was working in high-temperature aerospace defense materials and growing in those areas, and this technology was very different from everything else we worked on. And so this British company that makes their specialty is nothing but standards, optical standards and other kinds of standards. This was perfect fit for this was right in the wheelhouse of what that company did as its primary mission, and it was off to the side for mastering. Okay, so it just fit fit better with what they are they were up to, and so they purchased that part of your exact and it was a fully mature technology in production for years and years. Uh, one of the things we ended up having to do is recertification. A company would send a tray back, and for a few hundred dollars, we would recalibrate it, certify it, and send it back. And we made a lot of money on that. The materials were designed to be basically stable forever. Uh I had standards that I'd sold. Well, now it would be 30 years ago, that were being recalibrated for the sixth time. And the standard had actually passed through the hands of a dozen different people at that company over time, had inherited the standard anyway.

Dr. Leeanne Aguilar 41:25

Now you negotiated multi-million dollar licensing agreements and built a significant IP portfolio. How do you decide when to manufacture in-house versus license? And what signals tell you which path creates the most value and the fastest adoption?

SPEAKER_00 41:40

Uh my rule of thumb has been um tech would only manufacture in-house things that were low volume and high value added. Any technology that needed uh very high volume uh was a candidate for licensing and tech transfer to a you know a really large company. And the reason for that is pretty obvious. As a small company, you don't have the facilities infrastructure for high volume production. Also, a state like California, where Mattux's always been based, we are not the ideal place to do high-volume manufacturing. Our labor rates are much higher, real estate is higher, regulatory compliance is higher. Everything that's the cost to doing business in California is higher than other states. The only way you can make money in California is stuff that's very high value. I mean, you'd see the tremendous innovation in California. It's all things that are high value added. You know, the latest AI software algorithm entertainment industry has always been pretty high value added. And you look at the cost of movies to make them. But even that has the thing is, even as companies get more mature, you notice a lot of high-tech companies have moved to Texas and Florida and other places because it's just too it's gotten prohibitive here. So that's always been a practical consideration. The other is that I had no desire to have a factory with 400 workers and you know 100,000 square feet.

Dr. Leeanne Aguilar 43:24

That's just not that's right. Okay, so it was an intentional choice. He focused on creating more innovation instead of scaling what you had. And so once it reached a point where it needed to be scaled, you would just sell the technology instead of taking the code.

SPEAKER_00 43:41

Yeah, exactly.

Dr. Leeanne Aguilar 43:42

Great. So for companies trying to buy or license advanced materials technology, what do they often misunderstand about readiness? The gap between a promising material and a production grade supply chain.

SPEAKER_00 43:54

Well, it depends. Most serious companies that have experience do understand pretty Much everything you just listed. Some companies, not as much. And I think sometimes they underestimate what it's going to take to move from the lab bench into the production environment. Or put another way, they think it can be done a lot cheaper than it really can be done. And so when they find out the cost of things, they're surprised. Uh I said, well, you shouldn't be, but okay.

Dr. Leeanne Aguilar 44:28

Right, exactly. So is that that's part of the process, then consulting, getting them just really familiar with what they're actually looking at cost-wise.

SPEAKER_00 44:37

Sometimes it takes a bit of hand holding and educating, which is part of business development. I mean, that's that's part of the job. Yeah, this is probably gonna take just a little more than you think it will, but here's here's the payoff. Here's what you're gonna get that your competitors won't get. And that's very important.

Dr. Leeanne Aguilar 44:56

Now, a lot of organizations talk about innovation, but procurement and qualification can slow everything down. How do you help large organizations move through gate reviews and compliance without diluting the technical intent of the material solution?

SPEAKER_00 45:11

It's very hard to do. When you're talking about large defense contractors, um, you know, the Lockheeds, the Raytheons, the Boeings, the Northrop Grummons, the others, particularly the the big four contractors, they have a bureaucracy that is so entrenched. Don't think you're gonna change it. You just gotta live with it, work around it, because it's just it's just part of the culture, and it's just entrenched. And there was a time 50 plus years ago, we didn't have three or four massive defense contractors. We had 50. Really? There was a hell of a lot more competition when DOD wanted an aircraft, there were many companies lining up with their proposals of what to do. So everybody had to compete, and it was an aggressive competition back in the day. But over the decades, there's been a lot more tremendous consolidation, and so there's less competition, and I think and it's not to say that anybody's bad or evil, I think it's just the nature of the beast. When you get down to only three or four competitors at best, that to that's not competition anymore. Because that's too few players to keep track of. You know, I'm not saying anybody colludes. There's no nefarious cigar smoke meeting behind closed doors with a bunch of old guys conspiring to, you know, this sort of thing. No, no, no. But everybody knows what's going on with everybody else. They all look down each other's knickers. Yeah, can't yell, particularly since it takes so long to get anything done. You got plenty of time to know what your competitor's doing. You know, you can't pull like a Howard Hughes back in the 30s and 40s and suddenly unveil a brand new aircraft that nobody saw coming. It doesn't happen anymore. Uh and so as a result, not saying that there's anything nefarious going on, it's just the way it is, there's a complacency.

Dr. Leeanne Aguilar 47:20

Right. I was gonna say that true spirit of competition is is gone then.

SPEAKER_00 47:24

Yeah, when you have only a couple of players that are competing.

Dr. Leeanne Aguilar 47:28

That makes sense.

SPEAKER_00 47:28

Yeah. You really have competition, you might as well only have one at that point. Yeah. I'm not advocating that at all. I think we should go in the other direction.

Dr. Leeanne Aguilar 47:37

Sure, sure. It just happens, right?

