Voyager Technologies Aktie

Welcome to the Voyager Technologies Investor and Analyst Conference Call. Participating on today's call are Dylan Taylor, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer; Matt Kuta, President; Phil de Sousa, Chief Financial Officer; and Matt Magana, President of our Defense and Space Technologies segment. [Operator Instruction] I would now like to hand the call over to your first speaker today, Phil de Sousa, Chief Financial Officer. Mr. de Sousa, the floor is yours.

Before we begin, let's turn to Slide 2. I'd like to remind everyone that today's discussion will include forward-looking statements regarding the acquisition, its anticipated benefits, integration plans, future financial performance and other strategic objectives. These statements are based on the current expectations and assumptions and are, of course, subject to risks, uncertainties and assumptions that could cause actual results to differ materially from those described today.

We ask that you please refer to our SEC filings, including the risk factors in our annual report on Form 10-K and today's presentation materials for a discussion of these risks and other important factors. We undertake no obligation to update any forward-looking statements, except as required by law.

With that, let's turn to Slide 3. On today's call, we will begin with a summary of the transaction. We will then provide an overview of Astrobotic. Next, we'll discuss the strategic rationale for the acquisition. And finally, we'll outline our broader lunar strategy and how this acquisition accelerates Voyager's vision of building America's path to the moon. Following our prepared remarks, we'll open the call for questions. With that, let's turn to Slide 4, and I'll turn the call over to Dylan.

Thank you, Phil, and good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us. For much of the last decade, the focus has been on when and how we will get back to the moon. That question is being answered with increasing clarity, and we have never been closer. The opportunity with the moon is massive and will define much of space commerce for decades to come. Over the last year, we've discussed this fundamental development and why Voyager is already well positioned as a system integrator and infrastructure provider with strengths in mission and payload operations, control systems, communications, propulsion and sensing.

Today, I'm extremely excited to announce an important milestone for Voyager, our next step forward in the evolution of the lunar economy, the acquisition of Astrobotic Technology. Over the next few slides, I'll provide a deeper understanding of the business, the rationale for this strategic acquisition and how it complements Voyager's capabilities geared towards building America's path back to the moon. But first, let's summarize the transaction terms.

Voyager has agreed to acquire 100% of Astrobotic for a total potential enterprise value of up to $300 million, consisting of cash and stock. At closing, approximately $162 million of value will be delivered with the remaining consideration tied directly to the achievement of future performance-based milestones. We also assume $9 million of debt as part of the transaction, and that will be paid at closing. Importantly, we believe we are acquiring a highly strategic asset at an accretive valuation. The guaranteed portion of the purchase price represents approximately 2.9x 2025 revenue. Taking into consideration the potential full value of the performance-based earnouts, the transaction remains well within Voyager's historical acquisition range based on 2027 estimated revenue.

From a financial perspective, Astrobotic brings substantial growth opportunities with essentially no overlap to Voyager's existing capabilities. The combination expands and solidifies our participation across the Lunar value chain, providing direct access to large and growing addressable markets, and it enhances our positioning on critical NASA and commercial programs. We're also acquiring a business with strong momentum, a growing pipeline and increasing visibility into future revenue opportunities. As a result, we expect the transaction to be accretive to earnings in 2027, while creating meaningful revenue growth and cost synergies over time. Finally, from a transaction time line perspective, we are targeting a third quarter 2026 closing, subject to customary regulatory approvals. Between now and closing, our teams will remain focused on maintaining execution momentum while developing a thoughtful integration plan designed to maximize long-term value creation for shareholders.

Turning to Slide 5. Before discussing the strategic rationale for the transaction, I'd like to spend a few minutes on Astrobotic and the capabilities they bring to Voyager. Founded in 2007, Astrobotic has established itself as one of the leading lunar technology and space robotics companies in the world. Their mission is clear: to enable a sustained human and robotic presence on the moon. What makes Astrobotic so compelling is the breadth of its platform. The company has built capabilities that span lunar delivery, mobility, infrastructure and advanced technology development, allowing it to participate across multiple stages of the lunar mission life cycle rather than just a single point solution.

Today, Astrobotic employs more than 200 highly skilled engineers, scientists and operators across facilities in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and Mojave, California. These teams have developed a portfolio of technologies that include lunar landers and rovers, power and charging infrastructure, reusable launch vehicle technologies and advanced autonomy, navigation, sensing and propulsion systems. The company has also built strong relationships with some of the world's most important space and national security organizations, including NASA, DARPA, the Space Force, European Space Agency and a broad set of commercial partners. These relationships reflect years of technical execution and position Astrobotic to participate in some of the most significant lunar and space infrastructure opportunities ahead.

Taken together, Astrobotic represents a highly differentiated platform with proven technology, strong customer relationships and a talented team operating at the forefront of the emerging lunar economy. Simply put, Astrobotic is one of the few companies that has assembled the technology, talent, customer access and mission experience necessary to help build the next generation of lunar infrastructure. That's what makes this acquisition so compelling.

Turning to Slide 6. At its core, this acquisition is about accelerating Voyager's vision to become a leading provider of the infrastructure required for sustained lunar operations. Astrobotic immediately expands our capabilities across some of the most critical elements of the lunar economy, including delivery, mobility, power systems and precision landing technologies. Combined with Voyager's existing strength in systems integration, habitats and in-situ resource utilization, the transaction creates a complete and differentiated lunar platform.

Just as importantly, Astrobotic is one of a very limited number of companies with a demonstrated lunar flight heritage and a leading position within NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services or CLIPS ecosystem. The upcoming Griffin mission further strengthens that position and provides additional opportunities to participate in future lunar exploration and infrastructure programs. We also believe the timing of this acquisition is particularly attractive. NASA is significantly increasing investment in lunar exploration and has articulated a long-term vision that includes dozens of lunar missions, substantial cargo delivery requirements and the development of a sustained human and robotic presence on the moon. As these investments accelerate, we believe demand for proven lunar infrastructure providers will increase accordingly. The combination of Voyager and Astrobotic positions us to capitalize on that opportunity. Together, we bring a highly complementary set of technologies spanning delivery, power, mobility, habitat and mission systems. These capabilities mutually reinforce one another through shared customers, shared technology development and participation in common mission architectures.

Ultimately, this transaction is not simply an acquisition of a company, it's the acquisition of critical infrastructure capabilities that advance Voyager's strategy and strengthen our position as a key enabler of America's return to the moon and the development of a sustained lunar economy. This acquisition accelerates Voyager's path to becoming a fully integrated lunar infrastructure company at precisely the time government and commercial investment in the moon is accelerating.

Turning to Slide 7. I'd like to conclude by stepping back and discussing the broader vision behind the transaction. Our view is the lunar economy is approaching an important inflection point. NASA and its partners are moving beyond demonstration missions towards the development of a sustained lunar infrastructure, creating demand for technologies that support transportation, power generation, communications, mobility, habitation and resource utilization. This chart illustrates how the combination of Voyager, Astrobotic and our strategic investment in MAX Space positions us across all of the key technology categories required to support the future architectures.

Voyager brings core strengths in systems integration, communications, computing, habitat systems, environmental controls and in-situ resource utilization. Astrobotic has proven capabilities in lunar delivery, mobility, power infrastructure, surface operations and autonomous systems. Together, these capabilities span a significant portion of NASA's Envision moon-based technology stack. Importantly, these technologies reinforce one another through shared customers, shared mission architectures and common infrastructure requirements. As lunar activity expands, we believe customers will increasingly seek integrated solutions rather than stand-alone technologies. The result is a more complete lunar platform, one capable of supporting missions from earth to the lunar surface and ultimately enabling sustained human and robotic operations on the moon.

We believe this positions Voyager to participate in some of the most important areas of investment over the coming decade and strengthens our ability to create long-term value for customers, partners and shareholders.

Turning to Slide 8. Before we open the call up for questions, I'd like to leave you with five key takeaways. First, this acquisition significantly accelerates Voyager's LUNAR strategy by adding proven lunar delivery, mobility, power and infrastructure capabilities that complement our existing platform. Second, we believe the timing is compelling. NASA is increasing investment in lunar exploration and infrastructure and Astrobotic positions Voyager to participate in some of the most important programs supporting a sustained human and robotic presence on the moon.

Third, the transaction strengthens and diversifies our business mix. Together, Voyager and Astrobotic creates a more integrated platform spanning critical elements of the LUNAR value chain, expanding both our capabilities and addressable market opportunities. Fourth, we believe the acquisition offers compelling financial returns. The transaction was structured at an accretive valuation, including meaningful performance alignment through the earnout structure and is expected to be accretive beginning in 2027, excluding transaction-related and purchase accounting impacts.

And finally, we're targeting a third quarter 2026 close and look forward to welcoming the Astrobotic team to Voyager as we continue to work to build the next generation of Lunar infrastructure. We are super excited about this opportunity and what lies ahead, and we believe this transaction further positions Voyager to create significant long-term value for our customers, partners and shareholders. With that, let's open it up for questions.

[Operator Instructions] Your first question comes from Sheila Kahyaoglu with Jefferies.

This is Kyle on for Sheila. I think Slide 7 is a really helpful overview of sort of the combined portfolio. So maybe when you consider what NASA has said about the Moonbased initiative in the first couple of phases, how you're thinking about the addressable market there? What's sort of opened up in terms of the TAM from Astrobotic? And then how you're sort of thinking about the revenue optionality as you look out into 2027 and then sort of thereafter?

Yes. That's great. Thanks for the question, Kyle. Great to connect with you as always. I'll take the first stab at it, and then I'll turn it over to Phil and others to chime in. But yes, as you correctly identified, this really expands not only the direct TAM in terms of what Astrobotics is able to deliver with Lunar landers, the CLIPS program, Moonbase II and all the things that are directly line of sight in front of us. But as we are hearing from the administrator and from NASA, it's anticipated that they're going to have additional lunar landing and CLIPS awards in the future. So we're hopeful we'll compete favorably for those. And then, of course, coupled with our MAX Space investment, which really focuses on lunar habitation, think of us as having now a technology stack that not only addresses the individual TAMs, but really has a multiplier effect because we're going to be able to deliver solutions for NASA that are more comprehensive than just about anybody else in the industry. So I think that's really the right way to think about this.

We laid out a lunar initiative, it's probably about four months ago now. And we really, in that initiative, created a road map and basically told the market where we were going. And of course, now we're delivering on that. And Astrobotic is just a phenomenal beloved company in our industry with key technologies, terrific people, great reputation. The customer really appreciates them as well. So I think this is a seminal step in that entire technology stack that's really going to significantly increase not only our lunar TAM but TAM in our 3L strategy, which, of course, is LEO, Lunar and Lagrange or deep space. But with that, I'll pass it over to Phil to talk more about 2027 in particular.

Thanks for joining the call. Appreciate the question. Yes, just to put the growth profile into perspective, you guys could probably back off the math, but you can see in 2025 we see Astrobots with revenue of about $59 million, anticipate, obviously, that to grow pretty significantly over the long term. When I think about that and I think about the 25% organic growth CAGR that Voyager has previously talked about over the 2030 period, I would just highlight that the organic growth CAGR that Astrobotics will contribute to the portfolio is actually in line and perhaps even better than the base portfolio business. Specifically, 2027 and '28, we would see a pretty significant ramp-up as Bill alluded to, there's a significant amount of lunar activities that are expected to accelerate with key customers like NASA here in the immediate term in 2027, where you can easily see a range of revenue for Astrobotics in the $100 million to $300 million range in 2027.

And I would add, this is Matt Kuta talking. NASA has laid out this vision last week of wanting to do 73 landers and landing over 200 metric tons of payloads on the surface of the moon between now and 2032. And if you look at it from a NASA budget perspective, in 2027, landers plus infrastructure is over 10% of the entire NASA budget and growing to 20% of the NASA budget within the immediate one to two years to follow. So it's a very large percentage of the entire NASA piece that we're participating with very few players in it.

Incredibly helpful. If I could ask just a follow-up to that point. I know you note in the release accelerating some of the investment for both the lunar and some of the reusable rocket stuff. Can you maybe talk about the investment profile, your relative view of like schedule and timing of some of those moon-based phases and maybe like the cash profile of this business as well?

I'll take that for the team here. So as I think about the cash flow profile of this business, again, I think long term, this is an accretive portfolio addition to Voyager. So I expect EBITDA margins to be nice and healthy in the long term as we've articulated for the Voyager in that mid-teens area. From a CapEx perspective, over the longer term, this is actually a CapEx-light business, very similar to the base business that Voyager has. So we do anticipate there to be about some, if you will, amount of investment over the course of 2026 and '27 necessary to really support the growth profile of this business. But that investment is largely dependent on the actual achievements and that performance of the business. And so I think back to the construct of the business overall, a fair amount of it is performance-based, a lot of milestones here, which are growth driven. And so we'll modestly, if you would, or moderate that investment over the next couple of years.

Yes. The other thing, Kyle, just to reinforce the points that have already been made. I mean the TAM for lunar is tremendous as we know. And this is the key focus of NASA is not only this year, but well into the future. So we're talking about billions of dollars of capital flowing into lunar. And so Astrobotic, which has done an absolutely extraordinary job developing this technology and developing the ability to land on the moon via the CLIPS program and other technologies they have like the power grid technology, reusable rockets and the like, that has really been done bootstrapped, right? They've only -- raised a de minimis amount of third-party capital. So our ability as a platform, as you well know, a technology and innovation platform with a track record of refining, investing and commercializing technology.

I mean, this is really an extraordinary marriage of a highly capable company that with some additional investment capital or innovation capital is really going to be able to take it to the next level. So that's -- think of that Alchemy, which we have demonstrated time and time again, whether it's our TDAX technology on Golden Dome or whether it's our ISS mission management business that's been parlayed into the Star Lab initiative. We have a track record of taking highly capable technologies and companies and leveling them up. And that's the way you should think about Astrobotic.

Your next question comes from the line of Gautam Khanna with TD Cowen [Technical Difficulty]

Your next question comes from the line of David Strauss with Wells Fargo.

This is Ben Tomick on for David. I was wondering, could you guys provide any further detail on what the milestones are for that additional earnout potential?

Yes, Ben, I'm going to pass it over to Phil. Thanks for the question. Yes, we're keen to see how you guys look at this acquisition because David, yes, I think we would like to see you guys better understand our growth story here. So I'll pass it over to Filipe. Go ahead, Phil, please.

Yes. So a really important element to note here, there's more than one two milestones. There are several milestones, 2-plus milestones, and they're specifically attributable to not just growth and the continued winning of awards from NASA and that would fuel not just the revenue growth here this year, but next year as well. But it's also significantly tied to the actual execution. So I think operational execution of the team on specific missions that are in backlog and planned in the future as well. So a nice balance of, call it, revenue growth as well as execution from an operational perspective.

Got it. Great. And then just -- could you just provide some color on how the acquisition really came about? And then if there are any other lunar opportunities you guys are looking at in the pipeline, just given kind of the TAM you guys have talked about today?

Yes. Great question, Ben. So I'll ask [ Matt Kuta ] and perhaps Magana to chime in on this as well. So we've known Astrobotic for many years. I was actually -- had a good relationship with John Thornton, the founder for years now. So we've been in touch and have admired them from a far, of course. And as I mentioned earlier to a previous question, we mapped out this lunar initiative really in response to the administration and NASA's call to action from the industrial base on returning to the moon. And so we crafted a very thoughtful strategy.

And as we did that, we have continued to evaluate the market. One of the investments we made as we've talked about many times, including on this call, is the MAX Space employeable Habitat investment, which has applicability to all three of the domains, the three Ls, if you will, LEO, Lunar and lagrange. But in surveying that, if you look at the CLIPS program, there's very few companies qualified to be able to deliver this call to action that administrator at Isaacman and President Trump have really called for. So in that context, it was a natural fit between the relationship we had with John and Astrobotic and what we believe to be strategically important to the future of our growth initiatives as well. So it really was a hand-in-glove acquisition and really fits very, very neatly and nicely into our strategy. So with that, I'll pass it over to Matt Kuta. Matt Kuta really led this acquisition, did an unbelievably amazing job, in shepherding this through. So you might have some additional comments.

Thanks, Dylan. Yes, just a couple of quick ones to add in addition to what Dylan mentioned. When we laid out the Lunar strategy a few months ago, we mentioned we made the investment in MAX Space, the expandable. Think of that as infrastructure. So when you get to the service of the moon, where do you go? Where do you stay? Where could you store things? And of course, there's dual use and dual application for those expandable habitats. And then you think about how do you get them there. And then we looked at the list of players out there. We looked at where the NASA budget is. Much of it's mandated by Congress, and we thought about where can we best enter this part of the market where Astrobotic is -- they have revenue. They have significant contracts across many different customers. So it's definitely something that is happening now. It's not a theoretical thing just because it deals with the moon. We see how important it is for NASA and for the country. And Astrobotic with their Griffin landers and Peregrine landers, there's a mission plan for the end of this year to land on the surface of the moon that we're very excited about. So this is all happening.

And so we looked at the budget priorities. We looked at where the capital is. We looked at where the addressable market is. And Astrobotic definitely stood out as the best player out there and the best opportunity for Voyager. And so now with Astrobotic, in addition to the landers, they also have developing LunaGrid technology, which is power on the surface of the moon. So you have expandable habitats, you have landers that get stuff there. You have the ability to develop technology to power technology that are on the surface of the moon. And it really is complementary to everything that Voyager has.

There's almost no overlap with our existing portfolio beyond just really bolstering our strong heritage of strong engineering and business development. So it really is a great fit at the right time. It's been bipartisan. The lunar focus of NASA in the United States has spanned multiple administrations. So we see very little political risk as well. And it's a great time to enter the market where it's been matured a little bit, but there's still a lot to go. If I was to use a baseball analogy, maybe we're in the second inning or the top to the third or something like that.

I was going to add one quick thing to you guys, and I agree with everything that Matt said, too. And I think just pull on that thread, there's a lot of the opportunity here from a revenue synergy perspective. And you know that we've talked multiple times around our dual-use capability. And as Matt said, things like power grid systems across the lines on the DOW and NASA around space comms, our guidance and navigation and compute systems. There's a lot of leveraging that we're going to be able to do there as we look at how we get revenue synergies into '27.

Your next question comes from the line of Steven Wahrhaftig with Wedbush Securities.

Congrats on the acquisition. I have a few questions, specifically the first one talking about the opportunity within the lunar environment. I mean the space has really gotten competitive over the past few months. And I want to talk a little bit more about how the Astrobotics acquisition would further improve the win rates for a lot of the deals that are coming to NASA and with the lunar opportunities that are now coming to fruition.

Yes. So thanks for the question. We're super optimistic about how our platform will come together. I should have mentioned earlier, I'm in Washington, D.C. at the CNBC CEO Council meeting and administrator Isaacman, spoke yesterday on stage. I think some of those remarks have been reported. But one of the points that I took away from what he said is he's really looking for companies within the industry who can really be -- this is my term, not his, but Swiss army knives, if you will. And that is bringing multiple solutions to the table and not only accelerating the initiatives that NASA and the administration has, but being able to solve multiple problems at the same time.

And that's really what Voyager is looking to achieve is to be that full technology stack to be ease of use for our customers, but also delivering real value and real technology solutions that ultimately achieve the missions that the administration sets out to do. So in that context, I'm very confident that we're going to be very well positioned to have a win rate that's attractive and differentiated in the industry, not for any other reason other than we're going to be, in my opinion, offering superior value to the customer. And that's really, as you know, in any business, right, if you focus on delivering value to the customer, that's how you win.

That's how you differentiate yourself. So we're super optimistic about that. Obviously, we're anticipating additional awards later this year, not only for lunar, but other things like our commercial space station program with an RFP out -- a draft RFP do out here in the next 30 days or so. So we're extremely bullish about our position within the space industry at large. And then, of course, on the national security and defense side, as you well know, that's going extremely well. and we're super excited about the traction we're getting there as well. So we're very enthusiastic about where we are and where we're headed.

Understood. And talking a little bit more about the cost synergies that you are talking about. I mean the company brings two facilities, one in Pennsylvania, one in California, brings a pretty strong employee base of a couple of hundred employees. So can you break down what's the fixed cost run rate that you're going to be taking on with this acquisition? And is any of it kind of duplicative within the Voyager ecosystem? Or is it more complementary, just like the capabilities that they bring to the table?

Yes, super complementary. I will let Phil talk about the specific cost structure. There will be synergies, of course, especially on back office and other operational streamlining of things, systems, of course. But when you think about technical expertise and I'll call it, physical plant, this will all be additive to what we're doing. But I'll ask Phil to chime in on it, and Magana and Kuta might have some comments as well.

Steven, great question. Well, first and foremost, I just want to highlight, one, from a business case perspective for us achieving our own internal rates of return and the way we think about the valuation for this business, this is a very accretive and attractive business addition to the portfolio, irrespective, meaning independent of revenue and cost synergies. That said, revenue synergies are actually the primary driver of the value creation. We'll see opportunities in procurement from a cost perspective or through back office. There's obviously opportunities in procurement, infrastructure. There's opportunities for us to leverage a significant amount of engineering collaboration amongst the teams, Astrobotic and Voyager.

We intend, obviously, to continue to be disciplined and realistic around all of our revenue and cost synergy assumptions. But that to be said, the biggest value from an overall profitability perspective is the scale that Astrobotic adds to the business. As I mentioned earlier, thinking out to 2027 alone and thinking in the range of $100 million to $300 million of top line revenue, not having to add any significant amount of cost from a back-office perspective to integrate this business into Voyager is going to create significant value for shareholders. And certainly, from a pathway to profitability perspective, will significantly move us down that road.

[Operator Instructions] Your next question comes from Alex Preston with Bank of America.

I get a lot of them have been asked, but maybe if I could ask quickly on how you guys are thinking about the integration, right? Astrobotic historically, as you know, a leader in R&D. But NASA is really pushing towards this commerciality and scale, especially on eclipse. How do you think about positioning Astrobotic to scale and hit their performance targets while maintaining that capability for innovation and maybe bringing some of that in-house as well?

Yes. Great question. I really appreciate it, Alex. I think a couple of things. First of all, we have a lot of experience doing this, right? In addition to our extremely high organic CAGR since we were founded 6.5 years ago, we obviously have done several acquisitions as well. So the needle we need to thread and we have experience doing this is to make sure that we're fostering the innovation and the secret sauce that has created a successful Astrobotic, while at the same time, scaling, as you said, the capabilities that they have, integrating that into the larger strategic narrative and delivering real differentiated value for our customer, right? And it sounds easy.

It's very difficult to do as implied in your question, but we have a lot of experience doing that, right? And we've demonstrated our ability to do that over time with several key acquisitions. So I'm very, very optimistic that we're going to be able to add value as an overall enterprise in very short order. And there are some specific things that we're going to be doing. And so with that, I'll pass it probably over to Matt Kuta to take a stab at it. I'm sure Matt Magana will have some views as well. I know Matt Magana is right in the middle of all-hand calls with Astrobotic employees and everything else. But I'll pass it over to the Matts.

Yes. Thanks, Dylan. I'll just add real quick, and I'll hand it over to Magana. As Dylan mentioned, we've done over a dozen acquisitions since our founding. So we definitely have a playbook of how we do this to keep that secret sauce, which is very important. And as far as scaling and to your point, really productizing and commercializing this, that's the benefit of the acquisition because it allows Voyager to enter the lunar economy at a really opportune time with an opportune technology. It's the Lander for Moonbase II that was announced recently last week. At the same time, allowing Astrobotic to have the benefit of being now part of Voyager, where we can really scale this capability together through things such as capital structure, technology and things across the platform. For the specific road map, Magana, go ahead.

Yes. What I'll say is that in the near term, our focus is on really maintaining continuity for Astrobotics customers, obviously, Griffin 1 coming up the employees and all their critical programs that they've got going on. Over time, we expect that to integrate Astrobotics into the broader framework, consistent with how we've been doing it with all the previous acquisitions I talked.

Our approach is really not to just absorb these companies, the unique capabilities of but to strengthen them with our scale, our resources, the customer access that we have and then in some cases, capital here as we start to get into multiple landers and then infrastructure associated to ensuring that we can meet the needs that Jared and his team are putting out there. So a key element of our strategy has always been around that summer path of ensuring that we keep the uniqueness of these companies, but also bring the horsepower that we've built through the IPO last year and through our teams here to make sure that we can, one, accomplish those synergies; and two, accelerate them into the market here, as Dylan talked about.

Our next question comes from the line of Kristine Liwag with Morgan Stanley.

With Astrobotics, you look at your folio with -- as you look at your portfolio here and pivoting to the moon, are there other aspects of the mission that you're looking to expand after Astrobotics? Are there areas that you find also interesting to supplement your presence as we kind of move forward with this moon base?

Yes. Thank you, Kristine. Great to hear from you as always. Just to be clear, we're not pivoting to the moon, right? This is an expansion of TAM. We still have an extremely robust LEO space initiative, including Star Lab and all the picks and shovels technology that we sell into that, including electronic propulsion and razor communication and all the stuff you're aware of. And then, of course, we're also focused on deep space with our Lagrange initiative as well. So this is truly an expansion of TAM. And obviously, we're being responsive to what the administration, the President and administrator Isaacman are asking industrial base to do. So I really want to emphasize that point. So yes, I think if we look at the lunar economy, -- there's a few different things that we're pretty excited about. One is, of course, the CLIPS program and the Lunar lander program. And as the administrator has said, we anticipate many more CLIPS awards in the future as it relates to getting more mass to the surface of the moon. And then, of course, as you deliver mass to the service of the moon, the real question is, okay, what do you do while you're there? And the 2 key things that the administration is talking about is power and habitation.

