A Ukrainian manufacturer took a ballistic missile from nothing to its first combat launch in a little over two years, which its chief executive said is the fastest development of such a weapon on record, the Apex Europe conference in London heard on Wednesday.
Iryna Terekh of Fire Point was asked from the floor how a company that did not exist before 2023 had managed it, and she began with what she had measured it against.
She said: “It is the fastest ever track record for developing a ballistic missile. I made my analysis. The average timeline for such a development is 15 years, the maximum was 30 years, and the minimum before that was seven years.”
“The first flight that we conducted was the last day of February, and three days ago it was the first combat flight. In between there were almost 20 different launches where we tested different things,” she said, adding that the whole programme had taken a little more than two years.
She was candid that the weapon is nowhere near finished, and set out her own measure for when it will be. “I have the rule that the first 100 launches of whatever you are launching, you can still be considered as polishing the product, establishing it to a more mature zone,” she said, describing Ukrainian manufacturing as living permanently at technology readiness level seven because insisting on level nine would cost too much money and too much time.
The method she credited is a document the company wrote at the outset and persuaded the government to sign. “We made a critical decision at the very beginning. We made a book. This book is called the Album of Acceptable Deviations, and we wrote it to present it to our military acceptance unit, who does the quality assurance before it is transported to the unit,” she said.
Inside it, everything that affects the quality of flight goes in one half and everything that does not goes in the other. The acceptance authority signed it, and quality assurance inspections are now carried out against it, which allows the company to use cheap parts wherever the engineering case for an expensive one is absent.
Not everybody who saw the result approved of how it had been built. “Once I saw some critics on the internet, oh my God, you’re using off-the-shelf solutions to fix some of the parts of your missile, your missile should be embarrassed to fly with this detail,” she said. “But this is exactly what cost-effective innovation is. If you are looking for a fancy, high-tech, ideal solution, it will be extremely expensive. You have to be able to be embarrassed as an engineer, but be proud as a Ukrainian providing a good product for a fair price.”
Her description of how the missile was built owes nothing to conventional aerospace practice. “We did it as it’s called in Ukraine from shit and sticks from the beginning, made it fly first and then polished,” she said.
A change in Ukrainian law is what made a company like hers possible in the first place. A bill signed in 2023 set out how new defence products, initially drones, are certified, tested, accepted into the army and procured, with the process published openly. “They took the industry from the shadows and made this a very clear, visible opportunity for any startup that want to try themselves,” she said, and the result is that a drone or a missile can now be certified within about six weeks without dropping safety requirements.
The effect on who builds weapons in Ukraine has been considerable, and she put it in a single sentence. “My generation, for example, who used to build startups, are now building arsenals,” she said.
Precisely echos what I was saying a few days ago about the inability to accept error healing enormous expense on weapons engineering.
Trouble is if you say that there is an immediate pile-on from the ooooohhhhh if that went wrong then XYZ would happen brigade of perfectionists.
Hi Mate, sadly so. Most of that in the UK is driven by the MOD’s risk adverse culture. Which was driven due to the findings of the Haddon-Cave Nimrod report. Since then the MOD has put the risk on the design authority. Which obviously wants the contract, so makes sure the risk is negligible. Only a few companies such as Space X, can afford the fail fast learn fast methodology. Most others have to plod through R&D to make sure their product has a very low risk of failing.
Well of course it has to be said most of the cost of what Space X does is financed by the US taxpayer and exorbitantly so. Having fallen for the endless hype US Govts have due to their own missteps had little choice and in particular thanks to Trump’s unquestioning endorsements keep the billions flowing to try to head off the Chinese so now too big to fail now. The stock market has bought into this bet on the future and Govt backing rather than any actual true company value. Only make that point to suggest it’s not a sensible lead anyone else should follow at scale. However elements of it certainly need to be adopted and Ukraine is showing the way, just as Britain has down so often on a budget in emergencies or when urgently seeking some semblance of independence from the likes of the US. Unfortunately far too often we slip back into complacency and gold plated narrow projects that seem to take forever. Competition for Bae and MBDA in particular can only benefit events and capabilities and new players seem to be providing that, now they need support so that promising starts don’t as per history end up in foreign hands.
