Defense company Anduril Industries has shown off the effectiveness of its Altius-700M armed drone, which successfully blew up targets in a September test.
The drone is capable of “loitering”—or flying around in midair for over an hour—until told to strike and blow up a target with a warhead.
Anduril, founded by OC entrepreneur Palmer Luckey, last month released a video and photo of the drone homing in on what appears to be a mobile missile carrier, which blew up in a huge fireball.
The company said in a statement that the Altius-700M had hit all targets in the successful tryout.
Anduril carried out the exercise at the Army’s Dugway Proving Grounds in Utah.
It was the first opportunity for Anduril engineers to test the Altius-700M with a live warhead, the company said.
The drone can be fired from a simple tube, for instance from an aircraft in flight, and looks like a small rocket with wings.
The drone “has demonstrated its category-leading performance across deployments ranging from hurricane data collection to the battlefields of Ukraine,” the company said on March 14.
Fisker, With OC Ops, Runs Into Difficulties
Electric car maker Fisker Inc., which maintains a portion of its operations in Orange County, has been running into difficulties.
The company (NYSE: FSR) said March 18 it would “pause production” of its electric-powered cars for six weeks “to align inventory levels and progress strategic and financing initiatives.”
The EV maker warned in February there was “substantial doubt” about its ability to stay in business.
Fisker had been in negotiations with Nissan for a potential transaction, which didn’t pan out, it said last week. It also said it had received a financing commitment from an existing investor providing up to $150 million of proceeds.
Surf City, La Palma
While Fisker has its headquarters in Manhattan Beach, it had a distribution and engineering facility in Huntington Beach, and leases a roughly 79,000-square-foot property in La Palma.
The company’s OC employee base now totals about 50; the Huntington Beach facility is now closed, officials said last week.
“La Palma is a key distribution/engineering hub (the primary in Southern California)—much like Huntington Beach,” a spokesperson for the company told the Business Journal.
Fisker counted a market cap of about $50 million as of last week.
Founder and Chief Executive Henrik Fisker previously headed OC’s Fisker Automotive, a separate company and maker of a luxury hybrid vehicle known as the Fisker Karma.
That defunct company’s assets are now owned by Irvine’s Karma Automotive.