And Astrobotic has a really interesting power grid approach and technology that we're really excited about. I think that can be very germane to what the administration is focused on. And then, of course, with lunar habitation, we're big believers in the technology we invested in with MAX Space on this inflatable expandable habitat technology. We're convinced that's really going to be the leading technology for lunar habitation. So as I said earlier, think of this as a technology stack where all these pieces are not only interlocking, but they're mutually reinforcing each other and not only increasing the TAM we're able to address, but the complexity of the solutions we're able to deliver. And that's really the key thing I want to emphasize for you and the other analysts. With that, I'm happy to pass it over. Phil, I don't know if you have comments, if not, over to Matt Kuta.

Great. Super helpful there. And if I could ask a second question, Dylan. For Phil, you mentioned earlier that this deal kind of accelerates your path to profitability for Voyager. I was wondering, can you expand more on that statement? Where are the areas that you could see the path to profitability? Is that all driven by better profitability from the acquisition of Astrobotics? Where are the synergies with the rest of Voyager? And I just want to understand that statement a little bit better.

Sure, Kristine. Great to hear from you today. I would say from a 2027 perspective, just to remind everybody, we had always expected to exit the year next year from an adjusted EBITDA perspective. And it's a bit early to provide specific '27 guidance. I'm smiling, of course, as I said this. But obviously, as we work our way through the year, you'll hear more about how Astrobotics fits into the overall portfolio. Obviously, from a top line perspective, there's going to be a significant amount of revenue contribution next year. So I'll just pick my way down the P&L to it. From a gross profitability or gross margin perspective, Astrobotics is going to be accretive to the Voyager portfolio even this year. And as we look out to next year as well, -- it's got an attractive accretive margin profile for the business. So a nice healthy revenue growth. Obviously, we're dropping cash and profit down to the bottom line.

What I talked about earlier and highlighted the cost synergies, again, we're not looking to remove or exit or cut costs here. In fact, if anything, we're looking to grow Astrobotics. That said, with the existing Voyager cost structure, we put a fair amount of investment last year and earlier this year as well. We've been intentionally growing our capability to support a much larger business over the long term. And so as we add this revenue to the top line, significantly scaling our fixed cost structure, a lot more of the incremental margin will drop through to the bottom line. So much more to come. I'll start -- I'll say, far away from giving specifics around bottom line expectations for '27. But know that certainly, this business is going to be a catalyst towards us achieving that profitability perhaps sooner than previously anticipated. And obviously, I look forward to the contributions from the team from a growth perspective as well.

And that concludes our question-and-answer session. I would now like to turn the conference back over to Dylan Taylor for closing comments.

Yes. Thank you very much. Well, thank you, everyone, for joining. A couple of just key things I want to emphasize. So with Astrobotic, we're really accelerating our vision of building America's leading lunar infrastructure platform. This technology stack that we've built and we'll continue to invest and build, I think, is really differentiated in the industry. And this combination really expands not only our capabilities, but it really strengthens our customer relationships and really positions Voyager to play a central role in supporting NASA's long-term lunar objectives while really creating a substantial value creation event for shareholders. And just in conclusion, we've got a couple of anniversaries coming up.

One is our 1-year anniversary of being a public company. We'll be ringing the closing bell on the NYSE June 12, which could also be the SpaceX IPO date. So that's interesting. And then, of course, we'll be joining all of you for our second quarter earnings call, which is currently scheduled for August 4. So again, thank you all for joining. Thanks for your interest in Voyager Technologies and the excitement that we're embarking on here, and we wish you all a great rest of your day. Thank you so much.

Thank you. This concludes today's Voyager Technologies Investor Call. Please disconnect your lines at this time, and have a wonderful day.

Welcome to the Voyager Technologies First Quarter 2026 Financial Results Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] I would now like to turn the call over to your first speaker today, Adi Padva, Senior Vice President, Corporate Development and Investor Relations. Mr. Padva, the floor is yours.

Thank you, and good morning, everyone. I am joined today by Dylan Taylor, our Chairman and Chief Executive Officer; and Phil de Sousa, our Chief Financial Officer.

Today's call includes forward-looking statements which involve risks and uncertainties detailed in our earnings materials and SEC filings, including in the Risk Factors section of our annual report on Form 10-K. We undertake no obligation to update these statements. We will also discuss non-GAAP financial measures. A reconciliation of these measures is available on our earnings materials on our website. I will now turn the call over to Dylan to begin with Slide 3.

Thank you, Adi, and good morning, everyone. Voyager had an outstanding first quarter with record backlog, a book-to-bill ratio of 1.3 and significant traction on new contracts, including Golden Dome. First quarter bookings of $45 million drove our backlog to a new record of $275 million, up 54% year-over-year. The backlog growth reflects broad-based demand and multiple awards across the Golden Dome architecture, additional work on next-generation interceptor and as importantly, we were awarded a contract with Raytheon to develop advanced technologies for their standard missile interceptor program, a major win for us.

Further, bookings momentum continues into the early part of the second quarter, reinforcing our confidence in near-term revenue conversion. And consequently, we are increasing our 2026 revenue guidance to $230 million to $255 million, a significant acceleration relative to last year. Voyager's high-growth platform is built to scale alongside customer demand in the most critical defense, national security and space programs.

Our ability to deploy differentiated capabilities across complex architectures, whether as a prime or a key technology partner, strongly positions us to participate across multiple programs as they move from development into production. That positioning is reflected in our first quarter performance, including strong bookings, record backlog and improving visibility into the revenue conversion, which underpins our confidence in raising our full year guidance.

With that context, let me turn to Slide 4 and walk through how we are scaling capacity and infrastructure to support execution as demand accelerates. As our demand scales, execution depends on capacity. And in line with our guidance last quarter, we have continued to invest in the infrastructure and production capability required to deliver at speed and at scale. In January, we broke ground on a major expansion of the Voyager American Defense Complex in Southern Colorado. The facility is designed for high-volume manufacturing, operations and testing, supporting the production of advanced military-grade components, propulsion systems, including our proprietary controllable technology and energetics.

In March, we extended our capacity build-out of advanced electronics, mission hardware and software with the launch of our Space Beach facility in Long Beach, California. This facility is strategically located next to our customers and expands our ability to deliver integrated mission-critical solutions across national security, civil and commercial space programs, while at the same time improving throughput and delivering timing as programs transition into higher rate production, enabling the conversion of backlog into revenue.

Turning to Slide 5. Innovation remains central to our strategy, and our investments are focused on differentiated technologies that address real operational needs and can scale across multiple markets. In the first quarter, internally funded R&D or IRAD, was 17% of revenue with total innovation spend of 48%, excluding Starlab. This record level of innovation spend this year reflects the strategic shaping of next-generation space and defense capabilities.

Our R&D priorities are focused on, first, advanced mission-critical electronics and communications that form the backbone of constellations and spaceborne cloud applications. Second, new capabilities for Golden Dome; third, enabling next-generation space domain maneuverability for commercial and defense markets. And lastly, our investment in AI is going to significantly accelerate manufacturing across the Voyager technology portfolio, materially shortening go-to-market and delivery time lines for our customers.

At the same time, we're continuing to build an ecosystem that accelerates the path for microgravity research to commercialization. Through our Voyager Institute for Space Technology and Advancement, or VISTA Science Park, as well as the collaboration with NASA's Glenn Research Center, we announced strategic partnerships with Yonsei University in South Korea and Oguda University in Hungary.

VISTA is the first of its kind U.S. science park dedicated to in space research, manufacturing and services located on the campus of the Ohio State University. VISTA unites aerospace companies, fast-moving start-ups, leading academic institutions and government agencies in a dynamic platform-agnostic ecosystem built to accelerate discovery, collaboration and commercialization of space.

Our strong commitment to innovation positions Voyager to not only develop differentiated technologies, but to scale and deploy them into a mission-ready application. This approach is central to our strategy and underpins long-term growth opportunities. Among these long-term opportunities is our alignment with NASA's priorities in LEO and lunar as presented recently during NASA's Ignition event, which I'll review on Slide 6.

Our confidence in Starlab as a transformational growth opportunity continues to be reinforced by our progress, including the successful completion of the commercial critical design review with NASA at the end of last year, a key milestone as the program advances into full system procurement and integration. This milestone further derisks the program and reinforces our confidence in Starlab's readiness to support commercially led operations in low earth orbit. During the first quarter, Starlab achieved 4 additional milestones and received $24 million in cash payments from NASA. We recently provided feedback to NASA's request for information after the Ignition event, and we remain confident we can deliver a strong and economic solution to NASA and other customers.

In parallel, we're advancing our lunar strategy in alignment with NASA and broader national priorities. Through our investment in Max Space, we are positioning Voyager to play a meaningful role in enabling sustained lunar operations and habitation. Our focus is on delivering foundational infrastructure and scalable space systems where we see strong alignment with long-term funding priorities and mission demand.

Since quarter end, we announced an important milestone that further underscores our momentum as a commercial space mission provider. Voyager was selected by NASA for the seventh private astronaut mission to the International Space Station, targeted for no earlier than 2028. This award builds on decades of operational heritage with NASA and reflects confidence in Voyager's ability to execute complex crude missions safely and reliably. We named the mission VOYG-1 for its historic significance.

Importantly, the mission serves as a bridge between current ISS operations and the next generation of commercial space stations, including Starlab. It will be used to advance and validate microgravity-based innovation, crew operations and integrated architectures that are directly relevant to the future commercial and lunar missions, reinforcing Voyager's role at the center of the transition to a commercially led low-earth orbit ecosystem.

Looking ahead, our strategic priorities remain consistent: accelerate growth, build capacity and infrastructure to deliver at scale, invest deliberately in innovation aligned with our customer needs and advance Starlab and our lunar initiatives as the next generation of space infrastructure.

In summary, we are off to a fantastic start, executing well and progressing on all of our strategic initiatives. We are raising our full year revenue guidance to $230 million to $255 million, representing 38% to 53% year-over-year growth, a significant acceleration relative to the growth last year.

With that, I will turn the call over to Phil to walk through the financials in more detail.

Thanks, Dylan. Turning to Slide 7, I'll begin with our first quarter results. Net sales were $35 million, up modestly year-over-year and in line with our plan. Bookings totaled $45 million, resulting in a book-to-bill ratio of 1.3 and driving backlog to a new record level of $275 million. Importantly, backlog growth was driven by demand across the Golden Dome architecture, including multiple awards for new weapon systems, additional work on next-generation interceptor. And as Dylan mentioned, we were awarded a contract with Raytheon to develop advanced technologies for their standard missile interceptor program, a major win for us.

Adjusted EBITDA was a loss of $33 million, reflecting our deliberate investment in engineering talent, internally funded R&D and infrastructure to support programs that are scaling. These investments are aligned with customer demand and are building the foundation to support higher program volume. Adjusted EPS for the quarter was a loss of $0.61 per share. With that, let's turn to Slide 8.

Starting this quarter, we simplified reporting from 3 segments to 2. First, Defense and Space Technologies; and second, Starlab Space Stations. This reflects how we operate our business and how we are engaging with our customers. Our Defense and space activities now operate as a vertically integrated platform spanning propulsion, advanced electronics, data, mission services and, of course, space infrastructure. As shown on this slide, this integrated platform is aligned to fast-growing defense and space markets and is positioned to drive durable growth. Going forward, Defense and Space Technologies captures this integrated platform, while Starlab remains separate given its distinct role as a next-generation commercial space stations and long-term growth driver. This change improves clarity, better aligns reporting with how we operate and simplifies how we communicate performance.

Turning to Slide 9, I'll provide segment highlights for the quarter. In the Defense and Space Technologies segment, we delivered a strong start to the year with $45 million of bookings, up 232% year-over-year, reinforcing continued demand across our core defense and space portfolio, specifically with the new awards for Golden Dome and standard missile programs we discussed earlier. Revenue was up modestly year-over-year and in line with plan, driven by strategic growth, including acquisitions completed last year and partially offset by the planned wind down of a NASA services contract. Adjusted EBITDA for the segment was negative $11.5 million, reflecting, as I previously mentioned, deliberate investment in manufacturing capacity, operating infrastructure and internally funded R&D to support long-term growth.

In Starlab, we received $24 million of NASA milestone cash receipts in the quarter, bringing program inception-to-date milestone cash receipts to a total of $207 million. Starlab's adjusted EBITDA reflects the cadence of investment as the program matures and enters its full system procurement phase.

Overall, the quarter reflects strong demand momentum in Defense and Space Technologies, continued milestone execution in Starlab and disciplined investment to position both segments for long-term growth.

With that, let's turn to Slide 10, and I'll cover off our financial position. As we execute our growth strategy, we continue to operate from a position of financial strength and flexibility. We ended the first quarter with $429 million in cash and access to $212 million in credit facilities, thus resulting in total liquidity of $641 million. During the second quarter, we will be upsizing our credit facility, reflecting support from our creditors as our growth trajectory accelerates. Our liquidity supports a disciplined growth-oriented capital allocation strategy. We continue to fund organic investments to develop new technologies to further scale our existing platform while also pursuing accretive M&A to enhance scale, margins and our overall market position.

Turning to Slide 11. We are raising our 2026 sales guidance to a range of $230 million to $255 million, representing a 38% to 53% year-over-year growth. This outlook is supported by record backlog, strong recent bookings activity, specifically demand in Golden Dome line programs as well as growth contributions from other areas. We expect to see significant revenue growth acceleration in each of the next 3 quarters.

Gross margin for the year is expected to be in the mid-teens, reflecting continued investment in manufacturing capacity and program readiness ahead of growth acceleration. Internally funded research and development will increase to approximately 20% of sales as we are advancing mission-critical capabilities aligned with customer priorities, including defense initiatives such as Golden Dome, while continuing to innovate across our existing platforms, as Dylan discussed earlier. We expect modest SG&A leverage as we -- as revenue growth begins, and we also absorb public company costs as we lap pre-IPO periods. With more significant leverage as revenue increases and growth accelerates, we will continue to see that leverage increase over time.

In addition to innovation investments, capital expenditures, excluding Starlab, are expected to be approximately $60 million to $70 million. This directed towards scaling domestic production, advanced electronics, propulsion capacity and infrastructure investments tied to multiyear programs where we have clear line of sight to revenue. Starlab investments will ramp as the program enters full system procurement. These investments are expected to be supported through a combination of NASA CLD funding, other government sources and the capital markets, consistent with our previously outlined funding strategy.

As we look ahead, 2026 represents an important step in executing toward our long-term financial framework. We continue to target approximately 25% organic revenue growth, gross margins in the range of 30% to 35% and mid-teens adjusted EBITDA margins, excluding Starlabs, with low teens free cash flow margins, excluding Starlab, as the platform continues to scale. Starlab is a meaningful driver of long-term value creation. Once operational, we continue to expect Starlab to generate approximately $4 billion of annual revenue and $1.5 billion of annual free cash flow, reflecting its role as the next-generation commercial space station infrastructure platform.

In summary, the first quarter reflected disciplined execution, strong bookings, expansion of backlog to a new record level. We are investing ahead of growth, and we're supported by improving demand and ample liquidity. And with that, I'll turn it back over to Dylan.

Thanks, Phil. To wrap up on Slide 12, I am very happy with our first quarter performance, reflecting solid execution and continued momentum, supported by growing demand and a platform built to deliver mission-critical capabilities at scale. We are seeing expanding opportunities across missile defense, national security and commercial space, reinforced by strong bookings and a record backlog.

Our priorities remain consistent as we move through 2026, disciplined execution, investment to support scale and advancing Starlab as the next generation of space infrastructure. With strong demand, improving visibility and a strengthened operating foundation, we believe Voyager is well positioned to convert this momentum into sustained growth and long-term shareholder value.

Operator, with that, we're now ready to take questions.

[Operator Instructions] Our first question is going to come from Sheila Kahyaoglu with Jefferies.

Maybe, Dylan, just to start, the backlog increased despite the seasonal downward trend typically. What were key wins in the quarter, especially related to Golden Dome? And what do they mean to your capability stack, if you could elaborate?

Yes. Well, thank you, Sheila. Great question. I appreciate the thoughtfulness of the question. Yes, Q1 really was a seminal milestone quarter for us on Golden Dome. As we said in the IPO roadshow, our technology is very relevant to multiple missile programs. And so what we said in the roadshow was that we could expect in addition to next-generation interceptor that we would be added to these additional missile programs. And frankly, that timing has actually been accelerated beyond what I would have expected. So we've had a lot of success here in Q1 and the early part of 2026.

So as I mentioned in my remarks, we've been added to standard missile by Raytheon. That's a huge win for the company. There's also an announcement that's just out in the last 15 minutes about our relationship with Anduril on space-based interceptors as well. So that wasn't in my previous remarks because it literally just was issued about 15 minutes ago. So think of this as in 2 different categories, being added to programs where our technology is relevant to upgrade to next-generation technology. And then the second part is actually being an on-ramp for additional volumes because, of course, there's a big ramp-up that the government is looking to achieve on these programs with existing technology.

So we're being added as a second source, and we're being added as an upgrade to next-generation technology. So both of those are playing out. And again, if I look at our backlog, that's showing up in Q1 backlog, to your point, it reversed the trend of actually burning backlog off in Q1. We were able to actually increase backlog in Q1. And then, of course, our pipeline continues to grow, Sheila, really, really, really significantly. So we're extremely optimistic that this is a validation of our technology and additional programs awards are forthcoming as well. So hopefully that answers your question. Happy to take any follow-up.

Yes. Super helpful. And maybe as a follow-up, thinking about how you raised the low end of the guidance for '26, what came in -- which one of the following is increasing it? Was it NGI? Was it the Anduril relationship? And maybe if you could talk about milestones over the next 3 quarters we should be looking for?

Sounds good. I'm going to give that to Phil for the detail.

Good morning, Sheila, how are you? Great question. Just as a reminder, right, we raised the guidance here this quarter, but this is following us raising the lower end of the guidance last quarter, and that was obviously following us initiating guidance for 2026 back in November. What we've seen in the last 6 months has been a continued strengthening of that customer signal demand. Our pipeline remains extremely strong, over $5 billion.

And the confidence raising the bottom end is the conversion of that pipeline into backlog that we know we will deliver beginning here in Q2 and all the way through the back end of the year this year. Obviously, we still have quite a ways to go. So we'll reserve touching the midpoint or effectively the top end of the range for future quarters, but increasing confidence in us delivering as we planned here in 2026.

Your next question comes from the line of Ron Epstein with Bank of America.

This is Alex Preston on for Ron. First, I just wanted to follow up on the Anduril award. I actually noticed that a bit before you mentioned it, Dylan, so you stole my thunder there. But just curious if you can maybe talk broadly about the contributions you'll make it on that team or what the partnership means for the business in general? Just some more color would be great, if you could.

Yes. Yes. Thanks for the question, Alex. So it's obviously a very significant award. It pertains to the space-based interceptors. We have to be vague as to exactly what role we're playing in the team. That's really driven by the customer. But I think you're aware of our suite of technologies, advanced technologies and the ones that are relevant to space-based interceptors and call it Golden Dome in particular. And what I can say is we have multiple technologies on the SBI program.

Furthermore, Alex, what I can also say is there are additional news forthcoming on SBI. So stay tuned on that. But we're extremely pleased with how central our technology is to the architectures being put forward on Golden Dome and space-based interceptors in particular. And as I said in my response to Sheila, we had anticipated that our technology would be relevant for Golden Dome. Frankly, I'm quite surprised at how quickly that technology is gaining traction within this architecture, and we're extremely bullish on what we see there. So hopefully, that answers your question. Alex, I'm happy to take any follow-up.

Yes. I appreciate the color. And then if I could shift to Starlab and CLD, right? A lot of moving parts, obviously. It sounds like NASA has got maybe funding challenges, but they put out this RFI for a core module path forward. I guess, broadly, maybe how are you thinking about the updates here on Starlab's time line perhaps, your view on the competitive landscape, if there maybe aren't 2 free flyers as was once thought? Sort of broad thoughts there would be also really helpful.

Yes. Well, first of all, we're still very, very optimistic about Starlab and the program because either direction NASA takes, whether it's a core module with commercial modules attached or it's commercial free flyers, we think we have the technology and in particular the market traction to service both those models. So we responded to the RFI. As you mentioned, NASA put out the RFI. We responded to that. We're awaiting NASA's response on that, which is likely to be an RFP.

But keep in mind, we're already at 130% of commercial demand capacity spoken for on Starlab. And that commercial demand could translate to a different solution if NASA goes a different path. So we're actually quite bullish. And as you probably are aware, we won the PAM7 Private Astronaut Mission from NASA. That's really a validation of our mission management business. So we're actually quite optimistic that no matter what path NASA takes, our capabilities will be relevant.

We did pass another 4 milestones in the quarter on Starlab itself and got some additional cash payments in. And I don't know if we mentioned on the last quarter or not, but we had this high fidelity mockup in Building 9 at Johnson Space Center. We're getting a lot of people through there. It's quite impressive, just seeing the volume of that Starlab design. So I would encourage you, Alex, or anybody on the call, if they happen to be in Houston, we can arrange a tour.

But I think just, yes, to put a finer point on it, we're very optimistic that we're well positioned on CLD no matter what path NASA chooses to take.

Your next question comes from the line of Myles Walton with Wolfe Research.

I was hoping to maybe clarify first on the standard missile contract during the IPO roadshow, that was, I think, the largest single opportunity in the pipeline, around $300 million plus. Is the part of the win that you've gotten this quarter in there? Is that the entirety? Is it something new? Maybe just put it in context what you were looking for versus what you get.

Yes, Myles, it's all good news here. I'll let Phil give you the particulars, but this is all incremental to what we reported.

And I think really important to highlight too, Myles, is, one, this is just the initial contract we've received here from Raytheon for SM-3. This is a preproduction award. And so significant upside to the backlog that we've added here strategically. More importantly, as we look beyond 2026 and expect that program to then continue, it absolutely aligns well with what we had talked about around the IPO, where there wasn't just a next-generation interceptor program that had $1 billion worth of leg to it from a production standpoint. We still expect that, if you would, to come to fruition later this year as we enter into 2027 from a low rate to high rate production perspective.

For Raytheon SM-3, early stages, we'll continue to report out as we make progress on that specific program. I think more exciting news as we've validated our disruptive technologies in the space.

Okay. And then so while I have you, the sales cadence for the rest of the year obviously has to accelerate quite substantially. Is -- could you talk about the first quarter headwinds you had, do those alleviate in the second quarter? Maybe just the magnitude of acceleration you're expecting here in the near term versus the tail end of the year?

Yes, I appreciate the question, Myles, a bit to unpack there. So let's remind everybody, $35 million of revenue this first quarter, slightly up year-over-year. As a reminder, we did have some pretty substantial programs rolling off. For example, the [ Space Doc 2 ] contract that we've been flagging and highlighting as a year-over-year headwind latter part of last year, contributed about $5 million of revenue last year, first quarter. And so that's just about wrapped up completely. So about a $5 million, I think, 13 percentage point headwind into the quarter for us this year.

We also had a fantastic software design radio contract with Airbus. That was a big growth driver for us last year and in 2024, frankly speaking. That program is also wrapping up here early 2026, so another headwind. As I think about looking ahead, the new record backlog that we've established, the momentum we're building from a bookings perspective, we anticipate revenue to ramp sequentially and accelerate growth sequentially, going from $35 million of revenue should increase sequentially by 37%. So think high 40s, if you would. There will be about mid-single-digit growth year-over-year.

And then just based on the backlog, the customer time line that we've received, the delivery of longer lead material items, we know we have in our backlog a substantial amount of second half revenue to deliver. And so that's how we're planning it, about 33% of our full year revenue at the midpoint in the first half and about 67% of the revenue in the second half of the year with great visibility given our backlog.

And Myles, just to emphasize the point that Phil made there, it's not only line of sight for what we have in the backlog and what we're reporting on in Q1. But all of these incremental awards that we're talking about are all going to be additive to that confidence that we have, including, for example, that PAM7 mission that I mentioned earlier, none of that is in backlog.

First of all, that was a Q2 award. Secondly, being the conservative company we are, we're not going to count that as backlog until we actually get a signed contract and a down payment towards a mission slot. So that's all upside to backlog as well. So I just want to emphasize that point.

And maybe just to put a finer point on the momentum story, and I'm just reflecting back to my answer to Sheila at the opening of the call. One thing to highlight here, and I know it's early in the second quarter, but we continue to see the bookings momentum continue for us here early Q2. We've already booked quite a substantial amount of the second quarter. And I know, Myles, you and I have had that discussion around the -- we typically burn backlog in the first half of the year and build it in the second half of the year. I wouldn't say it's unusual. It's a realization, if you would, of the strong demand signal that we're getting here that we had a 1.3 book-to-bill ratio in Q1.

Expect our book-to-bill ratio will exceed 1 again in the second quarter, and we should well exceed even the $45 million of bookings that we had in Q1. So momentum continues to build. Line of sight to even the bookings we have here in early April. These are also revenue-generating programs here for the calendar year 2026. A substantial portion of these won't be delivered until the second half of the year, again, supporting that second half ramp. So again, I appreciate the question. I just want to make sure we highlighted the continued momentum that we've seen in early Q2 as well.

Our next question comes from the line of Seth Seifman with JPMorgan.

This is Rocco on for Seth. I was wondering what were the main factors that kind of weighed on Q1 gross margins? And how should we expect the margin to progress through the year? Will it just be kind of a quick step-up in Q2 or more of a ramp throughout the year?

Yes. Maybe I'll take that question, Rob. So from a gross profit margin perspective, if you recall, we anticipated this year will be a gross profit margin in the mid-teens. So think 14%, 15% on a full year basis. That reflects year-over-year an incremental investment ahead of growth, scale growth as we move into higher rate production contracts later this year and into next year. So we're already anticipating a challenging first half of the year. You see negative gross profit reflects exactly that, some program mix as well.

