Part I: The Foundry

The only clue that Rangeview, a secretive hard tech startup, occupies an aging red brick building on the corner of Center Avenue in El Segundo, CA is a one-inch logo etched on the glass door. “Customers know where to find us,” shrugs Cameron Schiller, Rangeview’s 26-year-old founder.

I’m here to tour Rangeview’s facility and understand the manufacturing business that apparently needs no advertisement. Cameron hands me a steel casting for a Top Gun-era F-16 rudder stick and informs me that over half of America’s advanced fighter jets are grounded for want of parts. The part looks like the PlayStation joystick I had as a kid, but heavier, considerably more lethal and expensive to make. Until now.

We make our way to a pouring research station. Thomas Pakh, a 23-year-old Floridian who defied U-Haul trends and relocated here from Florida to work at Rangeview, loads an ingot of metal into a white ceramic sheath to be superheated into liquid metal. Cameron explains that robotics will take over the process from here.

“Don’t go past the yellow line,” cautions Thomas. (I was actually in the process of backpedaling when he said this.) Four engineers huddle around a laptop that streams information from the robotic arm and furnace. Then, on cue, the metal ingot drops into a smelter that heats the bar to 2,000 degrees before the resultant molten brew is poured into a custom 3D-printed mold.

Six minutes later, the furnace doors unlock. Sparks fly out and a palpable heat engulfs the immediate area. Inside, an orange hunk of metal glows in the chamber. From start to finish, the whole process takes less than 15 minutes. This was just a test pour, but the Rangeview masterplan is to have thousands of these robotics pours going round the clock. The engineers are collecting data to help them improve the process.

Rangeview can make parts in almost any size, shape, or material. But right now, they’re having a moment with turbine blades, which have two critical uses:

1. Burn natural gas to spin a turbine and create energy that powers AI data centers.

2. Burn kerosine (i.e. jet fuel) to spin a turbine and propel missiles or drone interceptors through the air at high speeds.

The gold rush to build and power AI datacenters drives the first. A panic to modernize our military prompts the latter.

But, for Cameron, the duty runs deeper than all that.

Where others see industrialization, Cameron sees the world he wants to build for his future kids: “If all you do is shuffle papers and change numbers in an excel sheet, what connection do you feel to your neighbor? What responsibility do you feel to your country? People that can feel the product of their labor have a different sense of pride. Steve Jobs talked about this a lot, but everyone prioritized serving a few more ads.”

It’s reminiscent of Jobs’ classic hiring pitch, “Do you want to make sugar water or do you want to change the world?”

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