This Airborne Robot Pickup Truck Could Be A Lifeline For U.S. Troops In War With China
As the Pentagon gears up for the possibility of a war with China over Taiwan, it’s grappling with a thorny problem: how to get supplies across thousands of miles of water to U.S. forces battling an enemy with an arsenal of long-range missiles designed to destroy lumbering American cargo planes and ships.
Grid Aero believes it has a solution: split up the cargo across a fleet of cheap, small, autonomous airplanes and make it a losing proposition economically to shoot them down with $1 million to $2 million anti-aircraft missiles.
Plenty of Silicon Valley startups are trying to pitch the Department of Defense on new ways of moving troops and supplies around. Grid Aero CEO Arthur Dubois has worked at two: Xwing, which aimed to graft a robot brain onto existing airplanes to allow them to fly without a pilot, and the company that acquired it last year, Joby Aviation, which is developing an electric plane capable of taking off and landing like a helicopter. Neither approach offers the right combination of range, capacity and affordability, according to Dubois. That’s why he founded Grid Aero.
“The opportunity that we saw here is if we built the platform just for cargo, just built to really flood the battle space with many, many assets, we could drop the price significantly,” said Dubois.