But as we look out second quarter, anticipate gross profit to be positive, think low mid-single digits in Q2 and then a significant acceleration, thanks to leverage. I just reflected on the revenue profile. I think 33% first half, 67% of our full year revenue guidance split that way. From a gross profit sequential perspective, you should see a step up into the mid- to high teens in Q3 and then back into the mid-20s in Q4 as we significantly leverage our cost structure.

Great. And then what drove the decision to combine the defense and space businesses into one segment? And is there an opportunity for the combination to drive any synergies in the business?

Yes. I'll start with that, Rob, and I will ask Phil to chime in. I think a couple of things. One is there's increasing convergence between our national security and defense business and our space business. Of course, it's been said before that space is the ultimate high ground. So there's a lot of national security implications for that. And there was also a lot of overlap in the technologies that were being deployed. We had a single executive, Matt Magna, running those businesses as well. So that also allowed us to merge the growth teams and a lot of other things that were relevant to actually running the business. So those were the main drivers. I'll ask Phil to chime in as well.

Yes. As a reminder for everyone, we IPO-ed last June with 3 external segments, Defense and National Security, Space Solutions and Starlab. And going forward, we've got the 2 segments now. To Dylan's point, internally, we had already integrated the Defense and National Security and Space Solutions segment under the leadership of Matt Magana. Equally as importantly, as we progressed post-IPO last year, made 3 strategic acquisitions, EMSI, ExoTerra and then Estes late in the fourth quarter. And so as we've already well on our way to integrating these businesses fully, the way we go to market, the way we go and highlight and bring our technologies, our disruptive space tech and defense tech technologies to the customer, it's bringing a portfolio solution sell to the customer.

Take next-generation interceptor, it is a great example, classic fuel propulsion technology that we've been long developing alongside with Lockheed Martin for years, combine that with traditional space or effectively dual-use space technology and navigation controls. And so that's a great example of how we're bringing a more portfolio set, getting a greater wallet share with our customer. And the segmentation helps us clarify and clearly convey those results the way that we manage the business internally to the external community. So it should help from that perspective as well.

Your next question comes from the line of John Godyn with Citigroup.

Dylan, you had a great dialogue in the beginning about AI investments, reducing go-to-market time, preparing for rising production rates with the strong booking commentary and outlook you guys have here. I just wanted to revisit that topic, understand a little bit better and understand how you guys are kind of preparing to scale.

Yes. Thank you for the question. Very thoughtful question. So we're thinking about AI in a couple of different ways. And this has got very senior level executive sponsorship. Matt Kuta, our overall company president is driving a lot of this. We also made a key hire, and I credit Paul Tilghman, our CTO, for this, a key hire at a DARPA labs, who is involved very much in Agentic AI.

So we're thinking of AI beyond just personal productivity, which is the way I think a lot of people are thinking about it, and we're really thinking of it as more of a technical tool that allows us to not only enhance our ability to create technical solutions for our customers, but to, as I said in my remarks, reduce cycle time because when you're a technology and innovation company, which Voyager is, it's all about being first to market with advanced technology. And so that's really the way we're thinking about it, and that's really where we're seeing the primary benefits.

So think of everything from a custom ASIC design to other things that might go into a program instead of that being a multiyear approach, it could be a multi-month approach. And it's not only getting a better outcome, but it's reducing that cycle time and bringing the innovation to bear sooner. So that's really the key way we're thinking about it. Early indications are this is going to have a significant impact on our business. It's still too early to say exactly what meaningfully will change from a margin profile and things like that.

But I would tell you, as you would expect, being a technology and innovation company, we are on the leading edge of innovation in this area as well. And I really like what I see initially here. And I think we'll have a lot more to say about this probably on our next earnings call.

Great. That's great color. And if I could just sort of ask a knit, this is probably more for Phil. You guys raised the low end of the revenue guidance, but not the high end. I know it's very early in the year, a very small percentage of revenue in 1Q versus the full year. That may be it. But I'm just kind of curious, scope to kind of revisit the high end or execute to the high end throughout the year. I mean the bookings commentary was great. I think there might be a little bit of potential for that. But Phil, any thoughts?

Yes, John, I appreciate the question. Love it when the conservative CFO gets put in the corner. So I'm smiling here on this end, no. Again, just reminding everybody, so we've now consistently raised, yes, the bottom end. It's because it is early in the year. We're wrapping up the first quarter. As I mentioned earlier, great momentum heading into Q2. We'll provide an update on what we think about what the top end could be once we get through the second quarter of this year, we've got that crystallized visibility into the second half of the year.

I do highlight, and I mentioned it earlier, there's second half revenue, about 67% of the full year guide with a substantial amount of that in the fourth quarter. Our customer schedules tend to move around, no fault of theirs, but things get delayed and get pushed, et cetera. And so again, perhaps more on the conservative side here before we start to think about moving the top end up. We'll keep it where we laid out today and provide an update in August. Look forward to that update, obviously.

Things continue to progress well as they have here through the strong start to the year. I'm optimistic that there could be some upside, but we'll stay a bit short from guiding that way until we have that crystallized visibility. But thanks for the question, John.

Your next question comes from the line of Gautam Khanna with TD Cowen.

This is Anton on for Gautam. So assuming Starlab does win CLD Phase 2, when do you expect Starlab to start generating revenue? Can we start to see revenue from things like on-ground astronaut training as soon as 2027? Or is this really only meaningful in 2028? And maybe how much revenue can you generate from on-ground work?

Appreciate the question. This is Phil. Yes, our expectation is that we could start seeing some revenue recognition as early as 2027 and certainly in 2028 from a training perspective. I think most importantly for everybody to kind of keep an eye on, and I highlighted this the last quarter, I keep an eye out from a balance sheet perspective, the deferred revenue, that we start to recognize -- or not recognize excuse me, but realize.

We expect advanced bookings could start as early as like they did here in 2026. Certainly expect that to accelerate as we move into 2027 and beyond. I think that will be the strongest indicator. As Dylan mentioned, we already have over 130% of our commercial capacity spoken for. But as we move through the year, out the back end of the year into next year, we start to see that convert into cash reservations, nothing better than that from a CFO's perspective. And then we'll start to turn that and flip that into revenue, like I said, the year after in '27 and '28.

Your next question comes from the line of Michael Leshock with KeyBanc Capital Markets.

I wanted to ask on Golden Dome. Is the early Golden Dome revenue more R&D prototype like? Or is it more production like with more established gross margins? Just appreciate any additional color you can provide on the margin profile for Golden Dome-related work.

Mike, it's Phil. I'll take that from a gross profit margin perspective, but certainly have Dylan weigh in as well.

So we highlighted it as a preproduction contract. So it's certainly not research and development. This is a revenue-generating contract that we're going to -- that we've received here and expect to deliver on. It is a firm fixed price contract. So I know that wasn't your question. But from a margin perspective, we're looking at 20-plus percent margin. So these are healthy margins, early stage, clearly. And as we move into the higher production, no different than the NGI, we expect that margin profile to only improve or increase as we move into that phase. Thanks for the question.

Your next question comes from the line of Kristine Liwag with Morgan Stanley.

Dylan, you mentioned earlier for NASA CLD that depending on the approach NASA wants to take, that Voyager is prepared with Starlab. I was wondering, is the third option possible? I mean if NASA still seems to be uncertain about the path they want to take, considering the maturity of your investments in Starlab and your ability to have raised private capital to support the investments, could you still go forward with Starlab as a private enterprise even if the NASA CLD doesn't materialize in what you had initially thought? It would be helpful to get your thoughts on that.

Yes. I think the short answer is yes, Kristine, we could. But I don't anticipate that being the case. I mean, NASA, of course, is the largest user in commercial LEO -- I'm sorry, in LEO today. And as we all know, the International Space Station is aging, and even if it's extended to 2032, it's hard to imagine it being extended much past that. So even if we were to go it alone, so to speak, and actually build Starlab, I would still anticipate that major space agencies around the world would be an important part of that.

But if your question is, could we capitalize this independent of NASA, I don't think that's going to end up having to be the case. Like I say, I think we're very well positioned for CLD Phase 2, but it's not out of the realm of possibility that we could independently finance this.

The other thing I would say, I just want to reinforce for everyone on the call, space is an incredibly important part of our key strategy. We have this 3L strategy that we've been referring to. That refers to LEO, which is, of course, low earth orbit. That's where Starlab plays and a lot of our other technologies play. But we also have a key lunar initiative. So that's the second L. The third L being Lagrangian, which just is a proxy for deep space technology.

But as it relates to lunar, we have a key initiative there. We call it [ Project Prevail ]. There was a lot to work with in the ignite presentation that Jared made that we're very excited about vis-a-vis lunar, including lunar habitation. And that really brings into focus our key strategic investment in Max Space, which is on expandable inflatable technology.

So we really like what we see in that 3L strategy from a growth prospect standpoint, far above and beyond just Starlab and just LEO. So I really want to reinforce that for everyone. We're very, very bullish on what we see on the space economy.

Great. Super helpful. And Dylan, just doubling down on the CLD and just understanding it a little bit better. So what are the milestones we should be watching for the Phase II announcement? I mean, is the program still on hold? Or is that still expected to be early summer for the down select? And then also just understanding the size of this potential contract. Can you just level set us again regarding the investments in Starlab so far and what you need to do and fund if you have to go in this alone or as a stand-alone entity?

Yes. Well, the second part of your question really depends on what the final design and parameters are. So it's hard to answer that second question without answering the first question, which is what the award is. What we know is that the RFI was submitted, and I think industry has all participated in that RFI. And it's our understanding based upon what NASA has said that they will then take that RFI and they will create an RFP around that.

In terms of the timing, it's uncertain. We would anticipate sometime early summer, so June, July. But there's nothing official so far as we know from NASA with a firm deadline on that. So yes, TBD on timing, Kristine. But I think what I would say is I'm confident that we have the right commercial model, the right team and the right technology to address NASA's needs. And so no matter what comes out in the form of the RFP, I think we're going to be extremely well positioned. That's really what I want to leave you with.

Super helpful, Dylan. And congrats again on your announcement with Anduril this morning. As a follow-up to that announcement, I want to understand, is this an exclusive partnership? Or are you able to partner with other players for other space-based interceptor approaches?

We are on multiple award-winning teams is what I can say, Kristine. More to come, but we are on multiple SBI winning teams.

Your next question comes from the line of Steven Wahrhaftig with Wedbush.

Congrats on a good quarter. I kind of want to take a big picture look at the entire defense space, considering the fiscal year '27 defense budget is expected to expand to about $1.5 trillion. And this includes about $75 billion of munitions procurements and $17 billion specifically for Golden Dome. So I wanted to kind of touch on how Voyager is positioned to gain some of this incremental deal flow if this budget were to pass. And then also about $350 billion of that $1.5 trillion is sitting in reconciliation rather than the discretionary base. And I just wanted to figure out exactly where your programs fall in the defense budget for reconciliation for discretionary.

Yes, really smart question. I'll ask Phil to chime in on it, but let me just give you the headline. Obviously, $1.5 trillion defense budget would be an absolute windfall not only for our industry, but for Voyager in

Welcome to the Voyager Technologies Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2025 Financial Results Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] I would now like to turn the conference over to your first speaker today, Adi Padva, Senior Vice President, Corporate Development and Investor Relations.

Mr. Padva, the floor is yours.

Thank you, and good morning, everyone. I'm joined today by Dylan Taylor, our Chairman and Chief Executive Officer; and Phil de Sousa, our Chief Financial Officer. Today's call includes forward-looking statements, which involve risks and uncertainties detailed in our earnings materials and SEC filings, including the Risk Factors section of our IPO prospectus. We undertake no obligation to update these statements. We will also discuss non-GAAP financial measures. Reconciliation of these measures is available in our earnings materials on our website.

I will now turn the call over to Dylan to begin with Slide 3.

Thank you, Adi, and good morning, everyone. 2025 was a fantastic year for Voyager, which was founded just 6 years ago. 2025 was the first year we operated as a public company, moving from building the platform to rapidly scaling it. And we are now well positioned to accelerate and industrialize our growth in 2026. In fact, based upon a record backlog, we are significantly raising our revenue guidance for the year, and we'll provide more specifics on that raise in a moment.

For the sixth consecutive year, we delivered growth. Our Defense and National Security segment grew significantly, up 59% year-over-year, driven by execution on Next Generation Interceptor and other classified programs. Our backlog increased 33% year-over-year, entering 2026 with $266 million to support our accelerating growth. During 2025, we raised over $1 billion, including and executing on a successful IPO and issuing a follow-on convertible note, all strengthening our liquidity to fund innovation and strategic growth initiatives.

We completed and integrated several acquisitions, expanding our capabilities to meet growing customer demand, which we expect to remain strong in today's geopolitical environment. These expanded capabilities are enabling us to advance several of our key initiatives, including Golden Dome. We established our orbital data center capabilities, launching the first space-hardened, managed cloud infrastructure to the International Space Station. We enhanced our missile defense capabilities with integrated optical technology for Next Generation Interceptor and cutting-edge electric propulsion.

We are enhancing space situational awareness with AI-enabled automated target recognition and intelligence analytics for space-based radar systems. Later in my remarks, I will provide more details on Estes Energetics, a significant growth opportunity for the company. Innovation is key to our strategy. Given the large opportunity set in front of us, we increased our innovation spend in 2025, which includes customer and internally funded R&D to over 20% of revenue.

Examples of the outcomes of our efforts include successful critical design review of our throttleable propulsion for NGI, new products such as AI-enabled edge computing, patented extraterrestrial manufacturing method for high-performance optical communications and patented Dust Repellent Coating technology that landed on the moon aboard Firefly's Blue Ghost lander. We expect to accelerate our innovation spend going forward to strengthen our competitive moats and capitalize on our growing addressable markets. We're also expanding our innovation ecosystem through strategic partnerships.

During the year, we formed new partnerships. VISTA or Voyager Institute for Space Technology and Advancement at the Ohio State Campus is a first-of-its-kind U.S. campus purpose-built to accelerate the commercial space economy with in-space research, manufacturing and services by bringing together aerospace, defense and commercial industries, academia and government. We recently announced partnerships with the University of North Dakota and the University of Connecticut and anticipate expanding this ecosystem to other innovative campuses domestically and internationally.

In addition to investing in technology and partnerships, we also continue to invest in our people. We added Paul Tilghman as Chief Technology Officer, who joined us from Anduril and was previously at DARPA and Microsoft. John Baum as Chief Marketing Officer, a former fighter pilot who joined us after a successful career at the Department of War and was Co-Founder of Draken. And most recently, Shoshanna Moody as Chief Administrative Officer, with experience scaling emerging businesses such as Instacart and Lyft.

Moving on to Starlab, a transformational growth engine for Voyager. We view Starlab as a generational investment opportunity built as an infrastructure-like platform with the potential to deliver attractive and enduring returns over multiple decades. During 2025, Starlab accomplished meaningful milestones, ending the year by completing our commercial critical design review, a major technical milestone with NASA that validates the maturity of the program and clears the path to full-scale construction of this station.

To date, we've completed 31 program milestones, generating $183 million of cash receipts from NASA, which underscores both performance and disciplined execution. Many investors attended our first Investor Day in Houston in November, where they also toured the full-scale high-fidelity Starlab mockup at NASA's Johnson Space Center. It's the only commercial space station mockup in the facility right next to the ISS mockup where NASA trains astronauts.

During the year, Starlab secured meaningful capital from marquee investors and partners, including Janus Henderson, Sumitomo, Mitsubishi, Seven Grand Managers and Space Applications Services, strengthening Starlab's balance sheet and reinforcing external confidence in the platform.

Finally, we're seeing strong customer demand, and I'm excited to share with you that Starlab's commercial payload capacity is fully reserved, providing early visibility into the future utilization and revenue potential. To summarize, in 2025, we strengthened the foundation of our growth engines in National Security and commercial space, leveraging our disruptive and innovation platform and multi-use technology stack. Acquisitions will continue to be an integral part of our growth strategy and our strong financial position supports that effort.

Now I'll review our most recent acquisition, Estes Energetics, now Voyager Energetics on Slide 4. Voyager Energetics strengthens a foundational layer of our missile Defense and National Security platform. Energetics, propulsion and critical resources are essential to interceptors, solid rocket motors and propulsion architectures that sit at the heart of modern missile defense and highly applicable to Golden Dome. In an environment with supply chain sovereignty and domestic manufacturing capacity are strategic imperatives, control over these inputs directly impacts program execution, schedule readiness and mission readiness.

Estes converts a historically vulnerable segment of the value chain into a strategic advantage. Specifically, it provides the U.S. with controlled onshore manufacturing and surge capacity aligned with the Department of War's priorities at a time when freedom of maneuver and deterrence are increasingly important. Voyager Energetics also deepens our vertical integration across propulsion and interceptor architectures, increasing the portion of high-value content we control within missile defense systems.

As programs such as Next Generation Interceptor and other advanced missile defense initiatives transition from development to production, this integration enhances throughput, improves margin durability and reinforces customer confidence in our ability to deliver it at speed and at scale. This acquisition is a great example of how we intentionally build Voyager, acquiring durable infrastructure-level capabilities that strengthen the industrial base, aligned tightly with customer priorities and compound long-term returns for shareholders.

Turning to Slide 5. I'll now highlight our priorities for 2026. Our top priority for the year is to accelerate growth. First, as I mentioned previously, we are meaningfully raising our 2026 revenue guidance initially provided at our Investor Day in November to a range of $225 million to $255 million, representing growth of 35% to 53% year-over-year. This acceleration relative to last year and long-term CAGR is driven by demand for our Defense and National Security technologies.

Programs aligned with Golden Dome are expanding in scope and urgency. SigNet now bolstered with new AI capabilities is also seeing higher customer interest and importantly, acquisitions are adding to our growth momentum. Our next priority is building a sustainable platform for scaled growth. We recently broke ground on the Voyager American Defense Complex in Colorado, a major expansion advancing the Pentagon's urgent call for industry to accelerate domestic missile defense and tactical munitions supply.

The Voyager American Defense Complex will be 150,000 square feet for advanced manufacturing, operations and testing and designed to support high-volume production of military-grade components, propulsion systems and energetics used to address the increasing demand from the Department of War.

Next, we are making deliberate investments in technology innovation to meet customer demand. Our increased IRAD spend is focused on strategic campaigns directly aligned to customer priorities such as Golden Dome, mission-critical advanced electronics, dynamic space operations such as propulsion and navigation, and also AI and autonomous industrialization to shorten lead times from design to output.

Finally, 2026 will be a pivotal year for Starlab as we transition to full-scale procurement and development. We anticipate NASA will soon release the RFP for the second phase of the Commercial LEO Development program, or CLD, with a decision later in the year. We are highly confident in the modernized, cost-efficient and commercially scalable solution that Starlab is delivering to NASA and other key stakeholders. The architecture is designed to provide continuous U.S. presence in low-Earth orbit while enabling a broader transition to commercially-led operations.

As the program advances, we are expanding Starlab's commercial ecosystem, building durable partnerships across mission logistics, life sciences, biopharma, advanced materials and other high-growth verticals. The approach strengthens demand visibility and reinforces Starlab's role as an ecosystem, not a single-use platform. The early demand signals that Starlab commercial capacity is fully reserved are reinforcing our confidence.

So to recap, we closed 2025 very strongly despite a prolonged government shutdown and our growth is accelerating into 2026, giving us the confidence to raise our full year revenue guidance. We have tremendous opportunities to capture additional market share, and we'll continue to fund innovation in IRAD to fully capitalize on these opportunities.

With that, I'll turn the call over to Phil to walk through the financials in more detail.

Thanks, Dylan. Turning to Slide 6. I'll begin with the fourth quarter results. Net sales increased 24% year-over-year, driven by strong execution in our Defense and National Security segment. Growth was driven by continued progress on the Next Generation Interceptor program, classified programs as well as contributions from newly acquired businesses. We ended the year with total backlog of $266 million, a 41% sequential increase from last quarter. This step-up reflects new program awards, expanding scope on existing programs and contributions from acquired businesses, all of which are significantly improving our revenue visibility and accelerating growth in 2026.

Adjusted EBITDA for the fourth quarter was a loss of $21.8 million compared to a loss of $6.3 million last year. The year-over-year change reflects investments on innovation, talent acquisition and corporate infrastructure build. These investments are intentional and placed ahead of growth, establishing the operational foundation to ensure we scale efficiently. On the bottom line, adjusted EPS was a loss of $0.37. This compared to a loss of $2.09 in the prior year, with comparability reflecting a higher share count following our IPO.

Turning to Slide 7. I will discuss segment performance for the fourth quarter. Defense and National Security net sales increased 63% year-over-year, driven by execution on Next Generation Interceptor classified programs as well as contributions from acquired businesses. Segment adjusted EBITDA was a loss of $4.5 million. This reflecting increased R&D and talent investments. Space Solutions net sales declined 29% year-over-year and entirely due to the anticipated conclusion of a multiyear NASA services contract.

Segment adjusted EBITDA improved to $2.3 million compared to $1.2 million in the prior year. Here, our volume decline was more than offset by favorable mix and disciplined cost management. Today, while Starlab does not generate revenue, during the quarter, Starlab continued to achieve NASA milestones, generating cash receipts of $10 million. This highlighting the continued execution, progress and momentum. It is noteworthy that in addition to NASA milestone cash receipts, we are also seeing very strong support of Starlab from high-quality investors as part of Starlab's Series A capital raise.

Now turning to Slide 8 to recap our full year performance. For the full year, net sales increased 15% year-over-year, a 33% year-over-year increase, excluding the planned wind down of the legacy NASA contract within Space Solutions. The growth here was led by Defense and National Security expanding 59% year-over-year. Adjusted EBITDA for the full year was a loss of $69.9 million compared to a loss of $30 million last year. Adjusted EPS was a loss of $2.05 compared to a loss of $5.72 in the prior year.

Turning to Slide 9 for a review of our full year segment performance. Defense and National Security net sales increased 59% year-over-year, while segment adjusted EBITDA was a loss of $4.5 million. Significant growth in Next Generation Interceptor and classified ISR Programs were the main growth drivers here. Space Solutions net sales declined 36% year-over-year, and as I mentioned earlier, primarily due to the planned wind down of a legacy NASA services contract.

Segment adjusted EBITDA was a slight loss of $0.8 million. Starlab achieved 11 milestones during 2025, and we have achieved 31 milestones program to date with milestone-based cash receipts since inception of $183 million. As a reminder, this is part of our $218 million NASA Commercial LEO Development Phase 1 award to support program development and execution in replacing the International Space Station.

Wrapping up here, we're encouraged by the momentum across our businesses, and we are increasingly confident in our ability to execute on our backlog, scale our business and deliver long-term value through disciplined growth and strategic investment.

Let's turn to Slide 10 and cover our financial position. As we execute our growth strategy, we continue to operate from a position of financial strength and flexibility. We ended the year with $491 million in cash and access to $213 million in credit facilities. All this resulting in total liquidity of well over $700 million. Our liquidity supports a disciplined growth-oriented capital allocation strategy. We continue to execute our targeted priorities for acquisitions, particularly opportunities to enhance our vertical integration or add differentiated capabilities, all the while also funding organic investments to develop new technologies and to further scale our existing platform.

Turning to Slide 11. We are raising our 2026 net sales guidance to a range of $225 million to $255 million. All this representing 35% to 53% year-over-year growth and a clear acceleration from 2025. This growth is driven by demand in Defense and National Security, including Golden Dome aligned programs as well as contributions from other areas. With the wind down of the NASA services contract behind us, we expect to see Space Solutions once again return to growth in 2026.

In 2026, we are making investments directly linked to opportunities we are seeing across our markets. Investment and incremental growth are clearly connected. We are investing because demand is expanding and customers are pulling us into larger multi-year, mission-critical programs. Gross margin for the year is expected to be in the mid-teens, reflecting targeted investments in manufacturing capacity ahead of growth acceleration.

Notably, internally funded research and development will increase to approximately 20% of net sales, advancing mission-critical capabilities aligned with customer priorities, including national defense initiatives such as the Golden Dome, all the while continuing to also innovate across our existing platforms. We expect modest SG&A leverage as revenue growth begins to absorb public company costs. In addition to innovation investments, capital expenditures, excluding Starlab, are expected to be approximately $60 million to $70 million. Here, we are focused on scaling domestic energetics and munitions production, advanced electronics and propulsion capacity as well as product line enhancements.

Importantly, these investments are tied to programs where we have line of sight to growing demand. Starlab enters its full system development phase in 2026 and is expected to ramp investment levels executing to plan. Starlab investments, including operating expenses, procurement and capital expenditures will continue to be supported by diversified funding sources, including NASA's CLD program, other government entities, domestic and international as well as capital markets.

2026 is a pivotal year towards delivering on our long-term financial framework. To emphasize, we continue to target a 25% organic growth CAGR, gross margins in the range of 30% to 35%, resulting in mid-teens adjusted EBITDA margin, excluding Starlab and low teens free cash flow margin, again, excluding Starlab. Starlab once in orbit is expected to generate $4 billion of annual revenues and $1.5 billion of annual free cash flow, providing a significant value creation opportunity for shareholders. In summary, we continue to invest in growth to support accelerating demand for our mission-critical capabilities with a clear line of sight to scale, operating leverage and cash generation as execution builds. This framework balances our near-term execution with durable long-term value.

With that, I'll turn it back over to Dylan.

