🔷 Your mission: Read. Enjoy. Learn. Share. Don’t forget the last step—it’s what keeps us going.
🤣 Today is National Rum Day and National Joke Day, so here’s a twofer:
A polar bear walks into a bar and says to the bartender:
“I’ll have a rum …………………. and coke.”
The bartender asks, “What’s with the big pause?”
The bear looks down and shrugs. “I was born with them.”
In That Number
3.84:1
Avidrone Aerospace won 1st place in the DARPA Lift Challenge by carrying a 112.4-pound payload using a 29.3-pound drone, achieving a remarkable 3.84:1 payload-to-aircraft-weight ratio.
No surprise, a helicopter is the ideal solution.
On the Radar
LMCO
Pentagon Demands More Munitions. Deputy Defense Secretary Steve Feinberg gave industry 21 days to propose faster deliveries and higher production for critical weapons. Separately but definitely related, he also requested that defense industry board members come to the Pentagon for briefings on threats, munitions, and inventories—an unusually direct appeal to the people responsible for corporate capital allocation.
The Merge’s Take: The irony: DoW buys for peacetime efficiency, is demanding industry rapidly create capacity to surge production, which lack capacity largely because DoW regulations punish industry for having excess capacity. FAR 31.205-17 makes unfunded, deliberately maintained surge capacity economically unattractive because it makes it an “unallowable cost,” meaning the company absorbs 100% of the cost while it sits idle waiting for use. Calling in boards makes sense—they approve factory investments—but industry needs both durable demand and separate agreements for “allowable costs” for surge production expansion (something the same FAR permits).
LMCO
Golden Dome Faces FY27 Funding Cliff. Gen. Michael Guetlein warned Golden Dome could stop in October without new funding. About 90% of its initial $25B is obligated. DoD wants $17.5B for FY27, but less than $400M is in the base budget; roughly 97% depends on the proposed $350B “Recon 3.0” reconciliation package Congress has not approved.
The Merge's Take: This is a politicized, self-inflicted budgeting problem. Golden Dome’s initial $25B “down payment” via the 2025 reconciliation One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Now the follow-on payments are coming due for the $185B program, and the plan is…to put 97% of the next payment in another reconciliation bill—one that is politically improbable to pass in its current form? With NFL pre-season underway, we’ll use ESPN’s catchphrase: "C'mon Man!" Watch whether Golden Dome migrates into baseline appropriations in the coming months during appropriation negotiations.
Boeing
Stingray Status. When we last covered MQ-25 in May, the first production-representative aircraft had flown, and fielding (IOC) had slipped to 2029. Since then, the tanker drone cleared Milestone C and entered low-rate initial production (LRIP). The Navy is requesting $1.75B in FY27, with roughly half of that for procurement of 3 more aircraft.
The Merge's Take: Between now and February, MQ-25 must expand its flight envelope and mature the aircraft/UMCS integration enough to go to sea. The first CVN flight is scheduled for February 2027 and is the next big proof point: successful carrier launch/recovery moves Stingray from “drone that flies” to a “carrier-capable drone”—and de-risks the same carrier infrastructure the Navy will eventually use for Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA). The clock is ticking…
TRIVIA
On August 16, 1960, U.S. Air Force Captain Joseph Kittinger Jr. made aviation history when he free-fall parachuted out of a balloon gondola at 102,800 feet—19.5 miles above Earth. Why did he do it?
A) daredevil on military leave
B) testing supersonic effects on humans
C) testing egress systems for high-altitude pilots
USAF
They Said It
“The important thing here is continuing what the RACER program started, which was like, ‘What’s the best you can do in off-road autonomy?’”
— Michael Rose, Chief Technology Officer for CPE Mission Autonomy, regarding the Army’s decision to transition its unmanned ground vehicle testing from Infantry Squad Vehicles (ISVs) to Polaris MRZR platforms.
Knowledge Bombs
Archer acquired 3 Boeing subsidiaries (Wisk, Insitu, Skygrid)
Epirus won an $11M Marine Corps contract for high-powered microwave systems
Cambridge Aerospace raised a $300M Series C at a $3.4B valuation
AeroVironment won a $400M Army contract for counter-drone laser systems
Lockheed Martin launched Strigo, a set of modular sensors, datalinks, and seekers
Joby Aviation acquired Resonant Sciences for $500 million
Neros raised a $250M Series C at a $2.5B post-money valuation
AEVEX is acquiring BlackSea Technologies for $650M
The Army started a competition for new long-range missiles
The Navy & DIU announced a $50M plus-up to the RIMES program for Shield AI’s X-BAT
The Pentagon's interceptor vendors all passed the first Golden Dome milestone
Impulse Space won a $28M SBIR contract extension from the Space Force
Heart Aerospace completed the first flight of the world’s largest electric aircraft
Code Metal won an $80M DoW contract to for its modeling & sim platform
The Army admitted it used AI to weigh a procurement decision, which hallucinated to invent a weakness in a bidder's proposal, and no human ever checked it (they are being sued)
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ANSWER
C) Project Excelsior III was testing high-altitude egress systems. Captain Joseph Kittinger ascended to the edge of space in a pressurized gondola lifted by a massive helium balloon and stepped off at 102,800 feet. During his 4:36 freefall, he reached speeds of 614 mph—nearly the speed of sound. The total descent took over 13 minutes, and his records for the highest parachute jump and fastest freefall stood for 52 years until they were finally broken in 2012.
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