SPEAKER_00 47:40

Yeah. Yeah.

Dr. Leeanne Aguilar 47:42

Now you've said that modern constraints and aerospace and advanced systems or materials problems. Where do you see the next major breakthroughs coming from? New chemistries, better architectures, better processing scale, or smarter qualification models.

SPEAKER_00 47:58

Of the the five things you listed, I'd say the last two. I don't think we need new materials. Maybe new to some people because they didn't hear about it before, but in terms of being truly new, I don't think we need new materials. We have so many materials already that could be immensely impactful. I even have a few. And we just haven't exploited them yet. We haven't leveraged them anywhere near how we should or could to get more performance out of these systems. You can get away with a system engineering approach to demonstrate an engine, a propulsion system of some sort. And maybe the materials are not nowhere near optimized, but you're only going to fly it for a minute as part of a test program. You don't need to spend the money on the material demonstrate, because you're not demonstrating materials, you're demonstrating a design. You're demonstrating a system engineering approach that you want to show works. It's a new propulsion system, a new design for a propulsion system. But if you want it to fly reliably and manufacture involved, then you're going to need to apply the new materials. I think that's where a huge opportunity is right now. People are starting to wake up to the fact that they need things that are better.

Dr. Leeanne Aguilar 49:20

Yeah, right. So finally, for engineers, founders, and RD leaders who want to build enduring careers in advanced materials, what's your best advice on developing technical depth and the business fluency needed to get real-world adoption?

SPEAKER_00 49:35

That's another big question. I think in the universities, one thing you're learning theory, and that's great. And you're learning your phase diagrams. As a materials engineer, I had to memorize the iron carbon phase diagram and a lot of others. And that's great. One thing you need more of as a student is hands-on. I think for the university is, of course, a great opportunity to learn principles and theory of material science, but you need hands-on. One of the greatest opportunities I had starting as a freshman is I was hired into a research lab, and I started out uh literally washing test tubes and beakers when I first joined uh Professor McKenzie's UCLA, uh, and quickly uh became an assistant for a grad student. And I spent so much time in the lab, as much time in the lab as I spent in uh classes, and I started getting my own projects, and I was the youngest uh student to have his own project with my professor. I was a junior and I had a NASA project, uh, and usually that was reserved for doctoral students. And I remember the day he came to me and gave me the project. He says, Ed, I have a program that started six months ago. It requires a grad student, a postdoc, and an undergraduate. I have nobody. I'm giving this project to you. Wow, you've got six months to do something with it. Anyway, I did. And it ended up being the first paper I ever gave at a professional meeting while I was still an undergraduate. And I took it to it like a duck to water. And of course, by the time I was a grad student, I was a royal pain in the ass to the professors because they would be talking about certain things that I knew a lot about, hands on. And uh, you know, they'd say something, and I said, actually, if you do it this way, yeah, uh, this is what you'll get. Right. And you know, anyway. So hands on, but I don't I I don't think that being an entrepreneur is right for everybody.

SPEAKER_01 51:53

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 51:53

Uh there's a reason only 2% of the population are leaders. It's because it it it it takes, not saying that I'm a leader, but I've survived. Uh it takes a certain type of personality, and not everybody has that.

Dr. Leeanne Aguilar 52:07

Yeah, and it's it's a lot more than just doing the thing, and it's it's more than the engineering or the technology or the material science, right? It's it's running a business, it's doing all of the the other things and and managing people. So, right, it's it's a different set of skills. And I I do agree though, the hands-on on experience. I mean, there's no substitute for that. I mean, there's conceptual knowledge and and uh theory, like you mentioned, but when it comes down to to practice and implementation, that's a whole nother ball game. And you gain so much more insight and and depth of understanding by actually getting your your hands dirty, right?

SPEAKER_00 52:44

And getting in there and trying things. I've been told many times I'd I'd pass an idea in front of a grad student or postdoc when I was younger, and I said, nope, that's not gonna work. Here's why it's not gonna work. Okay. And I go in the lab and I do it, and it works. And I said, and here's what you missed. Here's why it worked instead of not working.

Dr. Leeanne Aguilar 53:07

Right.

SPEAKER_00 53:08

I was like, oh well, you know you know how to do that because you work with your hands, you observe with your own eyes what is happening, and you gain so much. AI can't do any of that.

Dr. Leeanne Aguilar 53:20

Right. Yeah, no, right. Well, and it's drawing from a database of what's already been and what's already has been. I mean, it doesn't create from from nothing, it creates from the existing knowledge. Uh right.

SPEAKER_00 53:32

So exactly. And what it doesn't have, it hallucinates. So there you go.

Dr. Leeanne Aguilar 53:37

Yeah, that and that too. So you've got to know the difference. Well, Dr. Pope, thank you for joining me. Your work is a powerful reminder that materials aren't just inputs. They're often the boundary between what's imaginable and what's achievable. For listeners who want to learn more, where can they reach you?

SPEAKER_00 53:54

Well, I can be reached on LinkedIn. I have a profile there. Just type in Dr. Ed Pope, and I think I'll pop up. Uh Mattech has a website, www.mattechsm.com. And scct has a website, www.supercarbon.us. And there's a uh a page on that website where you can send me a message and I'll get back to you.

Dr. Leeanne Aguilar 54:24

Excellent. Well, thank you again. It's it's been great. I really enjoyed our conversation.

SPEAKER_00 54:29

Thank you so much. Likewise.

Dr. Leeanne Aguilar 54:30

Thank you. For our listeners, if you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe to Industry Ignited and tune in for our next conversation with another leader shaping the future of industry, manufacturing, and innovation. Until next time, stay bold, stay curious, and keep igniting industry.