Thank you, Phil. To wrap up on Slide 12, 2025 was a year marked by transformational execution for Voyager, backed by customer momentum and supported by a platform purpose-built for mission urgency and scale. We strengthened our foundation by entering the public markets, delivered strong growth, completed strategic acquisitions that deepen vertical integration and advanced Starlab through major milestones. Each step expanded capability and reduced risk. The opportunities ahead across missile defense, national security and commercial space are funded, measurable and accelerating, and we are well positioned to convert that demand into sustained growth and long-term shareholder value. I am confident in our team, our strategy and the strength of our technology stack as we execute in 2026 and beyond.

Operator, we're now ready to take questions.

[Operator Instructions] Your first question comes from Ron Epstein with Bank of America.

Dylan, I was wondering if you could just maybe go into some more detail on what really prompted the revenue guide and what you're feeling really comfortable about to do that?

Yes. Well, I appreciate it, Ron. Good to hear from you. So a couple of points I would make. First of all, it's a terrific environment for our products and services in general. Certainly, defense spending, as we know, is on the increase, but probably more importantly than that, structurally, the way the Department of War is procuring products and services is evolving, it's really playing to our strengths. It's really leaning into the innovation side of things. Everything is being challenged in terms of legacy programs versus new advanced technologies.

So that's playing directly into our strengths. So a great environment, record pipeline, record backlog. And then if I dive deeper into the demand signals, it's really across the board. It's everything from our advanced electronics capability, which is really seminal to a lot of these programs. We're seeing the demand signal very, very strong in propulsion on multiple programs factoring into Golden Dome.

The Energetics business that we just acquired, we're seeing huge demand signals on that as well as the Department of War looks to replenish their stockpiles. And then I would say also on communications, sensing and data processing, huge demand signals on that as well. So it's really across the board, and that's why we have the conviction based upon the record pipeline, based upon the record backlog to raise revenue guidance into the year.

And then maybe just kind of as a follow-up to that on Starlab with a NASA administrator set and things seeming more stable on the top of NASA. When would you expect a down select decision on the Starlab?

Yes. Definitely this year, Ron, we still anticipate a down select this year. To be more precise, it's difficult to say. We would anticipate the RFP is going to come out in the next 60 days or so and basing that on language that was in the NASA authorization bill that just passed committee. But if you figure roughly, I don't know, 4 to 5 months for selection once that RFP is out, then that would be sort of late summer, early fall. But I would definitely anticipate selection within calendar year 2026.

Your next question comes from the line of Myles Walton with Wolfe Research.

Maybe, Phil, you gave us a number of the moving pieces on the EBITDA walk. Could you maybe flesh that out if you want to, to get to sort of a range? And then relating to the higher CapEx, we've seen a lot of the missile providers find a way to get what are effectively advances, but basically higher milestone payments coincident with the CapEx expenditures to lessen the load on free cash flow. Could you touch on that as well?

Myles, I'll take that first one and just ask you to repeat the second question for me. But from an EBITDA perspective, you're 100% right. We are guiding to an EBITDA loss in 2026. It shouldn't come as a surprise. We continue to see tremendous opportunity to grow our business, invest in our business. So as part of that, we're accelerating a significant amount of our own internally funded research and development. We know that there's a strong signal for demand for our product for our innovative solutions that we already have and are contracted and the next generation of those.

And so we're going to continue to invest in growing our business. We see a strong signal, as Dylan mentioned earlier, from the marketplace that that's going to continue. It's not just a short-term duration. So we're going to continue to invest in our business here in 2026. Important too is, as we start to scale and grow through the back half of this year, we anticipate to still, if you would achieve our longer-term aspirations of being EBITDA positive exiting 2027 and be free cash flow positive in 2028.

And so that's, I think, is a really important element to make sure that investors and analysts alike understand. We are committed. In fact, if anything, we're enthused with the increasing demand for our product and see opportunity to actually potentially achieve some of those targets earlier than we had previously anticipated despite our investment here in 2026.

Sorry, it's Dylan. I think just to touch on your second part of your question if I understood it correctly, we're seeing tremendous demand on the propulsion missile defense side across multiple programs. So I think part of what I would want to communicate on that is, in addition to Next Generation Interceptor, our technology is quite relevant to other programs. And whether it's THAAD or PAC-3 or some of these others. And so 2 things are happening. One is our technology continues to be relevant to being spec-ed in on those programs.

And then the second part is the demand for those, let's say, the quantities under those programs are increasing given the geopolitical circumstances in the world. And then touching on another part of your question, which is, is there nondilutive funding and/or milestone payments available for these programs? The answer to that is yes, and we're absolutely driving that and expect some additional detail and announcements on that as we roll forward into 2026.

But right now, we're not communicating any of that quite yet. We're not in a position to do so. But you're absolutely right. There is a lot of nondilutive funding available to accelerate not only these programs, but the quantities on these programs. So we're very optimistic that, that's going to be very beneficial as we look to scale our propulsion technology as well.

Yes, that was the question, Dylan. And just one follow-up, if I could. The Starlab percentage ownership at this point by Voyager following the fundraising, where does that sit today?

I believe we can get you an exact number, Myles, but I believe we're sitting at...

At about 60%.

Yes. It's right at just north of 60%. I think it's 61% last time I checked, but we can get you a precise number.

Your next question comes from the line of Seth Seifman with JPMorgan.

This is Rocco on for Seth. How should we think about growth in Defense and National Security next year? Should NGI remain the main growth driver? Or are there other growth drivers that should be called out?

In '26?

Yes, in '26.

Yes. No, it's really across the board. So NGI, for sure, on the propulsion side of things, that's a big part of it. I wish I could give you more specificity on the Golden Dome in general, but there are a lot of programs associated with Golden Dome that are being spec'd in currently. Those announcements -- award announcements haven't been made public yet. But rest assured, our technology is quite relevant to those various programs. So stay tuned on that.

And then as I mentioned earlier, in addition to the propulsion technology, we're seeing huge demand signal on the advanced electronics part of our business, which is really foundational to a lot of defense programs in general. And then the energetic side, as I mentioned, and then advanced communications and sensing. So a lot of our SIGINT data processing that sits mostly in the intelligence community and classified programs, we're seeing strong demand signals there as well. So yes, it's really across the board with an emphasis, I would say, on propulsion.

Phil, would you add anything to that?

Yes. I'd certainly -- well, one, I want to remind everybody how diversified our Defense National Security portfolio is today, especially with the strategic acquisitions of ExoTerra and Estes in the back half of last year. So to kind of reframe, certainly, this past fourth quarter, NGI was a significant driver of our growth. NGI actually grew over 100% year-over-year in Q4. NGI was up about 100% year-over-year in the calendar year 2025.

As we enter 2026, bear in mind, about $200 million of our backlog sits in within Defense and National Security and only about 25% of that is actually tied to NGI, which is a fantastic program as a base, and we look forward to the scaling of that program as we move from design phase here in 2026 into low rate production and high rate production in 2027 and 2028, respectively. But just as a key reminder to investors, we are far more diversified than just Next Generation interceptor as important program as it is to us.

Yes. And just final point I would make is, again, record backlog. And the record backlog is based upon record pipeline. So we really like the visibility we're seeing and the demand drivers we're seeing. And as a management team, the way we think about value creation is build pipeline. That's why we're super excited about the record pipeline, make sure that we turn that into backlog. And of course, we at record backlog, which then, of course, transfers into revenue, EBITDA and cash flow. So the funnel, Rocco, is just tremendous, and we're super bullish about the demand signals that we're seeing.

Right. And digging into that funded backlog in Defense and Security, I mean it's over doubled quarter-over-quarter. Should we think about the kind of unannounced Golden Dome awards as being the primary driver there of the growth? Or is there another kind of program to call out?

Yes. It's not included. It's not included. So think of this as things that have been announced and things that haven't been announced are not yet in those numbers.

I go back to the initial question from Ron asking us about the confidence in our visibility, as you said, in our revenue guide for 2026. And obviously, it starts with that record backlog position. But it's also, if you would -- and I don't mean to sound overly enthusiastic. I'm supposed to be the CFO and more of the realist here in the room, but we are tremendously excited by the pipeline and how that's going to crystallize for us over the course of not just first half of this year, but even as we extend out to the back half of the year. We know this administration is going to be heavy into upping the defense budget, the defense allocations, if you would.

And clearly, a lot of the onshoring demand that we're excited about is not reflected in this backlog. It's all in front of us in terms of order opportunity for us into '26. We have to get through 2026 first. But as we look out to 2027, it will make for yet another acceleration in growth profile for Voyager.

Your next question comes from the line of Justin Lang with Morgan Stanley.

I'm on for Kristine today. I appreciate all the detail at the top on Estes. I was hoping you could provide a little more color on how that business factors into your '26 outlook and how you think about synergy capture from here. And we've heard a lot about fragility within the missile propulsion supply base. So just curious if you could size maybe the magnitude of investment required to build out capacity in that business? And then I have a follow-up.

Yes. So I'll take a stab at that, and I'll pass it over to Phil, especially to talk about the cost portion. But yes, the energetics portion of our business is going to be increasingly strategic and critical. If you look at the value chain for propulsion and missile defense in general, but also factoring into things like munitions, which is another key focus of the administration.

Within that value chain, energetics is one of the key components, not only from a value capture standpoint, but also as a critical supply chain input. And it's at the confluence of not only the fact that this is essential to make these systems work, but it's also at the confluence of the administration's priority for critical chemicals, which is the same strategic orientation that they had towards critical minerals like antimony and things like that. So that's a key focus.

It also is at the confluence of onshoring because a lot of these energetics are currently not made in the U.S. So there's a few factors here. One is we can control more of the production inputs, which gives us more control over the supply chain, which ultimately gives us speed to market, which is what the customer is asking for. Furthermore, it allows us to build out this Voyager ADC, the American Defense Complex, which is relevant to all of our propulsion technologies. There's actually some CapEx offset with this Estes Energetics acquisition we made, where we're able to use some of their facilities to offset some CapEx that we had anticipated with our TDACS technology. So we're super excited about that.

And then the other thing, which isn't in our numbers, but we're still, I think, very optimistic about is all of this is eligible for nondilutive funding from the government under this critical chemicals framework and onshoring framework. So I think that's another opportunity for value capture and CapEx offset. So when you think about this Voyager American Defense Complex and what it's supporting, it's not only supporting the energetics business, which is a critical input, it's setting us up for scale production for our entire propulsion technology suite. So think of this as a foundational investment that's going to lead to huge scaling and upside on the revenue side for propulsion more generally.

So we're super excited about that. I think it's going to be ultimately a critical competitive advantage and moat that we're going to have that other providers are not going to have. And again, I think it's completely aligned with the administration's goals, stated goals for these critical inputs as well.

So with that, I'll pass it over to Phil.

Yes. And again, thanks for the question. So -- and one thing I think I'd really start by highlighting is, as we acquired these businesses, the first thing that Voyager looks to do is integrate the businesses into our portfolio. So don't think of these as a stand-alone operation kind of going forward. We will quickly integrate them. As Dylan mentioned, it's not just Estes, it's ExoTerra. It's our former predecessor Valley Tech business. It's all really part of our strategic defense portfolio.

And so Estes along with ExoTerra, does nothing but strengthen our vertical integration around propulsion. It's tied to multiple growth drivers, including Golden Dome. Estes alone from an energetics perspective, adds over $1 billion of opportunity to our pipeline. So again, back to the backlog, $266 million entering the year, very little of that tied to energetics. The opportunity is all in front of us. We know the opportunity is real. The U.S. government continues to call for it.

When we highlight $60 million to $70 million of CapEx in 2026, of course, that's all excluding Starlab. A significant portion of that is going to be tied to the Voyager American Defense Complex. Again, it's not only specifically Estes or energetics. It's also tied to propulsion, the broader propulsion portfolio and supporting our grander, Golden Dome driver -- or growth drivers, I should say, and initiatives.

Got it. That's great color. And then sort of relatedly, just on Golden Dome specifically, as that opportunity set takes shape, just curious the signal you're getting from the customer if they're really stressing an industry sort of invest upfront here and you're seeing maybe a pay-to-play type dynamic emerge? Any color there would be helpful.

Yes. Well, again, record pipeline. About $1.6 billion of our record pipeline is associated with Golden Dome opportunities. So we're super bullish on the opportunity that we see. In terms of the procurement strategy, which is really, I think, embedded in your question, we are seeing the customer and the Department of War looking for new ways to incentivize commercial providers to not only expect the technology they need, but to move faster to develop these systems. And of course, that need is urgent.

I think that plays to our strengths, right, because we're more maneuverable, more entrepreneurial, more flexible, more adaptable than certainly a lot of the legacy players in this space are. So we actually welcome this, I would say, creative procurement approach that the customer is asking for. And then ultimately, keep in mind, the technologies that we're putting into play in the Golden Dome have already passed things like critical design view with -- critical design review on next-generation interceptor, right? So this is already proven technology.

So even if it's a milestone-based contract, we have a lot of confidence that the tech is already going to work as opposed to, let's say, developing systems that might have unproven technology being spec'd in. We could be more specific on the Golden Dome, but currently, we're not able to talk specifically about the specifics of those contracts. But I would say, generally speaking, the customer is looking for new and innovative ways to procure that are disrupting the status quo approach.

I think, Dylan, if I could just double down and emphasize. So think of not just the CapEx, but the innovation investment that we have planned for here in 2026, it's extremely deliberate. And it's a deliberate investment ahead of growth, not ahead of opportunity. If we didn't have line of sight to orders in our pipeline, line of sight to larger programs that are scaling in terms of moving from design phase into production phase, we wouldn't be making these investments ahead of this growth.

So just to kind of reiterate our confidence, what that growth profile looks like. And of course, like Voyager has demonstrated in years past, being ahead of the curve, if you would, so not necessarily waiting for the opportunities to knock on our door. We are -- if you're positioning ourselves to capture a great share or a portion of that share of that market as it unveils and it evolves.

Yes. And I just want to emphasize one thing. Our record backlog does not include the upside from these Golden Dome opportunities.

Your next question comes from the line of Greg Konrad with Jefferies.

So you spent a lot of time talking about the Defense and National Security side. If maybe we could talk about Space Solutions a little bit. I think you said now that some of the wind down is behind them, you expect it to return to growth in 2026. What do you see as the biggest drivers of that? And any way to maybe quantify the growth expectations for Space?

Yes. So I'll take that, Greg. So just a reminder, right? So fourth quarter revenue down entirely driven by the planned wind down of the NASA low-margin services contracts. So as we -- if you would reset 2026. We see continued demand for mission management services on the ISS and it certainly continues to operate today and think of that as the bridge to Starlab, which we're already seeing continuous demand.

And in fact, we know it's our current mission management services, customer relationships, managing things on the International Space Station today that's leading to that overbooked, if you would, commercial demand that we're seeing on Starlab already. So as we kind of look out to 2026 and 2027, we continue to see low earth orbit as a demand driver. Looking out even beyond, certainly, the focus on lunar and perhaps we can talk a little bit about the announcement we made today in that space and how that lends itself to that.

I think that there's upside opportunity in Space Solutions. I look forward to seeing it return to growth in 2026, albeit modest relative to our Defense and National Security business, which is supported by a tremendous amount of backlog entering the year. But make no mistake, Space Solutions continues to be a growth driver and a growth focus for Voyager.

Yes. And I would just add, so we're very bullish on Space Solutions. I know we've spent a lot of time talking about the Defense side. But we also see great demand on the Space Solutions side. Just to reiterate our strategy there, we call it the 3Ls, which is LEO, Lunar and Lagrange, Lagrange being a proxy for deep space. So we'll have more to talk about on our Max Space investment probably on our next quarterly call because that's fresh.

But think of us as focusing on the technologies that enable administration goals in all 3 of those domains, low earth orbit, the lunar environment and deep space. And so we have relevant technology already that applies to all 3 of those domains, and we're going to look to fund IRAD and/or make acquisitions and/or investments in technologies that are again going to address all 3 of those domains. And as Phil pointed out, we see a huge opportunity in lunar and the return to the moon with lunar infrastructure.

And then, of course, a lot of our foundational mission management business is leading directly to these demand signals we're getting on Starlab, which is really well -- positioning us well to capture the majority of the market share available in low earth orbit. So we're feeling very bullish about that. 100% of our commercial demand for Starlab is already reserved, which I think is a fantastic outcome given the fact that we won't be in orbit for another 36 months.

And then maybe just as a follow-up, that's a good transition to Starlab. Any way to maybe quantify some of the financial impact in 2026? I think most of the numbers you gave are ex Starlab, thinking about innovation, CapEx and then it seems like potentially some offset given you've sold out the payload capacity. How should we think about the free cash flow usage and any inflows tied to Starlab in 2026?

Yes, Greg, I think really important to note in terms of planning cash flow around Starlab in 2026 is, one, I'm driving a -- think of it as a cash neutral profile, meaning it's not just about free cash flow, but it's also about our successful fundraising for Starlab, and that's nondilutive capital as well as dilutive capital through our successful Series A for Starlab that's been ongoing.

We anticipate, obviously, NASA to step in during the year as well, but it's going to be -- also be other international space agencies. And as we kind of start to approach the latter part of the year, we'll start to expect some pre-advanced fundings to come in from customers already. To that point, and I'll highlight, I know we've talked a lot about our record backlog in the $266 million.

But just to highlight and be fully transparent with everybody, there's actually $6 million of backlog associated with Starlab, which is quarters ahead of what I would have expected to actually have hit. And so back to the growing demand, growing necessity for a low earth orbit replacement for ISS and Starlab's great position to do so. We feel great about that. From a financial perspective, Starlab is intended to be, if you would, cash neutral for the year. We do anticipate free cash flow to be a cash outflow that will be funded by both dilutive and nondilutive capital coming into the year. I think that's the important piece to highlight.

From a Voyager perspective, just to remind everybody, the JV structure actually reduces Voyager's capital exposure to Starlab. Our diversified funding within Starlab itself limits Voyager's capital burden. And again, just to highlight the early demand visibility, the diversified customer base we see for Starlab gives us tremendous excitement as we look out to later in 2026 and certainly 2027 as we start to move from design and actually constructing the new station.

Your next question comes from the line of Michael Leshock with KeyBanc Capital Markets.

I wanted to ask on the government shutdown and what you're expecting from the catch-up there and how that plays out in '26. Is there one quarter that might see the biggest benefit? Or is that relatively consistent as the year progresses?

I can take that as well. The government shutdown had a minor, if you would, impact or a relatively small impact to us actually in the fourth quarter. Probably would have had even bigger backlog, even more orders to report in Q4, if not for the prolonged government shutdown. So as excited as we are about total record backlog of $266 million, that would have been higher. So I look forward to Q1 and certainly Q2 being perhaps a little bit higher in terms of orders than perhaps historically speaking, we would have seen.

From a revenue perspective, that delay, if you will, in the fourth quarter, probably means our first quarter will be a bit muted from an actual revenue crystallization perspective. And so we would anticipate revenue to accelerate through the year in 2026. But the government shutdown thought it's worth doesn't necessarily impact Voyager that significantly. The underlying demand drivers here, these national security growth drivers are not, if you were temporary.

Obviously, with the geopolitical environment that we're in today, last quarter, we were talking about the impact potentially of the prolonged impact of the Ukraine war with Russia. Now we have the Iran conflict, et cetera. If anything, these things are just depleting our national security resources and Voyager is well positioned to replenish that. And it's not going to be a 6- or 12-month resupply mission. This is going to be a multiyear growth support driver for Voyager.

Yes. The only other thing I would say is that given the fact that we were shut down for half of the fourth quarter, right, 45 out of 90 days, the fact that we essentially hit our revenue target, I think, is a very good fact. And I think it shows not only the resilience but the diversification of the business. And again, exiting the year with record backlog, record pipeline, raising revenue guidance, all on the heels of a prolonged government shutdown, I think, is a very good fact.

And then on the NGI program, can you provide any color on next milestones or key watch points for NGI to hit its target for LRIP in late '26? Is there any facility or capacity expansions that are needed to hit your targets and kind of drive the strong growth that you're seeing there?

You want to take this, Phil?

Yes. No. So NGI, as we've said, we work very closely, obviously, with the prime Lockheed Martin there. Just case in point, we've continued to stay on time and stay on schedule from our perspective, irrespective of other potential supply chain issues. Ultimately, we will take that final order through the low rate production from the customer when it's ready. We do anticipate those orders to come here second half of this year as we move into low rate production next year.

As far as the manufacturing capacity and investment, to be clear, we are investing in our -- in the Voyager American Defense Complex ahead of demand for golden dome opportunities. in excess or said incremental to next-generation Interceptor. We know that those opportunities are real. We're working very closely with other primes, not named Lockheed Martin as an example, on various -- through initiatives, various programs. And so that's the reason why we're making that investment. That said, we are well positioned through to scale on NGI when Lockheed is good and ready.

[Operator Instructions] Our next question comes from the line of Sam Brandeis with Wedbush Securities.

Sam on for Dan Ives. Looking ahead to 2026, can you walk us through the 2 or 3 most critical growth drivers or milestones, whether contract awards, Starlab development targets, program execution gates that you would point to as the clearest proof points that Voyager's long-term thesis is well on track?

Well, we got a lot more than 3. I'll try to pick the biggest 3. I mean, I think a few things. One is continued delivery of our propulsion technology on programs like NGI. But I would say more specific to that would be being announced on additional programs of record, including Golden Dome programs, including legacy programs of record.

I think evidence that we can hopefully talk about in the public domain here in the near term that would show that we're getting traction on additional programs, I think, would be a key indicator and validation point. And that would be -- and again, just to reemphasize, that would be in addition to the record backlog that we've already talked about. So this is all incremental. So I think that's one thing.

Second key thing would be our ability to scale our production capacity because that's really what's going to set us up for a remarkable 2027 and 2028, both from a revenue growth perspective, but also from an operating leverage, EBITDA, free cash flow, all the things that we anticipate. And then the third thing I would say, which is relevant is the successful outcome of CLD Phase 2, which, of course, is the space station selection by NASA. And we anticipate that selection to happen within calendar year 2026, and we feel very good about our strategic position there.

And then just to emphasize, we have ample liquidity, lots of dry powder on the balance sheet. We're seeing huge opportunities, not only for internal investment to drive growth, but also still on the acquisition side as well. So those would be 3 kind of pillars that I would put out there. And we have a lot more than just those 3, but I think those are 3 to keep an eye on.

Great. And you guys made 5 acquisitions in 2025. Where do you think are the remaining capability gaps in the portfolio? And when do you think the strategy shifts from capability filling to driving scale as the company further matures?

I think we've already made the pivot or shift to that second part. We are in scale mode for sure. I think on the capability side, there are a few areas that we're still interested in exploring. Anything in power and propulsion, we're going to continue to look at the value chain there. How do we go faster? How do we scale capability and production availability. We'll also be responsive to the needs of the customer as we have been with this critical chemicals and onshoring initiative that we talked about.

On space exploration, I think the lunar environment is something that we're really keen on. There's a huge opportunity there with NASA's focus on going back to the moon and going back to the moon to stay. And we're very well positioned with our technology to be a major player in that domain as well. So I think those are 2 key areas.

And then I think our acquisition pipeline is quite robust, and we're seeing a lot of opportunities there. I think one way to think about this might be geographic expansion as well that would lead to other customers around the world that would be non-U.S. based. I think that's a huge growth opportunity for the company. Nothing imminent there, but I think that's another area that we can scale our business. So those are some thoughts and happy to dive deeper with you on any of those points.

Thank you. Mr. Padva, I'd like to turn the conference back over to you.

Thank you very much. We'll now take a couple of questions from [ FEI Technology ]. First one, as Voyager seeks to grow content additional missile programs, how should we think about the incremental investment required to supply programs like PAC-3 or others, which have higher production rates relative to next-generation interceptor?

Yes. Well, thank you for the question. I really appreciate that. So a couple of ways to think about this. Our Voyager American Defense Complex, we're building that out in anticipation not only of addressing the record pipeline that we have, but scaling from there. So this would be existing programs of record, missile defense programs of record like PAC-3, like THAAD, like Trident, like others. But in addition to that, opportunities on things like Golden Dome, which haven't been announced publicly yet.

So think of the American Defense Complex is setting the table for us to take advantage of all these demand signals that we're seeing. And we're confident with the investment that we're planning in 2026 for the Voyager ADC, we won't have additional incremental investment in order to capture these large pipeline and backlog opportunities that we see. So we feel very good about that.

The next question, given that NASA is expected to award the CLD Phase 2 later this year, what is Voyager's strategy in case NASA further delay the Phase 1 selection to '27, for example? And do you have any other financing to maintain the 2029 launch schedule without the federal funding?

Yes. Well, we don't anticipate a delay outside of calendar year 2026. There was a NASA authorization bill that just cleared the Senate Commerce Committee here recently, and it specifically says the RFP. I think it's within 60 days. So I don't anticipate the RFP pushing in or the selection pushing into 2027. The other thing about the Starlab joint venture model is it's fantastic from a Voyager perspective because there's a lot of capital flexibility in that model. So the cost structure itself -- well, first of all, the JV is actually raising third-party capital into the JV. So that's one key point.

But the second key point is the way the joint venture is set up is a lot of the cost structure is in procurement and integration, and those things can be modulated and the time that those costs are spent can be chosen at our option as opposed to, let's say, some of the competitors have a very, very, very heavy run rate cost structure. And if there's a delay in procurement on their side, their cash burn is extremely high. Our model is different, and that gives us much more capital flexibility in our approach.

This concludes our question. I will hand it back to Dylan for closing remarks.

Well, thank you, everybody. We're super excited about our 2025, the record backlog that we have going into 2026, the growth opportunities we see in the company throughout all of our growth vectors, including power and propulsion, energetics, Space Solutions, Starlab and the like.