At the end of the day risk is about proportionality..
If you have an airline size aircraft with a crew of 15 that will be flying over towns and cities.. it MUST be failsafe.
If you have a ballistic missile your firing once with a single warhead straight at an active enemy… you can accept a level of fuckup if it means you get the weapon in numbers
The Japanese used to make two versions of swords.. the perfect family sword that would be carried for generations and the one battle and its binned sword.
I am hoping we see reports of the first used of the FP-7.X anti-ballistic missile defense missile soon. Even if it is only as capable as the ASTER to start with, I would bet that Ukraine will be able to build interceptors nearly as fast and effective as the PAC-3 ACE within a few years.
Aster is as good as PAC-3. FP7.X will not perform at those levels initially but will get there quickly given how fast their development cycle is, while costing far less. After the war, this and many other Ukrainian armaments will take a growing share of the export market from US and European manufacturers.
perhaps they didn’t have meeting, referrals,costings. more meetings about the new meetings etc…..🤔
But let’s be honest they can’t get close to our ability to invent project names. ‘Freyja’ sounds just so 1940s.
True, but another classic bit of news today. The MOD has announced that the availabilty for the first T31 is now likely to be 2030 plus. No explanation, no costings, no details. So we are on our way to having no fiigates at all at the moment.
There is nothing like a war to make rapid design changes and advancements for the better. Roy Chadwick realised very quickly that the Manchester was a dud, so he made a huge change, lost the daft central tail and added two more engines but not just any engine: a Merlin, no less. Barns Wallace also developed many weapons of note and all within the WW2 timeline. Today, the UK still has brilliant engineers/sientists and hundreds of thousands of computer and gaming nerds who would be a huge asset in rapid electronic counter and defensive system development. I believe this pool of talent has not gone unnoticed by the MOD and is not wasting any time in studying positive ways of recruiting these youngsters if and when the country needs them.
You are right Maurice it’s so typically British to truly only exploit our innovative capabilities when the threat environment demands it and forces hands.
I can be somewhat critical of our universities at times and the failure for Britain and the City to truly invest in and exploit their full potential and don’t talk to me about ‘Humanities’ (if that nebulous subject area still exists) but can’t agree with Oblisk in his generalised criticism. There is immense innovation and capable research going on in our universities, the most efficient electric motors in the world is one such success from that (now being used in aviation and rocketry). Further back the first successful lithium batteries and blue lasers created here and over the last decade advanced ai models and socially interactive robotics, fusion research and a leading position in ion thrusters and micro and cube satellites. All manner of technological advances have transferred from universities in part or full to industry, just sadly too often into the hands of foreign businesses. Demonstrated in recent weeks as another success story in research into innovative fission initiated fusion rocket engines is moving to Texas so as to gain appropriate investment, after a successful demonstration earlier this year was live beamed to Geoff Bezos and co.
So it’s unfair to claim great research isn’t taking place all over the Country, exploiting it well is where we too often fail, certainly until the threat is at the door it seems. Too often the goals are perhaps set too high, distant and unachievable in the budgets and time frames available. Ukraine is showing us the way here as we see in this article. I was happy to see recent news that Bae is looking to keep its lightweight high flying aerial vehicles aloft through beamed energy, technology that comes out of original research into beaming the Sun’s energy to ground stations, which is still far off.
It’s this sort of lateral thinking and staged technological advances we need to perfect and hopefully academics and industry can better gel so greater focus and cooperation is achieved so that more promising research and innovation can escape the lab earlier and start offering returns on investment that our historic shortsightedness has sabotaged, which will hopefully bolster and sustain further start up investment that can stay and thrive in this Country.
