Ursa Major brings hypersonic rocket engine to TBPN: scaling from hundreds to tens of thousands of units with Palantir

Summary

Ursa Major, an aerospace and defense company, is deploying hypersonic rocket technology at a moment of acute urgency in the defense industrial base. Its flagship product, the Hadley engine, is a 5,000-pound thrust-class rocket engine with proven Mach 5 flight capability. Current applications are focused on interceptor technology, with next-generation products prioritizing maneuverability and storable fuels.

Nancy Cable, director of operations at Ursa Major, frames the core challenge as a manufacturing scale problem, not an engineering one. Production currently runs in the tens to hundreds of units per year. The target is tens of thousands of units annually, a two-to-three order-of-magnitude jump that requires a fundamentally different operational infrastructure.

80% of the Hadley engine is metal 3D-printed, including proprietary alloys developed in-house. Physical scaling constraints, primarily manufacturing machines and test infrastructure, represent the longest lead times. But Cable argues the harder constraint is supply chain visibility. In her career, 80% of line-down scenarios have traced back to missing inventory, not hardware complexity. A 1,200-component rocket engine amplifies that risk significantly.

Ursa Major has been a Palantir customer for approximately three months. Early deployments cover engineering and programmatic teams, including inventory modules, engineering line-of-balance tracking, and change management systems. The near-term priority, described as a few weeks in with early positive results, is deploying Palantir as a full manufacturing execution system, consolidating raw material ordering, parts production, and fielded customer data into a single source of truth.

The company currently operates with an ERP and is deliberately choosing Palantir's Ontology layer over adding a separate MES platform. Cable's view is that Palantir's integration capability makes it a better fit than layering in another monolithic system. The SpaceX internal software stack, widely regarded within the industry as the operational gold standard, is the reference point. Ursa Major's stated goal is the same outcome, everything in one place, built on Palantir rather than custom-developed in-house.

Traceability is a specific near-term use case. Data about a single tube, including bend date, material lot, CAD revision, and test history, currently exists across siloed systems and can take hours to retrieve. Consolidating that into real-time, queryable data is positioned as both a quality and a delivery-speed imperative as Ursa Major scales toward government and prime contractor customers.