So with that, I want to thank everybody for joining the call. Thanks for your interest in Voyager Technologies, and we look forward to speaking with you after we wrap up Q1. Thank you.

Thank you. This concludes today's Voyager Technologies Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2025 Financial Results Conference Call. Please disconnect your lines at this time, and have a wonderful day.

Thank you for joining us today. My name is John Godyn. I'm Citi's aerospace and defense analyst. For those of you that don't know me, we are very excited to have the CEO of Voyager here. Dylan, thank you for joining us.

My pleasure. Good to be with you, John.

We've been kicking it off typically with a very general question. And for some of the companies that maybe a little bit less known in the audience, just asking for an overview of the business, a bit of a background, the idea behind Voyager, the mission. Maybe you could just sort of get us up to speed.

Yes, sure. So we founded Voyager about 6.5 years ago. The thesis that we had was the aerospace and defense industry, the middle market had really been hollowed out. And what was existing at that time was the large aerospace primes, highly capable, could operate at scale, but maybe not particularly innovative or flexible or adaptable in their business model. And then you had a lot of upstarts, high technology, high innovation that weren't scaling particularly well, maybe didn't have the capital structures required to compete, couldn't assemble enough capability maybe to compete for programs of record. And so we thought there was a real opportunity to create an operating platform. We admired companies like Danaher, like HEICO, TransDigm and others that had created operating platforms that were really about value capture.

And so we thought if we could create a company that was the best of both worlds, prime capable that denominated on innovation, flexible, adaptable business model that not only would customers gravitate towards a company like that, but the best employees in the industry would gravitate towards a platform like that as well. So fast forward to today, we went public last June. We're sitting on around $500 million of cash $200 million untapped credit facility, very, very high organic CAGR, supplemented by accretive M&A. And we sit right at the nexus of defense Tech and smart missile defense, which is a great place to be, and space tech, including the commercialization of low Earth orbit, the Lunar economy and elsewhere. So we're -- we think really well positioned in those growth areas. We've got a great platform, a great company with great people and a lot of capital to deploy accretively.

That's fantastic. There are a few things I want to follow up in there. But maybe if you could just kind of get us up to speed the first year or so post IPO, major developments and milestones.

Sure. So when we went public in June. Soon thereafter, we announced 2 acquisitions. One was in the propulsion technology arena, which we excel at, a company called ExoTerra, which is focused on ionic based propulsion technology, specifically Hall effect thrusters, which is very relevant for satellite positioning. We also made another acquisition in, I'll call it, propulsion technology called Estes, which is really in the energetics piece, which is not only relevant to propulsion, but it's also relevant to things like munitions, black powder. There's a lot of onshoring of that by the administration. So those 2 acquisitions are one part horizontal expansion across business lines we are currently in, but also a part vertical integration as well, which is bringing more capability in-house.

We also did a convert soon after going public to put more capital on the balance sheet at very attractive cost of capital. And we're competing very favorably for the space station program. We anticipate that contract to be selected by NASA sometime this summer. We completed our critical design review with NASA in December. We're waiting to hear back on how we did there officially. But that program continues to -- we continue to execute against our milestones there as well.

That's great. Can we just talk about the growth strategy more broadly? Obviously, you mentioned some of the acquisitions. I want to hear about the acquisition philosophy, but also the organic growth strategy.

Yes, if you don't mind, I'm going to refer to a slide here, I'll fast forward. But because we laid this out, I think it's important to frame this up for folks, just back up here. So our growth strategy, the key thing I want to focus on is far left here, we're really leaning into the innovation piece. So think of Voyager as an innovation and technology platform, disrupting defense tech and space tech. So we have a very high innovation spend, about 18% of revenue. Thankfully, a lot of it is offset by customer-funded C-RAD as opposed to IRAD. But we're always leaning into what's next from a technological standpoint. We think that's how you win the game. Thankfully, this administration is also rewarding newer entrants as both the legacy companies. So that innovation has been particularly helpful. So that's a key part of our growth strategy.

The second part is scaling up existing technologies. One example of that is this propulsion technology I referred to earlier. We have throttleable -- it's called TDACS throttleable divert attitude control system technology. This would go on things like next-generation interceptor, which is hypersonic inbound missiles from adversaries. It's a no fail mission. If you don't intercept the missile, you lose a city. So it's really, really important. And our technology makes the missile more accurate. Now that, that technology has been validated on next-generation interceptor, which is kind of the highest technical standard past critical design review, now we can scale up that technology to other programs of record, including things like THAAD, Standard Missile 3, Trident and even things like Golden Dome space-based interceptors. So scale-up is another key part of it.

Accretive M&A, I mentioned that earlier. These are typically proprietarily sourced deals, principal to principal. We're typically not participating in an auction process. If a management team doesn't care where they end up and they're just looking to monetize, that wouldn't be a good fit for us. We've got great operational leverage in the business. So we're really focused on leveraging not only margin improvement, but taking the platform and growing into different customer sets. And then last but not least is the opportunity to build, develop and operate the next-generation space station. Of course, NASA there is inverting the model like they did with launch, which gave birth to SpaceX rather than own and operate rockets, they use SpaceX as their vendor, they're doing that on the space station side as well. So those are the different growth pillars that we have, and we're really excited about where the company is headed in all of those.

I want to follow up on some of those growth pillars more specifically. But before I do, if you could just give us a sense of the industry structure as you see it, the competitive set and competitive dynamics. You're a disruptor, you mentioned that you're going, in some cases, head-to-head against primes. I'm just kind of curious how you see the landscape.

Two of the key things that we wanted to focus on when we founded the company was flexibility in the operating model. That manifests its way in 2 instances. One is dual-use technology, so space and defense. So we're always looking for technologies that play in both arenas. Our propulsion technology would be an example of that. But the other is flexibility in the operating model itself, either to be a prime or a subcontractor at our option. So for example, on the space station, where there's huge economic benefit to being the prime and the owner of the operator, we want to be the prime in that particular case.

On, let's say, next-generation interceptor, where we have proprietary technology, and we're literally the only provider of this technology. We're happy to be within the supply chain, selling into a Lockheed or another prime contractor because we can get the margin and economic profile we're looking for without having to take a lot of customer pricing risk. So that ability to arbitrage, I think is differentiated as well. And that's a key way of how we think about it. I think in terms of how we're positioned in defense tech, I think we're seen as a disruptor, as you mentioned, an innovator. I think both the primes see us as helpful to their growth stories, right, because they are being asked to innovate and they look around their supply chain. And there is a range of innovation within their supply chain. I think they see us as innovators.

One example of that would be Airbus, which is a partner on the space station. With the defense spending increase in Europe, Airbus is asked to innovate and bring new solutions to bear. And if you look at the European supply chain, there aren't a lot of innovators but we're seen as an innovation partner for them. So I think that's another example. And then on the space side, I think we're very well positioned there. We anticipate a lot more attention being paid to space this year, especially with the SpaceX IPO. Some space companies do well under scrutiny, like the closer you look, the more you like it and other space companies less so. And we think we are in the category that the more -- the deeper you go, the more interesting the story gets. And so I think we're going to be well positioned when people turn their attention to the space now and continuing into 2026.

Yes. That makes a lot of sense. And when I think of some of the growth opportunities you've highlighted, space station, Golden Dome, NGI and the general outlook for missiles and how to participate in those programs, I'd love to dig into each one and just kind of get your view. Maybe we can start by double-clicking on the space station, understanding how that's going. You mentioned you feel like you're hitting milestones. Maybe you can elaborate on that.

Yes, sure. And I've got a slide on that, too. So there was a Phase 1 competition a few years ago with NASA. Let's see, I think it's back here. So the Phase 1 competition, there were 3 winners to that competition, and then there was a fourth who was on a separate program. The winners for our Phase 1 was Blue Origin, Northrop Grumman and ourselves. And then Axiom was another winner on a separate contract. Subsequent to those Phase 1 awards, Northrop Grumman chose to join our team. So now think of it as a competition between Blue, Axiom and ourselves. We've completed 27 milestones on Phase 1. The most meaningful one recently was the critical design review. We're waiting to hear back from NASA on that. But once we're official with critical design review, that really is a culminating milestone because basically NASA is certifying your design at that point.

We now have a full-scale mockup of Starlab Space Station on the floor of Building 9 at Houston Johnson Space Center, which is a big deal because that mockup is right next to the International Space Station training mockup, the lunar lander mockup. So I think the fact that we have a mockup on Building 9 is a good validation for how we're perceived on this program. Soon after winning Phase 1, we approached it as a global joint venture for a couple of reasons. One is we wanted to pick partners who had reliably built parts of the International Space Station today so that it would answer the question, how does this company that's 2 years old build a commercial space station.

So we had an answer to that. We formed a global joint venture. We added Airbus representing Europe. Airbus, of course, built the Columbus module, which is the European module on the International Space Station. We added Mitsubishi, which built the Japanese elements on the International Space Station, and we added MDA, which built a robotic arm, the so-called Canadian robotic arm. And then we added other partners like Northrop, which I mentioned, Palantir and others. So we really have a great consortium. Voyager is the controlling shareholder. We own 2/3 of the JV. And then there will be a Phase 2 competition. We anticipate the RFP for NASA to come out in the next few weeks and then probably a selection sometime late summer. We anticipate NASA will pick 2 winners, 2 successors. And our project should be in orbit in 2029. It's launching on SpaceX Starship.

Got it. That's very helpful context. And maybe you can give us a sense of for the Space Station Starlab, what were you solving for? What was the objective?

Yes. So what we believe to be true was similar to launch where the space shuttle was sunsetted NASA said, we want to privatize Musk to orbit, and that gave birth to SpaceX and others. We thought the same thing was going to happen on the space station side, right? The space station is aging. It's really 1980s technology. And there's a lot of things you can do in microgravity with microgravity research that's really supply constrained on the ISS, right? We would do more science in space if we had more lab space and if we had more astronaut time.

So we thought to ourselves, okay, how do we sort of make sure that we're a safe pair of hands for when that is privatized, we're selected. And we thought there were 2 really important elements. One was the services component and customer interaction. So we made a key acquisition called Nanoracks, largest commercial provider to the International Space Station today, and we are today, Voyager is. And then human-rated hardware. And there was a project to complete a commercial airlock, human-rated hardware attached to the International Space Station. We called that the Bishop airlock after the chess piece because we thought it was very strategic to our future growth. We completed that project, got it launched to the ISS on SpaceX, attached that to the ISS, commissioned it. And now we have the only, call it, sovereign real estate, nongovernment-owned real estate on the International Space Station.

And because we had the customer and service piece and the human radar hardware piece, I think that was a big reason why we won. But we really were anticipating where the market was going. And I think it really is a classic win-win-win. It's good for the government because they're getting a better product. They're getting more innovation. They're getting something that's leaning into 2030s technology, not 1980s technology. It will save them money. Of course, it's good for us and our shareholders. And I think it's good for the industry because it creates an operating platform where a lot of this innovation can really happen.

Yes. That makes sense. And going back to our brief conversation about the competitive landscape, what advantages do you think you brought to the table on this? What capabilities do you think that you have that were a little different?

Yes, I think our design and approach is -- first of all, I think there was innovation around the joint venture and bringing global partners in. But we're also taking advantage. It's this old adage, why are railroad tracks the size they are, right? And the answer is it matches the wheel width of a chariot from Roman days, right? And it's the same question, why are the modules on the ISS 4 meters? And the answer is that's what fits in the rocket faring, right? Our module is about 7.7 meters we're taking advantage of the larger format heavy lift capability with SpaceX starship. So we're building with this new format. And in space, volume is everything, right? The other thing you want to do is you want to avoid building in space, like on-orbit assembly is incredibly complicated.

So think about our space station, larger format, 100% of the research volume of the ISS in one launch. We can build it, test it, work at all the bugs on the ground and in a single launch, send it to space and it's working day 1 as opposed to 6 months after it's assembled. So I think the design is advantageous. The fact it's optimized for research capability. That's why we call it Starlab. The fact that we actually have created a research consortium around this. We have an initiative called VISTA of global -- leading global universities doing research in areas that are relevant to microgravity. I think with all those different things, we're really creating a pipeline. We're about 130% of commercial research capacity precommitted already. We announced another partnership just yesterday or another micro gravity partner. So we're seeing a lot of demand. And hopefully, at some point, we'll have multiple star labs in the future.

Yes. And it sounds like you also took this sort of very collaborative approach, right, as opposed to maybe sometimes with other companies, we hear a lot about vertical integration, particularly with space. Can you talk about that a bit?

Yes. I think vertical integration, SpaceX has mastered that. And -- but SpaceX is kind of end of one, right? I think the risk with that is, especially with the space station is you don't want unproven technology. Because the space station, it's not like a rocket where your first one can fail, your second one can fail, your third one can fail. Space station has to work the very first time because you're putting humans on it. So our design is around TRL 8 and 9 technology, right? That's why we picked Airbus and MDA. These are partners who have created technology that's already in space. And our innovation is really around the form factor, single launch to orbit and the customer model. That's where our innovation is. I think if you're trying to build your own life support system as an example, and it's like fail fast, MVP, Silicon Valley, I'm not sure that's the right approach for something where it's human rated and failure means people die. I don't think that in my humble opinion, I don't think that's the right approach.

Yes. And then the international dynamic, too, right, the international JV, how important was it to have international collaborators?

I think it's really important because if you look at the ISS today, of course, Russia is a party to it. So take them out for a second. It's the Europeans, it's the Japanese and it's the Canadians and the Americans, of course. It's very politically difficult for the Europeans to spend a bunch of money supporting an American company. But if Airbus is a part of the consortium, it's much easier for ESA to support a European-based company that's employing Europeans. So I think it helps capture not only funding, but it helps capture the customer in these different geographies. I think that's one thing.

And then the second thing is I think it's really important that these space stations represents -- it's an expression in many respects of soft power, right? And there is another space station in orbit, it's Chinese. And if you look at -- there's roughly 75 space agencies in the world. I think there are 10 or 15 that are clearly Western. There are 10 or 15 that are clearly Chinese, and there's a big middle that are trying to figure out where to place their bets. And I think it's really important that we welcome a lot of the new international partners to the Western platform.

Yes. No, that makes a tremendous amount of sense. If we could switch gears and talk about Golden Dome and NGI bit. These are topics that were very topical at the conference for obvious reasons. A lot of the companies that we cover have exposure, they expect award activity. Maybe you can just help frame Golden Dome and what it means for Voyager.

Yes. So Golden Dome, think of this as layers of the onion, if you will, different protective layers. Next-generation interceptor, which we're on is a really important layer because that's hypersonic missile interception. But above the hypersonic, you have space-based interceptors, which is a key focus of the administration. And then you have other layers beneath that, all the way down to marine -- submarine based interception and drone interception and things like that. The good thing is our technology, which are really 2 groups of technology. One is our propulsion tech, but the other is our optical navigation and control technology. Both those technologies are relevant to almost all the layers of Golden Dome. So that's one thing.

Second thing is we anticipate a higher defense budget. And in that defense budget, a lot of that is likely to be allocated to what I would say, innovative players, people who are leaning into the technology and innovation piece. And then just the final point is I think there are indications from the administration and some of the tweets that have went out and things like this that they have a certain view about the old guard and they have a certain view about the new guard. And I think you see this even with Hegseth's roadshow, the companies he's visiting and the sort of language that he's using. I think they're very keen on the new guard, the new innovators, the new disruptors. And I think that's very well -- we're very well positioned in that respect.

Yes. And we don't have all the details on Golden Dome, but what role do you hope to play as the details are reviewed?

Yes. So I would say our technology is relevant on propulsion and optical navigation and control. So I would anticipate in a world where they're picking different winners and different teams that our technology would make anyone's proposal more competitive. So I would anticipate us having multiple paths to glory on Golden Dome.

So it sounds like you have a lot of confidence that you're going to be involved?

I have a lot of confidence in our technology and what the administration is indicating that they want and how those two fit together.

Yes. That makes a lot of sense. One of the things I've heard from a number of companies at the conference is Golden Dome is in part, very important because of the opportunities that may follow beyond Golden Dome, right? It's one of the largest kind of space projects in defense that we've seen and certainly a catalyst for additional innovation and potentially follow-on business over many years. Can you talk about the long tail to winning Golden Dome and what that might mean?

Yes. Well, I think the new high ground in defense tech is space, right? And so we've seen this. It used to be having the best Navy in the world one a day, and then, of course, it was the Air Force. We're now reaching a point as a civilization where if you don't have space-based assets or space-based capabilities, you're at a competitive disadvantage. So everything is moving to space. That's why we have a space force. The U.S. formed a space force, not in a vacuum. They did that in response to positions our adversaries have taken. So I think space will increasingly be an important, if not the most important part of offense and defense as it relates to national security.

So in a world where that's the case, I think it's really, really, really important that you have capabilities in low Earth orbit, geosynchronous orbit, lunar and then something that's maybe not on a lot of people's radar screens are Lagrangian points, which for those of you who don't know, those are stable orbits that are further out. There are 5 of those L1, L2, L3, L4 and L5. The 2 most relevant are L1 and L2. L2 is where the James Webb telescope is. They're both about 1 million miles from earth looking back towards earth.

But what's interesting about them is if you're in low earth orbit with the space station and you don't boost it, eventually, it will degrade and will burn up in the atmosphere or crash into the earth. Whereas the Lagrangian points, think of these as orbits that are being tugged equally by the moon, the earth and the sun. And so if you're a rafter, think of it as like a little bit of an Eddie. And you'll sit in that orbit for 1 million years, like literally, without any fuel. Well, so these are really important places to put infrastructure to all kinds of applications. I'll leave it there. But so we call it the 3Ls: LEO, lunar and Lagrangian.

Got it. And capabilities potentially in each of those.

Indeed. Yes, that's right.

Can we talk about another big theme, a megatrend, if you will, across defense is missile technology. I think there's one element of that, which is just production rates going up across tactical missiles and other things. Another layer to that is actual innovation, hypersonics. Maybe you can talk a little bit about how Voyager might benefit from those tailwinds?

Yes. So I think volumes for sure. I think now that Greenland has been settled, they can probably determine the final architecture on silos and where to put them and things like that. So I think volumes is one thing. The other thing is, I mentioned earlier, our propulsion technology is very relevant because it allows you to modulate solid-state propulsion. In a missile interception, the most important thing, it's actually easy in quotes to get close. It's very hard to hit a bullet with a bullet. So that last little bit is really, really, really technically difficult.

And our propulsion technology allows you to do that flying course corrections at the very tail end, which increases the probability of impact dramatically. The fact that you can also turn the propulsion on and off allows for a larger glide path, which means you need less fuel as well. So our technology is very relevant to that. And then back to optical navigation and control, GPS looks down, not up. So when you're in space, if you want to orient yourself, you have to use different technologies, including star trackers and sunsetters, so that you can actually understand where you are in 3-dimensional space.

Yes. And it sounds like there's a lot of applications of what you're describing for space-based interceptors and being involved in that way.

For sure. Yes. No doubt about that.

Excellent. I appreciate it. Maybe we can just see if the audience has any questions for a second and then continue.

Great. please.

Thank you. Of course, getting outputs and loads back down to earth is an important part of that. So can you talk about your reentry capabilities and where you're taking them?

Yes. So we've signed a partnership Monday, I think, this week with ATMOS, which is a down mass provider based in Europe. So that's one answer to the question. There's another partnership that we're working on that will also be in this down mass category. So yes, it's definitely something we're working on. I think down mass is something that the industry has not focused enough on. So yes, it's definitely top of mind with us. And -- but ATMOS is our primary solution provider for that right now, and we'll probably add one more partner on that.

So on Starlab, can you talk about the business model, particularly on the commercial side, but also on the government side. ?How is that going to look different than the ISS with unlocking all of this micro gravity research?

Yes. It's a great question. So there's 2 categories of revenue at the most basic level with the commercial space station. One is astronaut tenancy, for lack of a better word. So actually astronauts spending time on the space station and either governments or private individuals paying -- think of it as a hotel, if you will. The second is research space. And a lot of these commercial agreements we've been announcing is really around commercial capacity to do research and experiments on the International Space Station. So think of those as the 2 main revenue generators.

And then separate from that, more exotic ways to generate revenue could be things like data processing, data collection, right, because you have a large high-power platform that's in low earth Orbit. That could be interesting, co-owning IP. So imagine a world where you're partnered with a biopharma company developing a drug and maybe we co-invest alongside one of those companies and maybe we co-own the IP. That could be an opportunity. Little known fact to most people, the cancer drug, KEYTRUDA, which is a lung cancer drug was developed in part on the International Space Station. And then there's even more exotic models like printing organic tissue in microgravity, organelles, I think they actually printed a meniscus on the International Space Station. So that's another revenue stream, growing perfect crystals.

One of the things about perfect crystal in structures, you can grow them in microgravity and think of those as seeds so that if you down mass it, you can actually grow under the weight of gravity, a larger perfect crystal if you have a perfect crystal to start with. So there's all kinds of exotic revenue streams above and beyond just the tenancy and the research and co-owning the IP. What I think will happen eventually is Starlab will be built, it will fly. It will be full. We'll have hopefully multiple star labs. But I think eventually, the industry will have special purpose space stations one for space manufacturing, one for optical fiber and one for biopharma. I think that's ultimately where the industry goes. And yes, so we're excited about it.

And again, I think it answers the question too, which a lot of you might be asked as well by people that are not focused on the industry like we are is why does space matter, right? And a lot of these things answer that because we go to space to benefit earth and a lot of these applications have direct applicability to making life on earth better.

Can we talk about this vision for multiple star labs? Yes, I think it's powerful. It's a big idea, but there's quite a few steps to get there. Maybe you can just sort of help us plug into that vision.

Yes. Well, I think, first of all, a lot of the NRE with any project will be retired on unit 1. So if we build a second, the cost is probably 60% of the first. And if we build a third, it's probably 35% of the first. So you get huge economic benefit. One of the big costs in space stations is resupply. And so if you cluster these if they're nearby, you can actually do your resupply and resupply multiple stations during the same trip. So that reduces the overall cost of resupply per unit. So I think that's really exciting as well. Yes, so I think, look, the analogy I use is launch. SpaceX, when they were doing reusable rockets and building that, I remember having conversations with people in the industry, and they said, well, Dylan, look, it's great that they're doing this.

But what is SpaceX going to do? Because they're going to launch in January and February. And then the other 10 months of the year, they're not going to have anything to launch because everything is going to be launched to orbit. It's like what are they going to do with the other 10 months of the year? And I'm like, no, no, that's not the way it works. The fact that we have this capability, you're going to have a lot more demand, and we're going to have much more constellations. And instead of sending 400 satellites up a year, we're going to send 4,000 satellites up a year. Of course, now we're sending 20,000 satellites a year, and Elon's talking about 1 million satellites, which seems like a lot. So it's a situation where supply is not addressing demand, supply is creating demand. It's very similar with space stations.

The reason more microgravity research doesn't happen, the reason more space flights don't happen, the reason we're not manufacturing in space is because it's supply constrained. And even if you can get the supply, it's 2 years to do a mission. You've got to go through the ISS National Laboratory System. You got to get manifested. You need to have astronaut time. There's a lot of friction. And oh by the way, if you pull off all of that, then you have to go co-own your IP with the government agency as well. So I think once you have a commercial model, it unlocks a lot of these opportunities.

Yes. If we could circle back to the acquisition strategy a bit. you mentioned a couple of deals that you've done sort of right out of the gate. Just plug us into the thought process there. And how do you think about collaboration versus M&A because you're also very collaborative in many things.

We like partnerships a lot. We definitely see a world where partnerships augment our growth and our strategy. Acquisitions, I think, are really interesting. We don't typically participate in auctions, as I mentioned earlier. These are definitely cultivated deals where we've gotten to know the principles. They believe in what we're doing. They're excited about what we're doing. If they wanted to monetize at the highest dollar value, they would run a process, but that's not really what they're looking for. They're looking to be part of a larger mission to work on something that they're excited and proud about leaning into the future.

So believe it or not, there are a lot of companies that fall into that category that don't want to sell to a financial sponsor. They don't want to go in alone. So we're cultivating those. We're trying to be very disciplined in terms of accretive M&A, but also very disciplined in terms of the areas that we're expanding into, whether it's propulsion or space station supply chain, things like that. I anticipate we'll continue to do a couple of deals a year, not because we have to, but because that's what we're seeing. We have a very robust pipeline. But I want to really emphasize, we have a very robust organic growth engine, and we think of M&A as supplementing that. I really want to emphasize that point.

Yes. Could you just elaborate a little bit on the pipeline aspect? You mentioned 1 to 2 a year, I sort of get that. What does the biz dev look like? And are there any scenarios where there's a deal that's a bit more transformational for any reason?

I wouldn't rule it out. I wouldn't -- we're not focused on kind of bet the farm merger type deals, but we return all phone calls. You don't say that. We're good fiduciaries. I would say the M&A pipeline is very robust. Our M&A team is led by one of our co-founders was former Goldman private equity. So we have a very competent internal M&A team. I think it's some of the best people in the industry, frankly. So that team is very, very good. And they're good at not only cultivating the pipeline, but I think analyzing the pipeline and moving deals forward that makes sense. So yes, we're very active in the market. I think we have roughly 50-plus companies in our M&A pipeline right now, but we have a pretty strict filter on that. So we're not just -- we're not doing deals just to do deals. We're pretty picky with the way we approach it.

Yes. No, that's helpful context. I think you're probably a little less sensitive to this question than other companies, but we have been asking a lot of the defense players that are at our conference about supply chain issues, particularly with rare earth metals, anything in the supply chain that where accessibility is difficult? Is there anything that you would flag as a concern or a consideration in the conversations that you have?