Spyinthesky, you are so correct; too many British inventions fail to get funding. Remember Brathwigth’s magnetic Maglev rail system. That said, wartime makes nations selfish and development tends to get the right investment, as losing or even sharing it could have serious consequences. However, I do believe that, due to AI and robotics, the need for some multinational programmes is the only way the UK can obtain the military performance it requires, Tempest being a good example.
And the UK can’t make one and needs to depend on America. It’s embarrassing. This is what happens when your universities is all you have their who agenda is to concentrate on useless social sciences and things like travel and tourism and business studies. Even their engineering courses are 97% academic when those subjects needs to be hands on learning. It’s like reading about boxing for 3 years before you’re allowed to actually go into a boxing gym. Polytechnics need to also brought back asap!
Just prior to ww2 we built an aero engine plant in under a year, it is remarkable what can be done when. You need to and kick the senseless moronic paper shufflers out of the way. How many decades to make a stupid decision about where to put more airport capacity and even more decades since arguing about planning, decades to approve oil and gas pumping from the north sea when it is clear to the most stupid moron we need it and it must be less harmful to the planet than dragging oil and gas half way round the world, how many billions and tears on planning a lower Thames crossing that will never happen. We need to cut the civil service to 1 in 10 of the current number so they don’t have to make work for themselves. We also need to be clear with judges, whether they like it or not if the government says something then that is with the will of the people and will happen
If only the gas and oil situation were that simple, there is no ‘Brent Crude’ anymore yet it remains in name one of the prime price identifiers for oil, why because it represents the type of fuel that it produced wherever it is produced today around the World. The totally ill judged comments by Trump about being self sufficient in oil is patently untrue, why because they too only produced a certain type of oil much of what they need comes from Canada. That can’t be replaced by Venezuelan oil because that is particularly thick and viscous and thus has limited usability even if the US could mythically transfer it to the US any time soon as claimed.
My point is that oil is sold on the World market and has to be shipped dependent on type where it is needed and can be refined into the desired end product. So no drilling more oil in the North sea will have a barely measurable effect on such shipments, or indeed availability of oil and its price in the UK. It simply doesn’t work that way, we didn’t create a sovereign wealth fund like Norway and Arab Countries so our only benefit is taxation which may or may not be offset by subsidies as North Sea drillers were demanding some years back to further drill in new fields. Can’t answer that because the subject hasn’t come into focus in recent times so may have changed. Gas we can take advantage of more easily and have home priorities but sadly our North Sea sector was never a great gas provider ( Norways Arctic sector is far more productive) and now 95% of available supply has been removed so again new exploitation will have limited results. Now I have no problem in fields like Jackdaw that are it’s claimed are ready to go, being exploited, as long as the benefit is real and that tax is real profit till we can replace fossil fuels, no argument with you on that point but it’s going have barely measurable effects on the overall fuel crisis here, again ‘Brent crude’ has its use parameters and not usable for much of the requirement we need.
Where I totally agree with you is the very British capability to build, innovate and succeed under the pressure of threat. As you allude to we built shadow aircraft factories underground and never discovered by the Germans enabling us to out produce them in aircraft by 1942 despite the almost total loss of the Supermarine factories. Within weeks the machinery was retrieved and being set up elsewhere. We exploited all manner of locations from small garages to car factories to build aircraft and engines and built others, some of which remain today building cars. Our invention, innovation and industrial output was incredible in that period, most of allied technological advances from our shores and we still retain much of that capability if let off the leash. Even before the present World War crisis we were in many areas producing bang for buck on limited investment far greater than many competitors including our woefully underfunded space sector who’s profit for every pound/dollar invested far outstrips the US amazingly. In some areas we are remarkably efficient, we just prefer to lament the overspends and self flagellate accordingly.
It is fairly simple. If we dig 1000 barrels worth of oil form the north sea but because we designed our refineries incorrectly and we cant refine it then we sell it. That pays for a 1000 barrels of imported give or take a bit of chage. If we dont drill at all then we pay for the full 1000 from taxes imposed on the working class,