Yes, I would say, so it's not so much supply chain, it's manufacturing at rate, right? And I think we do a lot of radiation hard and electronics. We do optical comms. We do, I would say, integrated electronics that are meant to be robust on orbit. A lot of that stuff is pretty bespoke, and it's difficult to manufacture that rate. And so I think that's one thing that we're focused on. It's not so much a supply chain issue as it is. I think the new term that I've been hearing a lot is industrial capacity, which isn't necessarily a supply chain issue. It's more a manufacturing technology issue. So that is something we're focused on.

We announced a big initiative to invest in a facility in Southern Colorado near Pueblo. And in part, we're doing that because we're really anticipating these larger volumes on missile defense, on energetics, and we want to make sure we have the manufacturing capability to not only satisfy the current demand, but larger demand in the future.

That's great. 1 We've got a couple of minutes left, and I've got sort of one last question really, which is just plug us into the next 10-year vision for the company. I mean there's so much going on. It's such a big idea. Just help us see the world the way that you see it.

Yes. I think it's really, really, really important that we win the 3Ls. So we want to be the leader in commercializing low earth orbit, full stop. So when you think about low earth orbit, we want Voyager to be the preeminent name, full stop. In lunar, I think we have a very important role to play. Elon and others are focused on data management, space manufacturing, energy generation. Where we want to play is in lunar habitat. So we announced a program partnership with Max Space around inflatable technology. So that's one area that we want to play. And then the third is these Lagrangian points, which have national security implications, but then also very much space, deep space implications as well.

So we have this 3L strategy, but the near-term one that I really want to emphasize is within 10 years, we'll have multiple star labs on orbit in low earth orbit, and we will be the market leader in the commercialization of LEO. I think that's absolutely critical. And then on the defense tech side, I think if we're not seen as the preeminent prime on defense tech, especially as it relates to missile defense, I would be very disappointed.

Well, that's a big idea. That's a big vision. Dylan, thank you for joining us today. We really appreciate it, and thank you in the audience as well.

Thank you, John. Thank you.

Hello, everybody. I'm Rob Brass, I'm Managing Director at Barclays, and I'm here today with Dylan Taylor from Voyager. Thanks for being here, Dylan.

Yes. Great to be with you, Rob.

So I want to spend some time going through some questions and thoughts and kind of getting your perspective on where things are in Voyager and maybe in Space and Defense more broadly?

So if we think about it, we're 253 days from your IPO. And I guess it goes back to the founding principles. Why did you found Voyager and kind of what is your broader mission? Often we lose that as outsiders looking in. So I would love to hear that.

Yes, yes. Well, I appreciate the question. So yes, the thesis when we founded Voyager, we saw an opportunity really within the A&D space. At the top of the market, you had the primes, very lovable and capable, but maybe not particularly innovative, maybe not leaning into the future as much as they needed to or should be doing. And then you had, of course, the upstarts, highly innovative companies, very entrepreneurial, a lot of sort of ethos around innovation and technology, but maybe not particularly capable, maybe not having the capital structures that they needed to be successful. And maybe the management teams weren't particularly skilled at running companies at scale and/or taking companies public.

So we saw a real opportunity to create an operating platform similar to, let's say, a Danaher or a HEICO or some of the companies that we admired. So that was the opportunity that we saw. We were driven really by our passion. I have a keen passion for space. I had the privilege of seeing the Earth from space on a suborbital flight. So I've always been really excited about the opportunity for space to not only provide infrastructure to benefit life here on earth, but really to imagine what's possible. Co-founder, Matt Cuta, served our country honorably as an F-15E fighter pilot. So he really approached it more from an operator standpoint on the national security and defense side. So we're both really driven by this passion around technology in space tech, defense tech. So that's what we set out to do. We made a couple of key technology acquisitions early on. We made a bet around the privatization of space stations, made a key acquisition called Nanoracks that was doing a lot of the servicing of the International Space Station, completed a human-rated hardware project, which was a commercial airlock and then we're very fortunate to win one of the contracts on CLD Phase 1 about 20 months after we were founding or founded.

So yes, that's really been a little bit of our journey, and we're going to continue to lean into this innovation and technology curve. That's really what our ethos is. The thesis when we set out to build Voyager was that the customers would gravitate towards a platform like this and the best people in the industry would want to work for a company like this. And so far, we see great evidence that not only the customers, but the best people in the industry like what we're up to.

And so when you think about the last -- since being public, although public is just a step in a longer mission, but what have been the major milestones that you're most proud of in the last 9 months?

I think getting public the old-fashioned way, Rob, there were a lot of SPACs that occurred in our industry. And of course, we were getting a lot of inbound calls to go SPAC. But I told the team, I said, look, we're on a long journey here. It's really important that we do things the right way, that we don't skip any steps. And that when we go public, it's because we're a high-quality S-1 company that can stand up to the scrutiny. So I'm proud of the fact that we did that because it was one part for us, but it was also one part for industry leadership as well and really to show that there is a right way to do things. So we were really fortunate that we got out. It was very successful. I think we were 20-plus times oversubscribed on the book. So I think that was great.

And then soon thereafter, we did a convertible offering and raised some additional capital. So we have a lot of dry powder. The balance sheet is very, very strong. And we see lots and lots of opportunities to grow the company. So we're excited about that. And then I think we've reported 2 quarters as a public company. We'll do our year-end earnings report issued March 9 and then a call on March 10. So we're excited to talk about that as well.

So let's look at the defense side of the business a little bit. When we talk about next-generation interceptor, Golden Dome, where do you see the opportunities there for Voyager?

Yes. So we have some key technology that -- actually 2 pieces of key technology relevant to Golden Dome. One is the ability to modulate solid-state propulsion. And this allows missiles to be more accurate. And if you think about hitting a bullet with a bullet, which is really what missile interception is, it's really important you can fine-tune and course correct the missile. So we have key technology for that. We also have key technology to orient missiles in space. Of course, GPS looks down, not up. So when you're in space, you need other technologies to know where you are. And our optical navigation and control systems are really best-in-class and allow us to orient the missile in space in ways that are very differentiated.

And when you talk -- when you first were talking about just industry structure and where the primes are and the kind of the neo primes and where you saw opportunity. And we can argue that the motivation of a lot of the primes is designed by the structure of the government contracting elements. But you play as both a prime and a subprime, right? Is that part of the strategy? Or how do you think about, especially in the market?

Yes. So it's a great question, Rob. One of the things we set out to do is to have maximum flexibility in the platform. So not only dual-use technology between space and defense tech, but also the ability to operate as either a prime or a contractor to a prime at our option, right? Because there are instances where being the prime, like, for example, the Space Station being the owner operator, there's a huge amount of upside to doing that. But there are other times where you have highly differentiated technology like TDACS, this throttle technology, where we're perfectly happy to be in the supply chain because we can get the margin profile and we can get the financial returns that we're looking for. And we don't necessarily have to take a lot of risk in a particular contract like that. So the ability to arbitrage between prime and contractor, I think, is another key part of our model.

So when you talk about TDACS and you talk about your unique kind of throttling technology, so you could play multiple entries into a program of record, right? That's the right concept, spread the offense a little bit right? Let's transition to space a little bit. This year, people have been talking about Mars. They've been talking about Artemis II, back to the moon. ISS, we haven't heard much about it, right? So should we be focused on the ISS? Is that still a thing from your perspective? When does it really become mission-critical? And how do we think about -- how you're positioned and what is CLD and how does that all work?

Sure. I think people are not focused on ISS, but they should be because when you think about the promise of space to benefit life here on Earth, one of the things that I think is undervalued is microgravity research. And the reason you don't hear more about it is because the space on the ISS to do microgravity research is limited. It's complicated to get missions done. It takes a lot of time. But if you look at all the different technologies that could benefit from microgravity research, this is biopharma drug development. This is perfect crystal growth. This could be semiconductor manufacturing. This could be just original scientific research that benefits from this microgravity environment. There's huge applications and upside to doing this. And this is a situation where when the commercial space stations come online, it's not addressing demand, it's creating demand, right?

So our project is called Starlab. It's optimized around laboratory space, right? That's the name. And so think of this as really a huge platform to not only provide innovation, but commercial potential. So I think people are kind of missing that part of it. The other thing is the ISS is coming down. It's old. SpaceX has been awarded a deorbit contract. They're talking about decommissioning in 2030, 2031. So if that's true, it's really important that commercial space stations are online before then. And our project should be in orbit in late 2029.

And what's the government -- what's the NASA process around awards for that because that is obviously a big part of the solution.

What NASA has said is they intend to select at least 2 successors to the ISS because they want pricing competition. There is a Phase 1 contract that we're currently under. There were 3 winners to that. There will be a CLD Phase 2. We anticipate that RFP in the next 4 to 6 weeks approximately, and a selection sometime this summer, probably late summer. And from there, the CLD Phase 2 award winners should be the stations that ultimately get built and used.

And if we were to take the counterpoint that, well, I don't know if commercial space stations are going to be something that people care about, what's the national security angle? Is anybody else up in LEO with a space station? How should we be thinking about that?

The Chinese are up there. So there's a new Chinese space station. It's brand new. I think every astronaut that is served on the Chinese space station is active duty military. So that gives you an idea of the posture that, that station has. So yes, I think there are a lot of national security implications, not only for LEO, but for Lunar and of course, these Lagrangian points, L1 and L2. I think there's a lot of national security implications. And one of the themes that we're seeing with the current administration is sort of a tighter formation between national security and civil space. You're seeing that with the DOW and NASA coordinating much more tightly on some of these projects.

And when we think about a lot's happened in the last year geopolitically and certainly with the administration, how has your experience changed with speed of contracting, the type of contracting, even the award identification in defense and space?

We're seeing evidence that, that's all being accelerated. We're also seeing evidence that the government is being more creative with the way they're contracting, whether it's more incentive-based or more competition-based. I think that bodes well for a company like ours, which can be more flexible and adaptable with our response to procurement strategies that the government might come up with. I think it's more difficult for a larger, more entrenched company to flex their approach. I think it plays to our strengths for sure.

And thematically, one of the areas that you focus that's different than some of the other companies in the space, you're deep in R&D as a percentage of kind of your revenue to drive future growth. When you look at R&D and you think about the thrust of that and the opportunities that you're looking at in the defense market, what are the areas where you think Voyager is really special?

Yes. So thanks for pointing that out. We're very high on our innovation spend. And the way we think about that is we're always trying to lean into this technology disruption. One of the things, and we'll probably maybe talk a little bit about SpaceX IPO here in a moment, but you're seeing a lot of convergence of technologies. And so the way we think about technology or what are the different technology and innovation vectors that are happening in the world that we can leverage for space technology and defense tech. So that's one of the things we think about it. Our Chief Technology Officer, Paul Tilghman, spent several years in the DARPA labs, which is a great proving ground. He then went to Microsoft and then he went to Anduril. So he's a fantastic resource, and we're really thinking about this convergence of technologies.

So there's a couple of different areas, propulsion being one of them. In addition to TDACS, which we talked about, we also have Hall-effect thrusters. That's a really important technology for maneuvering satellites on orbit, and then integrating that power and propulsion system in a tighter fashion, which we're known for. So that's one area. I mentioned optical navigation and control as well. We're also playing very heavily into optical comms. And if you believe orbital data centers are a thing or will be a thing, one of the key technology challenges is how do you move all that data around, not only from space to earth, but space to space. And really technologically, the only way to really do that effectively is optical, which is key technology that we have as well. So those are some areas.

So orbital data center, you said if you believe it's a thing or not a thing. Do you believe it is a thing?

I believe it is a thing, and I think it will ultimately be a key theme for space. I think the debate in my mind is more around what's the form factor going to be big or small, mesh network versus stand-alone nodes. That's one key question. The second question is when? How quickly will this build out. So I think to me, those are the points to debate. But whether orbital data centers will be a key theme for space in the future, I think in my mind, that's been settled. That will be a key part of our future.

And do you think it's -- is it an issue of security or power or cooling? What's the advantage of space for the uninitiated.

Well, power -- I think it's a couple of things. So power is "free" in space. There's no permitting required, right? I mean there is and there isn't. But it's theoretically easier to get something in space than it is here on the ground, right? At least that's the argument. I think the disadvantage of space is, of course, you need launch capability. SpaceX has that in-house. So that's a key advantage for them, but you need to bring other launch capability online. And then you mentioned cooling. It's counterintuitive. The cooling in space is actually challenging because the only way you can radiate -- or dissipate heat is via radiation because there's no medium, right? There's no air to cool the system. So I think that's a design challenge, but it mainly impacts how big the form factor is because it's -- the larger the data center node, the larger the radiation system has to be.

Right. And by dissipation, you mean just fins basically, right? Or something of that ilk.

Yes. It's basically -- yes, think of it as the ability -- additional surface area to dissipate heat. Yes, that's the way to think about it.

So you mentioned SpaceX a few times. Obviously, there's a lot of talk about them in the market. How do you feel like a potential debut of SpaceX in the market? What does that do for Voyager? And how do you feel about that?

Sure. If it's okay, I'll talk about it generally for the industry as opposed to Voyager. But I think for the industry, a couple of things. One is, we're going to have a lot more interest on the industry itself. So a lot of people will pay closer attention, what is space? Who are the players? What are the key technologies? What are the key growth vectors. So I think in an environment like that, the best companies that stand up best to scrutiny and call it, double-clicking on the story will do best. And not all companies show well once you really do the work, right? So I think the best companies will shine in that situation. So you have a lot more interest.

I think the other thing is we're going to have a capital event depending on if you believe Polymarket or others that is going to be at least $1 trillion of value creation, potentially even more than that. And I think a lot of that capital will want to be reallocated. I don't think it will be reallocated into treasury bills or something conservative. I think it will be something out on the growth curve of that growth of risk curve. And so I think it's likely that a lot of that capital gets reallocated within space and defense tech. And again, to the best companies, I think.

So like space is Hewlett Packard moment, if you go all the way back, right, like the creation of Silicon Valley.

Just on that point, just quickly because I heard a story recently that resonated with me, which was the Netscape IPO, which I think was 1995. And when that went public -- I did a little bit of digging on this. I think they had $15 million of revenue, and it ended up closing day 1 on the IPO around $3 billion valuation. And at the time, people were like, okay, this is the most ridiculous IPO that was ever done. Well, of course, that led to this big boom. And it was mainly -- the story was still the same. But what was different was people are now paying attention to it. Space has always been there. It's a huge meta theme, right? SpaceX has been building and companies like ours have been building. That story is not changing, but what's changing are people are actually now focused on it. So I see it as a Netscape moment as well.

Yes. And so we talked to ISS. What about LUNAR? What is the opportunity in LUNAR from your perspective? And how do you see people positioning around that? How do you see Voyager maybe positioning around?

Yes. So the administration has a big push into LUNAR, as we know. We announced a LUNAR strategy here recently as well, a partnership with a company called Max Space. Max Space's expandable and inflatable technology is very relevant for LUNAR habitat. So that's one area we see of collaboration. We have 2 other pieces of technology that are relevant to LUNAR, which include dust repellent, a coating technology that repels moon dust. That's one of the key design challenges on the moon. Think of this as like almost like sharp -- little shards of glass. That's what the moon dust is. So it gets into a lot of machinery, space suits, all that sort of stuff. So our coating technology is relevant. We also have technology that allows you to extract oxygen and water from moon regolith, which is also very relevant if you're going to live off the land, so to speak. So we're definitely focused on LUNAR. The way we think about the ecosystem for space is, we call it the 3 Ls. So LEO, low Earth orbit; LUNAR. And then the other is Lagrangian, which is a little bit more exotic. There are 5 Lagrangian points. Think of these as orbits that don't decay. So if you have a space station low Earth orbit and you don't reboost it, eventually, it's going to come down. With the Lagrangian points, there are the stable orbits between the moon, earth and sun, where it's getting equally kind of tugged. If you're like -- I don't know if you've rafted before, Rob, but it's like a little eddy where you're spinning and you're not moving. And those orbits would be stable for about 1 million years. So if you put infrastructure there, it's a great way to not only test deep space technology, but back to national security, surveillance, things like that. The James Webb telescope, which I think we're all familiar with, that's in L2, about 1 million miles from the earth. So yes, we think to be dominant in space, it's important to have a LEO strategy, a LUNAR strategy and a Lagrangian strategy.

And since AI is also topical, how is that impacting your business? Where do you see more opportunity? Or does it -- how is it coming into play?

Yes. I think Agentic AI is very meaningful to companies like ours in the design cycle, not only using less resource to design, build and test, but also to make the cycle time quicker. So we're very focused on that part of it. The other part of it is doing more data processing at the point, at the edge where data is collected. So Palantir is a key partner of ours. We have an edge computing initiative where we're essentially completing the technology stack between where the data is collected, processing that data so that you're transmitting the answer to the customer as opposed to a data stream, which is really important, especially in situations where it's a contested environment, where data streams could be jammed and things like that. So that's a key part of our strategy as well.

So you talk about Palantir, you talk about partnerships. There's a lot of gang tackling in defense for sure. When you think about some of your key partnerships and kind of the way that you're expanding even your physical plant, anything you want to share on that, that'd be interesting to hear.

We're focused on -- so one of the key challenges we have, like a lot of companies is, hiring enough talent, right? So we're focused on opening these innovation centers around the country, key places like Southern California, where we have an operation; Huntsville, Alabama; Colorado, Texas. So that's a key part of it. We'll have more to say on our earnings call about specific strategies there. But yes, that's a key focus for us.

And back to the defense side, when you look -- when you step back and kind of look at the geopolitical environment, a, you're trying to put your R&D into the arenas where it would be most valuable. But what are the hot zones that you see globally that maybe we're not all looking at over the next 3 to 5 years?

Yes. Well, I think we're all familiar with this, but the huge push into defense spending in Europe, specifically Germany, I think it's circa EUR 40 billion is what they're talking about, which is a huge number for them. I think Italy is also leaning into defense spending as well. Again, I think that bodes well for companies like ours because the main prime in Europe, of course, is Airbus. Airbus is a partner of ours on the space station. We have a good relationship with them, and I think they see us as an innovation partner. So I think that's good for us. But yes, I think Europe is a key theme. We'll be paying close attention to what happens in Japan. There was a big election there. Japan is really not militarized as we know, since World War II. But I think that could potentially be another growth factor. Our key partner for Japan is Mitsubishi and they're a partner on the space station as well.

And one of the things we hear often is that it's very difficult for U.S. defense companies to be effective in Europe because there's a little bit of tension. So your ability to be a subcontractor in some of these opportunities allows you to white label some technology into the European opportunity. Is that a fair way to think about it?

I think so. Yes. And I think a lot of it, of course, is subject to ITAR and regulatory complications. But yes, in general, that's true.

And so a classic question we always like to ask is what keeps you up at night? And I guess what keeps you up at night about Voyager? And then what keeps you up at night about the world?

Well, I'll start with the second one. I think we're heading to a place where we're going to have very, very, very high economic growth and probably high unemployment because I do think Agentic AI is a real thing. I've seen it with my own eyes in terms of what it's capable of doing. I've also seen how quickly it's evolving. My thinking on Agentic AI has changed in the last 4 weeks. Just to give you an idea what's on the leading edge that I think is possible. So I think in a world where there's 10% GDP growth, let's say, and 20% unemployment, what does that world look like, not only from a societal standpoint, but from a policy standpoint. So I think that's a question. I don't have the answer to it.

I think from a Voyager standpoint, it's really scaling. So human resource is a big issue. We really want not only to attract and retain the best people in the industry, but we're competing with the likes of SpaceX and Anduril and other very high-profile companies. So far, we're doing that very effectively, very well. But again, as we continue to scale our company, I think human resource is going to be a key limiting factor. And so I spent a lot of time trying to convince people that we're the right place for them to spend their future.

I appreciate that. And the -- I guess one -- sometimes outside looking in at Voyager, you say you've got your hands in a lot of different areas. How do you think about how to allocate more time or less time to space or defense and within that, even missiles and optical systems? Like how do you decide how to spend your time and effort as an organization given so many opportunity sets?

It's a great question. So this is where the dual-use technology, I think, really comes in handy. So propulsion as a category is something we're really, really focused on, but that's really not defense or space, it's both, right? So think of propulsion as a mobility is always going to be relevant, no matter what the application is, no matter who is the administration, who the adversary is, mobility is critical. So that's a key technology that we know. Moving, I'll call it, data sciences, not only moving data around, but processing data. That's not only dual use, but that's a meta theme that's going to be relevant for the next 10, 20, 30 years. So we try to -- back to the convergence topic, we try to focus on technologies and growth vectors that are not only durable, but that are ticking a lot of different boxes. So that's the way we think about it. And I think the other thing is leaning into that innovation curve, by definition, you're going to see opportunities that maybe other companies aren't seeing.

And when we were talking about CLD before, and you mentioned that there was a down select of a couple of companies. What does that landscape look like? Who else is trying to get into the ISS replacement commercial space stations? And is there more than one winner? Is it a winner take all? How do we think about that?

I think it's going to be winner take some, but not all because I do think -- again, I go back to launch. So a quick story on launch. When Falcon was a platform and reusable rockets were thing. There were a lot of people saying, well, I don't understand SpaceX's business model because in January and February, they're going to launch all the payloads to orbit. In the other 10 months of the year, they're going to be sitting around twiddling their thumbs. And my argument in others was like, no, that's not the way it works. By virtue of having this capability, we're going to launch a lot more satellites and infrastructure to orbit. And so this is a situation where demand is -- supply is not addressing demand, it's creating demand, right? And of course, that's exactly what has happened.

I think the space station business is very similar to that. we're going to have, I think, multiple space stations, not only serving different governments like the U.S. and its allies, but maybe sovereign nations will have special purpose for biopharma drug development, space manufacturing, tourism and the like. So I think there's a huge opportunity in that industry for a lot of different people to play. Key competitors on our program are Axiom and Blue Origin. Those are the key competitors. They're both Phase 1 winners of CLD. And I would anticipate they're going to be competing for Phase 2 as well.

Got it. And I think the -- I think it's worth noting that for you, space is very personal. I think there's always been a passion as you talked about it. when you look way ahead and you think about humanity and you talk about AI, you talk about the potential for unemployment and what do we do as a species, quite frankly. What do you think happens in space over the next 50 years?

Well, I think we'll have people living and working on the moon. I think we'll be on Mars by then probably. But I think to me, space is the best of us. And I think we have the ability to project a more hopeful version of the future. I think things are a bit dystopian right now with a lot of people wondering what's going to happen in the future. I don't see it that way. I think a lot of the conflict is around arguing over limited resources here on earth. And theoretically, if we open up the aperture and we create space, think of space as the eighth continent, Rob. If Antarctica is the seventh, we'll think about space as the eighth. I think it could be a way for us to see that we're in a more abundant universe than we think we are.

Awesome. Well, Dylan, thank you so much for your time. You've been very generous. I really appreciate it, and I love your thoughts. If everybody could just give a round of applause.

Good morning, and welcome to the Voyager Technologies Third Quarter 2025 Earnings Conference Call. [Operator Instructions]

I would now like to turn the call over to Adi Padva, Senior Vice President, Corporate Development and Investor Relations. Please proceed.

Thank you, and good morning, everyone. Welcome to Voyager Third Quarter 2025 Earnings Call. I'm joined today by: Dylan Taylor, our Chairman and Chief Executive Officer; and Phil de Sousa, our Chief Financial Officer.

Today's call include forward-looking statements, which involve risks and uncertainties detailed in our earnings material and SEC filings, including the Risk Factors section of our IPO prospectus. We undertake no obligation to update these statements. We will also discuss non-GAAP financial measures. Reconciliation of these measures is available in our earnings material on our website.

I will now turn the call over to Dylan.

Thank you, Adi, and good morning, everyone. I'm pleased to kick off Voyager's third quarter earnings call recapping a very successful quarter. Our third quarter results reflect continued strength in our core business; an acceleration of our innovation road map; strategic expansion of our technology stack through targeted acquisitions; and steady advancement of Starlab milestones. This translated into strong revenue growth, solid earnings performance and robust growth in backlog.

Building on this momentum and despite the impact of the government shutdown, we expect our revenue for the full year to be at the upper end of the previously communicated range, which we'll talk through in more detail later in the call. We built Voyager to lead the next era of defense, national security and space innovation, and we continue to execute on this vision.

Missile defense modernization is front and center. The Golden Dome initiative and Space Force budget expansion are driving demand for advanced tracking and interceptor systems. Voyager's next-generation interceptor, known as NGI, propulsion and intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, known as ISR capabilities are directly aligned with these national priorities, and we've actively engaged across key programs supporting the next generation of missile defense architecture.

At the same time, the space industry is ongoing a structural transformation. Launch costs are falling, satellite architectures are shifting to LEO constellations and both public and private priorities are accelerating investment. This is unlocking new opportunities for agile, vertically integrated players like Voyager. We're also seeing the commercialization of space infrastructure take hold. Voyager's leadership in developing Starlab, a commercial successor to the ISS and a generational investment opportunity positions us at the forefront of the evolution of space infrastructure, research platforms and national security.

We are designed to scale, adapt and win these attractive and growing markets that demand speed, innovation and mission-critical capabilities. From propulsion and signal intelligence to secure communications and orbital infrastructure, we are executing with precision and accelerating momentum.

Voyager's success is anchored in 3 strategic pillars: first, high growth and profitable and growing national security and defense segments; second, a relentless commitment to leading with innovation; and third, the transformational opportunity of Starlab Space stations. Voyager is a high-growth platform expected to deliver an organic CAGR of over 25% with additional upside through disciplined and accretive M&A that presents additional opportunities for growth.

We operate within a $179 billion addressable market spanning missile defense, space-based systems and advanced deterrent capabilities. Our robust pipeline of $3.6 billion in qualified opportunities underscores our ability to convert visible opportunities into long-term revenue and generate meaningful returns for shareholders.

We've built a company that can operate with the scale and discipline of a prime contractor, but with the agility and innovation engine of a high-growth technology company where product development, IP creation and accretive capital allocation are core to our business model. Over 18% of revenue is invested in innovation and developing proprietary mission-critical capabilities with much of that funded by our customers. This foundation makes Voyager fundamentally different from traditional defense and space contractors.

As a commercial platform, we are CapEx-light, IP-focused and operationally efficient. Furthermore, we maintain a fortress balance sheet with $413 million in cash, $200 million in available credit and no debt, which is highly differentiated amongst our competitors. And additionally, we offer a once-in-a-generation opportunity through our Starlab joint venture, where Voyager is the majority shareholder and lead developer.

Turning to Slide 4. For the third quarter, total revenue was up 15% when adjusting for planned wind down of the NASA services contract within the Space Solutions segment. Defense and National Security revenue increased very significantly at 31% year-over-year, driven by continued execution on key propulsion and sensing programs. As a reminder, in Q2, we completed critical design review for our NGI second stage roll control system, a major technical milestone that positions Voyager to deliver a flight-qualified subsystem for one of the most strategic missile defense programs in the U.S. portfolio.

Golden Dome is emerging as an exciting new opportunity. Voyager is actively engaged across multiple mission threads with the Golden Dome architecture with opportunities spanning the space layer, propulsion, guidance and navigation, sensors, communications and mission-critical electronics. We have submitted multiple Golden Dome-related proposals in partnership with several major primes and neoprimes, further strengthening our position as a trusted technology partner across the defense and space industry.

The Defense and National Security segment remains our largest and fastest growing, supported by multiyear visibility and expanding demand across missile defense and advanced surveillance. We remain very active in pursuing strategic M&A opportunities. During the quarter, we acquired BridgeComm's optical communications technology, fast tracking our ability to deliver secure, high-speed connectivity for defense and commercial customers. The deal shortens development time lines and strengthens our position in the rapidly growing market for advanced communications.

For defense, it supports DoD missions with resilient low latency links in contested environments. For commercial use, it boosts data capacity for global networks like aircraft to satellite connections. This acquisition expands our tech stack and reinforces Voyager's leadership in next-generation space and defense communications.

During the quarter, we also made a minority investment in an AI platform, Latent AI, which specializes in optimizing AI for contested and constrained environments. By embedding advanced models directly at the Edge, they enable faster targeting, sharper situational awareness and resiliency, real-time decision-making, and these capabilities are mission-critical in environments where every second counts and traditional cloud-based AI is impractical.

This investment underscores Voyager's commitment to staying at the forefront of innovation, bringing the decisive advantage of Edge AI to missions where outcome depends on speed, precision and resilience. I will discuss our additional acquisitions of EMSI and recently of ExoTerra in more detail on the next slide.

Lastly, Starlab continues to advance as a transformational growth engine. We completed 2 additional development milestones during the quarter, resulting in $4 million in milestone-based cash receipts from NASA. To date, we've completed 27 milestones under our $218 million funded Space Act Agreement, marking steady progress towards launching the commercial successor to the ISS.

This quarter, Starlab selected Vivace Corporation to manufacture the primary structure for its next-generation commercial space station. We are excited about this important development and partnership with Vivace, a company with advanced aerospace engineering expertise, high technology readiness level or TRL, deep capabilities and world-class facilities. The aluminum-based structure will be one of the largest single space-flight structures ever developed for launch and will be built at Vivace's Engineering and Manufacturing Center located within NASA's assembly facility in Louisiana.

As the majority owner and lead developer of Starlab, Voyager is building a scalable multi-decade infrastructure platform with significant recurring revenue potential. Once operational, we expect Starlab to generate over $4 billion in annual revenue and more than $1.5 billion in free cash flow, anchored by long-term demand from government, commercial and international customers. This program not only reinforces our leadership in commercial space infrastructure, but also complements our broader platform strategy, leveraging shared technologies across propulsion, sensing and mission systems to drive innovation and value creation.

Turning to Slide 5 and focusing on our M&A engine. We continue to execute against our strategic growth priorities, combining organic momentum with disciplined capital deployment. Our M&A strategy is focused on acquiring high-impact technologies that diversify and deepen our platform, solidifying our role as a key enabler in defense and space innovation. Recent acquisitions underscore our strategic focus, enhancing capabilities in radar-based analytics, electric propulsion and vertically-integrated subsystems.

During the quarter, we completed the acquisition of ElectroMagnetic Systems, known as EMSI, a radar AI software company serving high-priority U.S. defense and intelligence missions. EMSI specializes in synthetic aperture radar exploitation using proprietary AI-machine learning models and synthetic training data pipelines.

With prime positions on NGA's Luno program and DARPA's Midnight Earthquake initiative, EMSI brings differentiated IP, a cleared technical team and a commercial SaaS model with strong margin potential. Following the quarter, we closed on the acquisition of ExoTerra, a market-leading manufacturer of electric propulsion systems for advanced satellites. Their turnkey propulsion modules, Hall-effect thrusters and domestic manufacturing capabilities align with our road map across LEO, GEO and cis-lunar missions.

ExoTerra expands our ability to deliver integrated propulsion solutions and supports our strategic shift towards hardware-enabled space infrastructure. Together, these acquisitions reinforce Voyager's differentiated strategy and strengthen our vertical technology stack, bringing together propulsion sensing and software into a unified platform. They enhance our ability to compete for higher-value programs, accelerate the innovation curve and expand our relevance. Most importantly, they support our long-term growth strategy by deepening alignment with national security priorities, unlocking new market opportunities and creating durable accretive value for shareholders.

And with that, I will turn it over to Phil to walk through the financials in more detail. Phil, over to you.

Thanks, Dylan. Turning to Slide 6. For the third quarter, we delivered revenue of $40 million, flat year-over-year or up 15%, excluding the planned wind down of a legacy NASA services contract, thus reflecting strong demand and growth in our Defense and National Security segment. Bookings this quarter totaled $49 million, reflecting a 1.25 book-to-bill ratio as we continue to see momentum across missile defense and space platforms, thus reinforcing our alignment with national defense priorities and the relevance of our technology stack.

Importantly, backlog expanded 10% sequentially to $189 million. We generally see backlog levels decrease in the early part of the year and increase later in the year, driven by the timing of budget releases, OEM order cycles and the exercise of options under existing contracts. Given the strength of our current pipeline, we are tracking well to end the year with backlog that exceeds the level at which we entered the year.

Adjusted EBITDA for the third quarter was a loss of $17.7 million compared to a loss of $8.8 million last year. The year-over-year change reflects planned investments in innovation, talent acquisition and our corporate infrastructure. These investments are intentional and placed ahead of growth, establishing the operational foundation to ensure we scale efficiently. On the bottom line, adjusted EPS was a loss of $0.22 compared to a loss of $1.56 in the prior year, with the per share improvement reflecting IPO-related dilution.

Turning to Slide 7. I'll cover our operating performance by segment. Defense and National Security, our largest and fastest-growing segment, continued to perform well in the third quarter. Revenue increased 31% year-over-year, driven primarily by higher volumes across key programs, including the ramp-up of our NGI and other undisclosed programs. Segment adjusted EBITDA was a loss of $2 million, reflecting increased research and development investment and continued talent acquisition.

Switching over to our Space Solutions segment. Revenue was $11.7 million, down year-over-year as expected and primarily due to the planned phase down of the multiyear NASA services contract and a tougher year-over-year comparable. The segment continues to reflect the inherently lumpy nature of space-related awards and revenue recognition, which can vary quarter-to-quarter based on program timing and funding. Segment adjusted EBITDA was a loss of $0.6 million, primarily reflecting lower volumes.

Starlab continues to make measurable progress. During the third quarter, we accomplished 2 additional development milestones and received $4 million in milestone-based cash receipts from NASA, part of our $218 million funded Space Act Agreement. To date, we've completed 27 milestones totaling $174 million in NASA funding and materially offsetting our investment in the program.

Starlab's next major milestone is our critical design review scheduled in December 2025. Wrapping up here, we're encouraged by the momentum across our businesses and are increasingly confident in our ability to execute on backlog, scale and deliver long-term value through disciplined growth and strategic investment.

Let's turn to Slide 8, and I'll cover our financial position. We continue to operate from a position of financial strength that enables both focused execution today and strategic growth over the long term. As of September 30, we ended the quarter with $413 million in cash, no debt and access to a $200 million undrawn credit facility, resulting in total liquidity of $613 million. This fortress balance sheet provides flexibility to scale production, invest in innovation and execute our targeted priorities within M&A.

During the quarter, we deployed capital to expand our technology stack and enhanced capabilities through the targeted acquisition of EMSI. Following the close of the quarter, we also deployed capital to complete the strategic acquisition of ExoTerra as outlined in Dylan's remarks.

Turning to Slide 9. I'll cover off our outlook for fiscal year 2025. We now expect revenue to come near the upper end of the guidance range of $165 million to $170 million, reflecting year-over-year growth of approximately 18%. Excluding the impact of the NASA services contract within Space Solutions that is winding down, year-over-year growth in fiscal 2025 would be in the mid-30s percent range. This growth reflects both organic expansion and contributions from acquired businesses while also factoring in uncertainty related to the government shutdown. For the full year, we reiterate adjusted EBITDA between negative $60 million and $63 million.

In summary, we are scaling rapidly and focused on delivering high growth, executing effectively across high-priority programs, investing in mission-critical innovation and driving improved financial performance. Our CapEx-light operating model, combined with disciplined execution continues to support margin expansion and strong cash flow conversion potential over time, especially when layering in Starlab.

With that, I'll hand it back to Dylan for his concluding comments.

Thank you, Phil. In summary, everyone, we are executing with focus and momentum, supported by a platform purpose-built for this dynamic market. The opportunities ahead for both Defense and National Security as well as commercial space are significant and measurable, and I'm confident in our team, strategy and technology to capitalize on them.

Before we open it up to Q&A, I also want to highlight our upcoming Investor Day, which will be held November 20 and 21 in Houston. We look forward to spending time with many of you as we take a deeper dive into each of our business segments, walk through our long-term strategic opportunities and showcase how recent acquisitions are enhancing our technology stack and further accelerating our road map. Given limited capacity, participation is by invitation-only and does require an RSVP, please reach out to us with any questions.

So with that, over to you, operator, to take any questions we may have.

[Operator Instructions] Your first question comes from the line of Sheila Kahyaoglu with Jefferies.

Maybe if we could just start off one question and one follow-up. If we could dig into the 2 acquisitions and the partnership you announced, the investment you announced, maybe focusing on ExoTerra, it seems to have a nice overlap with content areas such as SDA, PWSA. How can we think about the benefits from these acquisitions to your portfolio?

And the follow-up would be, how do we think about it impacting the financials for 2026?

Sheila, thanks for the question. Dylan speaking. Yes, so ExoTerra, why don't we start there? Super exciting acquisition, does a few things for us on our technology and strategic road map.

First and foremost, as we've talked about previously, we're really focused on power and propulsion as a key capability. And of course, with the Hall-effect thruster technology, which ExoTerra brings to the table, it allows us to have a capability for in-orbit movement of mass that's going to be very relevant, not only to things like Golden Dome and those capabilities, complementing our existing power and propulsion capability on NGI, but it also allows us to be relevant to constellations that being built in LEO as well. So we're very excited about that capability.

The other thing which I want to note is it really enhances our U.S.-based manufacturing capability as well. And as you and others know, there's a huge push to ensuring, making sure that the entire supply chain is derisked and is U.S.-sourced. And that's another key vertical capability that ExoTerra brings to the table as well.

I think you also referenced BridgeComm and perhaps the Latent AI investment. I'll just touch on those briefly. BridgeComm, again, as I mentioned in my remarks, really enhances our comms technology portfolio. As you know, we're very relevant in laser communication. This further enhances that technology stack. So we're very bullish on that IP portfolio acquisition.

And then on Latent AI, our grand vision here in partnership with Palantir and others is to really build that entire technology stack for Edge computing. And where Latent AI comes in is really at the firmware level, so that as you're collecting data and you're passing it off to, call it, the operating system level, that's [ semi-processed ] data happening literally at the ASIC level. And so we're very excited about what Latent AI brings to that technology stack.

So just kind of to wrap that up into a broader theme here, these are acquisitions that are on our technology road map that are strategically relevant to our capabilities going forward. These are very accretive transactions. I'll ask Phil to chime in on that, proprietarily-sourced and really thematically very consistent with kind of what we talked about in our roadshow that we would execute our capital deployment on. So over to Phil.

Sheila, as Dylan mentioned, both acquisitions are extremely attractive, enhance our portfolio, not just from a technology capability perspective. But from my financial lens, I see these acquisitions as driving our overall growth up significantly in 2026. More to come on that front at our Investor Day. We'll provide the analyst and investment community with a framework about how to think for '26. It's still a bit premature to provide overly specifics there. That

said, given the profile of these acquisitions, I'm excited because they're both accretive from a gross profit margin perspective to our overall portfolio today, in some cases, significantly more accretive than our existing portfolio today, and both businesses bring positive EBITDA to us immediately. And so extremely excited to get both businesses integrated into our overall portfolio. I think over the longer term, revenue and -- revenue synergies that these businesses bring to enhance our overall portfolio are quite significant. So in addition to the 2026 contribution that you'll see is quite significant, over the coming 3, 4, 5 years, I think that these businesses will be real standout performers.

Yes. And just maybe one final point, Sheila, just to emphasize, our growth prospects for 2026 look very solid, and we're super confident as we look into next year. And these acquisitions are a big part of that theme. So thanks for the question.

Your next question comes from the line of Kristine Liwag with Morgan Stanley.

I just wanted to dive a little bit deeper on Starlab and the opportunity set there. It looks like the government shut down, they're laying off some employees related to the ISS in preparation for the deorbiting. So I was wondering how does this government shutdown and changes in employees affect priorities and potentially the timing of award for ISS replacement in 2026. Do you anticipate that the government shutdown kind of delays some of that time line?

And then also my follow-up would be just generally related to the government shutdown. How does that affect your expectations for strong orders for 4Q to get your backlog higher than last year?

So starting with Starlab, right now, the current time line remains intact so far as we know. And that time line, just to remind everybody, we have a critical design review on Starlab with NASA scheduled -- currently scheduled for December. So yet this year is the plan for that. We still anticipate an RFP for Phase 2 award sometime late this year or early next year. And then we anticipate a contract award for Phase 2, where they're going to pick who effectively wins Phase 2 sometime in early 2026.

So obviously, if the government shutdown continues longer than anticipated, let's say, past Thanksgiving into December and even into early next year, that could impact, obviously, the timing that I just communicated. But as of right now, based upon what we know, we think that timing will hold.

Also, I think you're referencing some of the job cuts, I think, at Marshall Space Flight Center. A lot of that has to do with ISS payloads. So that doesn't necessarily impact the CLD Phase II contract awards. But to your point, I think NASA is obviously looking at the budget with a lens towards the commercialization of the ISS long term. But I wouldn't read too much into those specific cuts. I don't think that's a change in strategy or anything like that. I think that's just a little bit of reorg consistent with some of the other budget pressures that NASA has.

But in general, we feel very good about the Starlab program. As we indicated, we completed another 2 milestones in the quarter. The program is on track. So we're very bullish and optimistic about where the program is. And again, it's anyone's guess on when the government is going to reopen. But as of right now, we would expect it would be open sometime before Thanksgiving, but we'll have to wait and see. But right now, I would say the timing is on track. Phil, would you add anything?

Just Kristine, I appreciate the question. I think your second part of your question is more tied to our expectations around orders and confidence around orders and how that builds over the course of the fourth quarter heading into next year. And so I'll just reiterate what I mentioned in my prepared remarks.

Extremely confident we'll enter the year next year with total backlog well in excess of the $200 million that we entered the year 2025 with. As you see, we already built backlog here in the third quarter. We were up to $180 million, up $18 million or 10% coming off of Q2.

From a pipeline perspective, I don't believe the government shutdown will impact our ability to not just capitalize and convert our pipeline into orders, whether it's here in the fourth quarter or early first quarter, we're terribly excited by the pipeline that we have, particularly supporting our Defense and National Security business. It's not just, as you guys know, NGI that we've been executing on. There's quite a number of Golden Dome opportunities that we've been actively pursuing and I'm -- have me excited about the prospects for 2026 and our ability to build backlog.

And one other final point, Kristine, I'm not sure schedule-wise, you'll be able to be at the investor event, but one kind of cool thing that's happening right now, I'll just mention is a full-scale mockup of Starlab is being constructed on the floor of Building 9 at NASA's Johnson Center. And so as part of that Investor Day, you'll actually see the full scale of the Starlab 7-plus meter design. And that's literally on the floor next to the ISS mockup, the Dragon capsule mockup and others.

So cool that we received kind of this coveted position, if you will, on the floor of Building 9, I think really showcases our partnership with NASA and the progress that the program has made. So we're excited to show that to investors in November.

Your next question comes from the line of Greg Dahlberg with Wolfe Research.

I just wanted to ask on capitalization for the build-out of Starlab. You talked before about the use of third-party equity raises. And I think most recently, you brought in space applications based in Belgium. So I was just curious if you could give an update on the timing and sizing of what to expect for future capital raises.

Yes. Thanks, Greg. Great question. So we are actively raising a Series A for the Starlab joint venture. That raise is actually going quite well. We look forward to making some announcements related to that, again, not to put too much pressure on Investor Day, but we anticipate being able to talk about that raise and some of the other marquee investors coming into that capital stack at Investor Day. But these are quite notable investors, name brand investors.

So we're very confident that the capitalization of Starlab is on track. And again, we're coupling that with continuing to achieve milestones and triggering payments there. And then, of course, the Phase 2 award early next year. So capitalization for Starlab looks extremely solid at this point. We're very confident in where that stands.

Your next question comes from the line of Alex Preston of Bank of America.

Maybe just to get back to M&A strategy a bit broader. It seems like you're building capabilities around various high-value subsystems on satellites, payloads. I know you've highlighted staying CapEx-light as a key part of the business. Are you approaching this from sort of high-value merchant supply only? Or is there an appetite towards potentially even doing your own satellite development at some point?

Great question, Alex. CapEx-light, capital efficient for sure, is really our ethos, and that's what we're leaning into. That being said, as I mentioned earlier, having an integrated U.S.-based supply chain is actually relevant, especially in the National Security community. So we're going to continue to find ways to make sure that we're as vertically integrated as we can be.

But to your point, let's take, for example, missile defense. We're on the optical navigation and control system. That's a great part of the technology stack to be on. We're on the Proprietary Propulsion and Roll Control System. That's a great part of the technology stack to be on. Would we make the missile body? No, we wouldn't do that, right? So I think similar to that on -- if you look at power and propulsion as a subsystem on a satellite system, that's an area we want to play.

Would we actually build the satellite and assemble the satellite? Never say never, but I don't think that's leaning into our strengths necessarily. As we look forward in our M&A pipeline, which, by the way, is quite robust, we might do some additional, what I would call, vertical integration on, let's say, the energetics side of propulsion. I think that's an important strategic objective that the government has identified is something that's important to the national security and national interest. So I think that's something we would consider.

And again, we're -- as I say, we return all phone calls, and we look at a wide swath of opportunities in the market. But we definitely want to lean into advanced technology, lean into innovation and make the model as CapEx efficient with generating strong operating cash flow as possible. That's really has been our success, and that's what you can anticipate from us going forward.

Got it. And then I think just there, you covered my follow-up what it would have been. So I'll keep it at one. I appreciate it.

Your next question comes from the line of Michael Leshock with KeyBanc Capital Markets.

I wanted to ask on the NGI program and the visibility you have there. Could you provide some color on the next milestones or key watch points for NGI in order for that program to ramp to its target for LRIP in late '26. Are there any additional capacity expansions to hit your targets? Or anything else we should be aware of there for NGI?

Mike, it's Phil here. I'll take this one and let Dylan chime in. But from an NGI specifically perspective, just as a reminder, we have the capital infrastructure, if you would, that's necessary and required to deliver on this program. That said, and yes, a great question there, I would look and turn towards our success in passing CDR back during the second quarter and how that leads and has led to significant activity, significant discussions around other programs.

As we continue to cultivate that and convert that pipeline into our backlog, there may be a time where we're required to invest further into CapEx. I think just to dovetail off of the previous question around M&A, we're quite thoughtful. We've actually used the M&A lever to acquire intellectual property to advance our innovation growth and opportunity. I think as we look ahead in our pipeline, there's also opportunities there for us to add other capabilities, both manufacturing as well as engineering. And so I just keep the door open there.

Coming back to NGI specifically, a fantastic quarter. Just as a reminder, NGI, that program is up over 130% year-to-date year-over-year. And we had significant growth again in the third quarter. It drove a significant composition of our overall Defense and National Security revenue. As we look out to fourth quarter, I anticipate sequentially, NGI will continue to grow. As we move into 2026, we'll continue to work closely with Lockheed as we start to move into our low-rate production and high-rate production in the years ahead.

Yes. And just one other thing to chime in on, Mike. We're seeing a lot of interest and traction on our technology for these other missile defense programs as we have previously communicated. And then on Golden Dome, some really exciting things happening there, especially as it relates to space-based interceptors. So we're on several teams of both primes and neoprimes. I think those so-called SBI awards will be made in the near term here. And I'm confident that if there are multiple awards, I think we have multiple paths to the glory, as I would say, because our technology is extremely relevant to the SBI, space-based interceptor component of Golden Done.

So more to come, but we really like what we see, as Phil said, and we've talked about previously, now that we've passed critical design review on NGI, that's really opened up the aperture for us to sell this technology into other programs of record in emerging programs of record like SBI. So we're super bullish on that.

Great. And then a follow-up on Space Solutions. Should we expect the Space segment to return to growth in 1Q '26 as that NASA services contract lapses? And any way to frame what the sales growth could be there for the segment in '26 and beyond?

Yes, Mike, it's Phil again. I'll take this one. Well, again, we'll cover off our 2026 framework at Investor Day. But as a reminder, everybody, that legacy contract rolls off -- has rolled off effectively here in the second half of 2025. So the full lapping of that will happen in the second half of next year. So we'll continue to see some pressure in the first half, not suggesting that Space Solutions won't return to growth.

We do anticipate we're excited about Space Solutions as it also if it dovetails and leads and feeds our Starlab opportunities there. So really exciting times for Voyager in the space sector. As for that specific contract, anticipate those headwinds to be over by the end of the first half of next year.

Yes. The only other thing I would say, Mike, is there are other things we're working on in Space Solutions that we're very optimistic will significantly build that backlog in 2026. So stay tuned on that. We've got -- we're competing for some things that are very interesting in that regard.

So we still see growth in Space Solutions. I want to really emphasize that. It's just a matter of timing on when that hits. So I just want to -- rest assured that it's still a growth business for us. It's just a matter of getting the timing right in terms of when some of this stuff hits.

Thank you. I will now hand it back to Adi Padva for more questions.

Thank you. Before we conclude today's Q&A, we'd like to take a moment to address a few questions that were submitted by members of our retail investor community. First one for you, Dylan, about M&A. How does ExoTerra acquisition positions Voyager to compete on Golden Dome?

Yes. So we covered that a little bit with some of the questions asked by the analyst community. But the short story is the way to think about Golden Dome is layers of a defense shield, if you will. At the outer most, we're very relevant to that, that's next-generation interceptor. So that's literally hypersonic missile interception for nuclear tip warheads from adversaries.

But if you think about in-space capability, not only tracking and defending against threats, but also intercepting in space. There are lots of technologies that are relevant there. Electric propulsion is specific hall-effect thrusters are very relevant there, especially if you can integrate both the propulsion and the power into a single integrated unit, which is what ExoTerra is known for.

So long story short, it enhances our ability to compete for different architectures and different designs of Golden Dome. And it's just another piece of the puzzle that makes us more relevant to the entire missile defense capability.

The next question about power generation and space. Is Voyager planning to integrate nuclear power for space-based platforms?

Yes. In fact, we are bullish on nuclear as a technology. Something that we haven't previously talked about is we actually made an investment in a nuclear power company called Helicity. We did that a couple of years back, and we did that really as a strategic investment to monitor that technology, and further enhanced our ability to use that technology in the future.

So the short story is, yes, it is part of our long-term road map, and it is something that we're actively monitoring. And again, we made that strategic investment in Helicity, which is one of the leaders in nuclear propulsion.

And lastly, on Starlab, what are the key milestones [ toward ] including the launch date?

Yes. So reinforcing some of what I've said previously, we have critical design review coming up with NASA, currently scheduled for December. The RFP for Phase II award is due out late this year or early next year. And then we anticipate a CLD Phase II award sometime in early 2026, probably late Q1, early Q2.

And then in terms of the launch date, we are currently on time and on target for a 2029 launch date, which would be well ahead of the ISS decommission date in 2030 and the orbit date in 2031.

Thank you, Dylan. This concludes the Q&A, and I'll pass it back to you for closing remarks.

Wonderful. Well, thank you all for joining us today. We really appreciate your interest in Voyager Technologies. We're super excited about the significant momentum the company has going into the fourth quarter and 2026. And we're looking forward to speaking with you again next quarter, and we hope to see many of you at the Investor Day in a few weeks in Houston. So thank you, everybody.

This concludes today's call. Thank you for attending. You may now disconnect.

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and thank you for standing by. My name is Kelvin, and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Voyager Technologies Q2 2025 Earnings Call. [Operator Instructions]

I would now like to turn the call over to Adi Padva, Senior Vice President of Corporate Development and Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, and good morning. Welcome to Voyager's Second Quarter 2025 Earnings Call. I'm joined today by Dylan Taylor, our Chairman and Chief Executive Officer; and Phil de Sousa, our Chief Financial Officer.

Today's call include forward-looking statements, which involve risks and uncertainties detailed in our earnings material and SEC filings, including the Risk Factors section of our IPO prospectus. We undertake no obligation to update these statements. We will also discuss non-GAAP financial measures. Reconciliation of these measures is available in our earnings materials on our website.

I will now turn the call over to Dylan.

Thank you, Adi, and good morning, everyone. It's my pleasure to welcome you to our first earnings call as a public company. I am super excited to share how Voyager is executing on the platform we purpose-built to lead the next era of defense, national security and space innovation. Voyager was founded with a clear mission to build an innovation and technology platform, designed to both disrupt as well as anticipate the evolving needs of the unique and mission-critical industries that we serve.

Our success is supported by 3 strategic pillars, which we will cover on each earnings call going forward. First, a high growth in profitable segments; secondly, a relentless commitment to leading with innovation; and third, the transformational opportunity of Starlab space stations.

To be specific, Voyager is a high-growth platform expected to deliver an organic CAGR of over 25% with additional upside through disciplined and accretive M&A. We operate within a $179 billion addressable market spanning missile defense, space-based systems and advanced deterrent capabilities.

Our robust pipeline of $3.6 billion in qualified opportunities underscores our ability to convert visible opportunities into long-term revenue and create meaningful shareholder return. We've built a company that can operate with the scale and discipline of a prime contractor, but with the agility and innovation engine of a high-growth technology company, where product development, IP creation and accretive capital allocation are core to our business model.

Over 18% of our revenue is invested in innovation and developing proprietary mission-critical capabilities with much of that funded by our customers. We are also accelerating the deployment of our multi-use technologies. For example, to support Golden dome missile defense systems, we leverage our technological capabilities from propulsion to optical sensors, navigation and controls, all of which enable us to capture new opportunities.

Importantly, we operate with a commercial business model in markets traditionally dominated by government structures, enabling us to move with speed and efficiency. Whether it's smart missile defense systems and our propulsion technology or our software-enabled signals intelligence, we're advancing scalable next-generation solutions to directly address the growing needs of our customers.

This foundation makes Voyager fundamentally different from traditional defense and space contractors. As a commercial platform, we are CapEx-light, IP-focused and operationally efficient. Furthermore, we maintain a fortress balance sheet with $460 million in cash, $200 million in available credit and no debt, which is highly differentiated amongst our competitors. And additionally, we offer a once-in-a-generation opportunity through our Starlab joint venture, where Voyager is the majority owner and lead developer of a commercial replacement to the International Space Station.

Turning to Slide 4. As a reminder, Voyager operates across 3 compelling business segments, each aligned to high-growth end markets and the evolving priorities of defense, national security and space. Our Defense & National Security segment is our largest and fastest growing. We are a leader in controllable solid fuel propulsion and signals intelligence technologies driving the future of missile defense, threat detection and advanced communications. Programs like Next Generation Interceptor, where our propulsion system recently passed critical design review, highlight our alignment with mission-critical defense priorities, including Golden Dome, as I mentioned earlier.

Our Space Solutions segment has a strong track record of enabling and expanding the space domain by delivering innovative solutions for government and commercial missions. Furthermore, as demand grows, we will continue to develop advanced hardware and software systems that enable critical capabilities like communications, infrastructure and mission management.

And finally, Starlab Space Stations, perhaps one of the most compelling long-term growth opportunities in the commercial space market. We are the majority shareholder of the joint venture, building the commercial successor to the ISS. To date, we've been awarded over $218 million by NASA. And to emphasize, Starlab is an infrastructure-light project with an upfront investment to develop the station followed by massive multi-decade free cash flow streams.

As indicated in our prospectus, once in orbit, we expect Starlab to generate over $4 billion in annual revenue and over $1.5 billion of free cash flow. Collectively, our segments provide shareholders unique access to growing mission-critical systems and programs and create multiple paths for long-term value creation.

Turning to Slide 5. Our first quarter as a public company marks another step forward in our company's trajectory, driven by advancing our strategic growth priorities and executing with discipline. We completed our IPO in June, raising more than $400 million in net proceeds and establishing a $200 million credit facility, providing us with a fortress balance sheet to further support our growth strategy.

Now on to second quarter results. I am extremely pleased to share that we have posted record quarterly revenue of $46 million, up 25% year-over-year, driven by 85% growth in our Defense & National Security segment. We continue to scale our platform through targeted acquisitions that enhance our technology stack and open new market opportunities. During the quarter, we acquired LEOcloud and Optical Physics Company. These businesses expand our vision for space-based cloud services and smart missile defense systems, strengthening our ability to pursue high-value contracts across our segments.

These acquisitions reflect our disciplined approach to M&A, proprietarily sourced relationship-driven, strategically aligned and designed to create long-term accretive growth by enhancing core strategic capabilities.

And on Starlab, we continue to make meaningful progress. In the second quarter alone, we achieved 4 key development milestones, resulting in $22.5 million in cash receipts from NASA. That brings us to 25 milestones completed to date each one marking tangible progress towards building the commercial replacement for the ISS that is scheduled to launch to orbit in 2029.

Over the next 2 slides, we highlight 2 visible growth drivers for Voyager. First, our advanced throttle propulsion technology selected for Next Generation Interceptor, also referred to as NGI. As mentioned, we recently completed critical design review for the second stage roll control system on NGI, a major technical milestone. This propulsion solution is the first of its kind, enabling precise in-flight targeting and control. Completing CDR is a critical step towards delivering a flight qualified production-ready subsystem for NGI's fielding.

NGI is the premier U.S. missile defense program, a multi-decade billion-dollar-plus revenue opportunity for us and a clear example of how Voyager is positioned to lead the next generation of missile defense. On Slide 7, we highlight our accretive capital deployment strategy. During the quarter, we completed 2 acquisitions. And today, we highlight Optical Physics Company, OPC, a vertically integrated addition that strengthens our Defense & National Security segment with proprietary optical technologies.

OPC extends our platform into critical subsystems used across missile defense and advanced surveillance applications. OPC Star Tracker systems enhance our optical navigation product suite. This positions Voyager to compete for higher-value programs and increases the relevance of our broader platform. Our M&A strategy is focused on identifying high-impact technologies, integrating them into our platform and driving accretive growth while deepening our alignment with customer needs.

In summary, we are executing with focus and momentum, supported by a platform purpose-built for this market. The opportunities ahead are significant and measurable, and I'm confident in our team, strategy and technology to capitalize on them. And with that, I'll turn it over to Phil to walk through the financials in more detail.

Thanks, Dylan. Turning to Slide 8. For the second quarter, we delivered revenue of $46 million, a 25% year-over-year increase, reflecting strong demand within our Defense & National Security segment. Excluding the planned wind down of a multiyear NASA services contract within our Space Solutions segment, overall growth for Voyager was 45%. Adjusted EBITDA for the second quarter was a loss of $9.1 million compared to a loss of $8 million last year. The modest increase reflects strategic investment to build infrastructure, systems and acquire talent to support our long-term growth trajectory as a newly formed public company.

I'll emphasize here that we're executing intentionally and investing ahead of the growth curve to ensure we scale efficiently. On the bottom line, adjusted EPS was a loss of $0.60 compared to a loss of $1.29 in the prior year period, with the per share improvement reflecting IPO-related dilution.

Now turning to Slide 9, I'll cover off our operating performance by segment. Beginning with Defense & National Security, our largest and fastest-growing segment. For the second quarter, strong execution and higher volume from key programs, including Next Generation Interceptor, drove an 85% increase in segment revenue. Adjusted EBITDA rose 80% to $1.8 million, primarily reflecting contribution from our top line performance.

Now switching gears to our Space Solutions segment. Revenue was $11.1 million, down 45% year-over-year. Segment adjusted EBITDA was a loss of $1.3 million, with the performance reflecting the planned wind-down of a multiyear NASA services contract, as I mentioned earlier.

Finally, Starlab continues to show steady progress. During the second quarter, we achieved 4 additional key development milestones and received approximately $23 million in milestone-based cash payments. These receipts are attributable to our $218 million funded Space Act Agreement with NASA and materially offset our investment in the program.

As a result, we are advancing what we believe is a transformational commercial opportunity in the evolving low earth orbit economy. Wrapping up here, we are encouraged by the momentum we are seeing and remain confident in our ability to deliver sustainable long-term growth across all 3 of our core businesses.

Now let's turn to Slide 10, and I'll cover off our financial position. As we embark on our journey as a public company, we do so with a fortress balance sheet, a position of financial strength that enables both focused execution today and strategic growth for the long term. Following the successful completion of our IPO and repayment of our $58 million term loan, we ended the quarter with $469 million in cash, debt-free and with access to an undrawn $200 million revolving credit facility.

Our robust capital position provides flexibility to scale production, invest in innovation and pursue disciplined M&A. This, combined with our disciplined capital allocation strategy, CapEx-light model and the multi-decade cash generation potential of Starlab reinforces our confidence in delivering meaningful returns to shareholders.

Now turning to Slide 11. I'll cover off our outlook for fiscal year 2025. Beginning with the top line. We expect revenue in the range of $165 million to $170 million, representing year-over-year growth of 15% to 18%. Excluding the impact of the NASA services contract within Space Solutions that is winding down, year-over-year growth would be in the range of 29% to 33%. This means that for the second half, we anticipate revenue of approximately $87 million at the midpoint, reflecting 9% sequential growth over the first half, 13% increase compared to the second half of 2024 or 34% excluding the impact associated with the wind down of the NASA services contract within Space Solutions.

For the full year, we expect adjusted EBITDA between negative $60 million to $63 million. Underpinning our second half expectations is sequential improvement in both gross profit and adjusted EBITDA margins, with the fourth quarter higher than the third quarter, reflecting both the anticipated top line progression and favorable mix.

In summary, we are scaling rapidly and focused on delivering high growth, executing effectively across high-priority programs, investing in mission-critical innovation and driving improved financial performance. Our capital-light operating model, combined with disciplined execution continues to support margin expansion and strong cash flow conversion potential over time, especially when layering in Starlab.

With that, I'll turn it back over to Dylan for some closing remarks.

Thanks, Phil. We entered this next chapter with strong momentum, clear alignment to long-term industry priorities and a differentiated platform built for high growth. We're executing across our existing key programs, expanding through innovation, our opportunity set and are positioned to capitalize on the tailwinds shaping the future of defense, national security and space. We're proud of the foundation we've built and confident in our ability to deliver long-term value for our shareholders.

Operator, we're now ready to take questions.

[Operator Instructions] Your first question comes from the line of Ron Epstein of Bank of America.

If you could speak a little bit to kind of maybe a bigger picture question, just more broadly on what makes you feel comfortable with the growth outlook that you guys are expecting this quarter, numbers came in. But -- and when we think about kind of the go-forward algorithm for the company, what makes you all feel comfortable about that growth?

Yes. Thanks for the question, Ron. A couple of thoughts. First is the markets that we're -- or segments that we're playing in. So for example, one of the growth drivers this quarter and this year, in fact, has been our throttleable propulsion technology, which, of course, is our Next Generation Interceptor. In addition to that, we're also on Next Generation Interceptor with our optical navigation system and increasingly being asked for more intelligence on that system as well with software-enabled hardware.

And as we know, Golden Dome is yet to be totally defined yet in terms of exactly what it is. But what we do know is there's a big push by the administration for additional investment in smart missile defense systems. And as we mentioned earlier, we've passed critical design review now with our throttleable propulsion technology. So if you look at all those key drivers for generally smart missile defense systems, we're very well positioned with our technology, not only for the existing volumes within NGI, which we think are very, very solid, but the possibility that those volumes will increase.

And then, of course, additional smart missile defense programs, including space-to-space interceptors which is a key focus area for the administration, and our technology is also relevant to that segment as well.

So I think that's a big category that gives us confidence not only in the second half of the year, but '26 and beyond. The other thing I'll just mention is M&A. We have a very, very robust M&A pipeline, and I'm very confident, Ron, that in the back half of the year, we mentioned 2 acquisitions in this quarter. I don't think those will be the only acquisitions we get done in 2026. I think it's highly likely we'll have more to report on the acquisition side here in the near future.

And then just final point, of course, everything that we're talking about would be supplemented by Starlab with future growth as well. So as I mentioned earlier, we've hit all our milestones to date. I think we just hit our 25th milestone and we anticipate hitting future milestones in the back half of the year. So those would be the key drivers that I would put forward. And Phil, do you have anything to chime in on?

Yes, sure. And Ron, thanks for the question. So again, just perhaps echoing some of Dylan's points and adding a couple of statistical data points for you all. As a reminder, we've got about a $3.6 billion opportunity pipeline, and that's growing. We're also excited, as Dylan mentioned, the acquisitions we did here this past quarter and anticipate here over the course of the second half, also anticipate that those acquisitions will open up new revenue opportunities for us as Voyager. As we've said, one of our M&A opportunities is to vertically integrate but also horizontally into attractive space -- new spaces.

That $3.6 billion pipeline I mentioned earlier, heavily weighted towards the Defense & National Security segment, about 3/4 of that 75%. And as a reminder, we anticipate the Defense & National Security segment to outpace the growth of Space Solutions, Defense & National Security segment growing about 35% over the long term. And that's all supported by obviously not just Next Generation Interceptor but the applications of propulsion technology, our optical sensors into other missile defense platforms that effectively support Golden dome.

Got it. Got it. Yes, just a quick follow-up. I mean, is there anything on the radar today that concerns you guys? I mean just is there any -- is there anything you're worried about?

I think we might have chatted about this previously, you and I Ron one-on-one. It's really just -- we've got to scale our technology, right? So if I look at our propulsion technology, in particular, our throttleable propulsion technology, we're moving from the design phase to low-rate production to high rate production.

And with any technology, making sure that you get that right is an important milestone for the company. And now that we passed CDR, we know the tech risk has been retired but scaling the ability to create more of those units over time, that's one thing that we're focused on.

With M&A, we've acquired 8 companies since our founding. As I said, we would anticipate doing additional M&A. You always have integration -- I wouldn't call them challenges but integration tasks that you need to get right as well. So that would be another focus area. And then just lastly, I know it sounds trite, but it's true, continuing to add talent to the platform. We've added talent here recently. I think you're aware of this, Ron, from both Anduril and Raytheon. Those have been terrific adds to the company.

We've got at least one additional C-suite brand name hire, if you will, from a company you would recognize that we'll announce here in the next couple of weeks probably. So -- but continuing to scale our team and our talent, that's another key focus area. So those would be the 3 areas I would offer up.

Your next question comes from the line of Sheila Kahyaoglu of Jefferies.

Maybe just to continue off that theme, Defense & National Security is set to grow faster, grew 85% in the quarter. Can you maybe parse out what -- how much NGI contributed? Any shift to that schedule? And then how we're thinking about Golden Dome applications? Would you be bidding with suppliers? Any expansion on that?

Yes, sure. I'm going to, Sheila, ask Phil to take the first part of that question, and then I'll chime in on the second.

Yes, Sheila. So yes, provide a couple of details there. One, first, maybe just remind everyone. So Next Generation Interceptor last year, our largest contributor to revenue, represented about $24 million of our total revenue last year. As we look out this year, we anticipate that revenue to accelerate, increase to about $50 million on a full year basis. This past quarter, $11 million from NGI. It was an increase quarter-on-quarter from the first quarter. As we look out over the second half, we anticipate NGI to continue to increase, posting well over 100% year-over-year growth.

So Next Generation Interceptor, obviously, a key driver to our quarterly performance here was not our only key program that delivered not just the revenue and the revenue growth in the quarter. We're excited about the balance and diversified portfolio that we do have. Obviously, Next Generation Interceptor is in this kind of pre-phase as we're kind of wrapping up the design phase and expect and anticipate from here on out as we move into production, revenue will continue to increase and it will continue to support our growth trajectory.

Yes. And maybe just to emphasize the second part of your question, Sheila, we're really a merchant supplier on a lot of these technologies. So we're independent, and we can sell to different prime contractors, which I think uniquely positions us for growth. The other thing is as it relates to new programs, there are other programs that we're spec'd in on. And now that we've passed CDR and the tech risk has been retired, it's a validation that a lot of these programs that take their technology queues from NGI are much more comfortable spec-ing in the technology now that it's passed CDR.

And then I mentioned in my response to Ron, the space-to-space interceptor which the administration is very focused on. They're talking about wanting to do a demonstration before this administration is over, which is obviously a very tight time line. Our technology, both on the propulsion side and optical navigation is relevant to that capability. And I think you asked the question, would we partner on that? Would we prime it?

We're working through that right now in terms of exactly how we want to address that. But the good news is our technology is highly relevant to that capability because both the propulsion technology and optical navigation really allow for that program to work. So that gives us a high degree of confidence that one way or another, we're going to be part of that solution.

Great. And if I could ask another one, maybe just an update on Starlab. You mentioned 25th milestone achieved to-date and cash received in the quarter. How that works towards CLD2? Any update around timing of that decision and what's being factored into the fiscal '26 budget proposal?

Yes. So in the latest bill that was passed by Congress, the funding for CLD is actually quite robust. And actually, in the outer years, there was an increase. As far as we know, the RFP is still due to come out before the end of the year with a selection sometime in 2026. That's the latest information we have. In terms of additional milestones for us, the next big one for us which we would anticipate sometime in 2025 is our CDR for Starlab, our critical design review. As a reminder, we've already passed PDR, preliminary design review. So that's our next kind of key technical milestone. And I believe on our project schedule, we have that for December approximately. So I would anticipate we'll pass that key milestone before the end of the year.

Your next question comes from the line of Seth Seifman of JPMorgan.

I wanted to ask about the signals intelligence and ISR business, including the work you're doing with Palantir. What we should be looking for there in terms of gauging that, that effort is on track and kind of what the next milestones to watch for are there?

Yes. Great question, Seth. Thanks for the question. And of course, Palantir blew their quarter out yesterday, so we were happy to see that. A couple of thoughts. So we're partnering with Palantir in a couple of ways. One, of course, is our, I'll call it, software stack in general. And as part of that, our ISR business is actually growing quite robustly. We're very excited about our capabilities there.

I mentioned earlier M&A pipeline. Seth, pleased to report that much of that M&A pipeline is focused on software and software-enabled hardware for things like signals intelligence. So I think there's a strong possibility that we'll have an acquisition in that category to report here, hopefully very soon that we're quite excited about. So that's one area.

Also with respect to Palantir, the other thing that we're doing with them, as you'll recall, is our edge computing initiative as well called [ Vista ]. And that's the one where we're partnering with NVIDIA and Palantir to create an edge computing device that we would get on the manifest with NASA and run a demonstration mission on the ISS. One of the big trends in our industry is rather than transmitting data from hardware and orbit back down to earth via K-band or some kind of ancient communication technology, putting it in a cloud, computing the answer and then sending that to the -- sending the actionable answer to the end user or end customer, the trend is why not just compute where the hardware is collecting the data and actually just transmit the answer. And of course, in situations where it's a contested environment, signals are being jammed, this is a really important capability. So that's a key initiative with Palantir. That's moving forward. And we're excited about that.

We don't yet have a date on when that would be on the manifest in terms of doing the demo mission. And then just the last thing I'll mention, this isn't related to Palantir, but I think it's relevant is we're doing a push into cloud computing. And you saw that very small acquisition we did LEOCloud. We didn't highlight it in our introductory remarks. But that also comes with a demonstration mission that we're getting very close to providing to the customer and will be flown in space. So that's another thing, Seth, that maybe on the next quarter's call, we'll have a good update for you on that, but that's another thing to monitor.

And then just final point, I just want to emphasize that Palantir is also a partner on Starlab and is providing not only the help with the compute for Starlab and how we think about that, but also supply chain optimization and other technologies and capabilities that they have that can enhance our entire program. So very much -- a really important partner for us.

Great. Great. And just maybe as a follow-up, based on your comments before about the critical design review for roll control on NGI and what that can mean to others. Does that bring us closer? And can we -- should we expect in the not-too-distant future that you'll be able to have some content on other existing missile defense interceptors?

Yes. I think we have a high degree of confidence that additional programs will spec our technology in, yes.

Your next question comes from the line of Kristine Liwag of Morgan Stanley.

Just following up on Seth's question on this on the opportunity for other programs. So when you look at your shipset content on NGI and you're able to expand your capabilities to other parts of the missile. Can you talk about how much shipset content you could potentially increase if you see your technology applied to a larger scale? Is this 50% higher content? And also as a follow-on to that, can you quantify the pipeline of business that you're pursuing today?

Sure. I'll let Phil address that.

Yes. So Kristine, so I mentioned earlier the $3.6 billion opportunity pipeline. Within that, I would highlight, one, Next Generation Interceptor represents about $1 billion from a production perspective. There's about another $1 billion of opportunities there. I won't articulate precisely which customer, but you can probably imagine which primes, if you would, are involved in missile defense. There's not too many. We are in active discussions with all on these incremental programs, not just the ones that, as Dylan alluded to earlier, we are already working on actively, but also pursuing in terms of potential future awards. That represents another $1 billion of opportunity. So it's quite significant for us out here in the forefront.

Timing of which -- and just to dovetail on the previous question is always a bit difficult. I appreciate Dylan's answer of yes. We're highly confident we're going to see additional awards in this opportunity space, timing of which is always a little more difficult to predict. But if not in the second half, certainly, we expect 2026 to be a rich year for Voyager.

Great. Very helpful. And look, a few weeks ago, you successfully conducted a static test of the hot running advanced solid propulsion subsystem for NGI. Can you give us some context regarding how important this technical milestone was? And how important was this in terms of unlocking your NGI revenues for the year and also giving you the opportunity to pursue the pipeline you just discussed?

Yes, it's really important. I mean there's elements of CDR. One element of CDR is sort of the theoretical design and making sure that, that checks the box, and that's really important for CDR. But then, of course, it's really important you do a hot fire test. So hot fire and CDR really linked, Kristine, is really the way to think about that.

But I think, again, it gives a high degree of confidence not only to other prime contractors that might spec in our technology, but probably even more importantly, the end customers, right? MDA is a key customer, but there are others as well that are working on these kinds of technologies. So I think that's -- yes, they're very much intertwined CDR and hot fire test.

I'd also just add, Kristine, from NGI and what does it mean in terms of unlocking incremental revenue, it's certainly -- well, one, first and foremost, our customer, Lockheed Martin, is working well with us to make sure that we're not only on time to the extent that we can, we can accelerate our progress in wrapping up design to support their ultimate design, CDR, et cetera.

The CDR passing here in the second quarter, it's not that it necessarily unlocks anything new, but we do anticipate that what it does is allow us to, as I mentioned earlier, continue to increase revenue sequentially in that program in the second half. So that provides us a lot of confidence as we look out to our second half guide.

Yes. And just one final point I'll make. OPC, I don't know if we stressed it when we were talking about that acquisition, Optical Physics, they're actually on NGI as well, and they were technically our prime on the optical navigation system. So in a way, we were on the optical navigation system. OPC was the prime. We essentially acquired the prime for the optical navigation subsystem. So to your point, we're aggregating more of the value and technology stack.

They also bring additional capability in optical navigation, specifically with their Star Trackers, as I mentioned in my remarks. And they have very, very high-end optical systems that we did not have within our product suite. And the way we think about that is it's not only NGI but that's a product that we can further commercialize and sell into commercial markets as well. So we're excited about that.

Your next question comes from the line of David Strauss of Barclays.

So to put a finer point on all the NGI questions, I think as part of the -- your road show, you talked about $40 million in NGI revenue this year and now it sounds like it's tracking to $50 million. Is that correct?

That's right, David. $50 million this year. As I mentioned just a little while ago, customers actively working with us to ensure that not only that we can achieve on our time line, which we've been doing all along the way, we've actually been a bright spot here, I think, for Lockheed, but also try to move as fast as we can, so we can ultimately get to that production phase, which we anticipate would be in 2026.

Yes. And Phil on that, I mean, I think you had shown kind of a leveling off in NGI in '26 and then a ramp up to like $80 million in annual revenue. Is that still a trajectory -- still the trajectory, but I guess just kind of off a higher base than you expected in '25?

Correct. Yes, nothing changes in terms of that anticipation. We do have -- as we wrap up design, and we're wrapping it up here in the second half of this year and early next year, then there will be a bit more of a lull, if you were to flattening before an acceleration as we move from then design into low rate production and high rate production when you think about 2027 and beyond. So you've got it nailed, David.

Okay. And a quick follow-up on Starlab and I guess, free cash flow for this year. How should we think about free cash flow for this year, what you're expecting potentially in additional NASA money or outside capital contributions on Starlab?

Maybe I'll take the first part here, highlight. And of course, Starlab is a bit more of the wildcard in terms of how capital expenditures are made and whatnot. I do expect there to be an increase in CapEx associated with Starlab as we move through the second half of the year. That's because we're achieving on all marks. You saw the milestones already we highlighted this quarter, 4 achieved milestones, $22.5 million of milestone cash receipts. That's on top of the one significant milestone we achieved in the first quarter and $20 million of receipts.

Second half of this year, we anticipate about another $30 million of milestone receipts and the balance of our fully funded $218 million NASA Space Act Agreement to come in during the first quarter of next year.

From -- I would say, I don't want to call it the core business because obviously, Starlab is quite core to our thesis. But within Defense & National Security and our corporate operations, anticipate pretty consistent free cash flow performance first half, second half. You saw what we did from a second quarter free cash flow perspective overall, $27 million of a net outflow. Do anticipate because of the Starlab capital expenditures in the fourth quarter that we will see a tick up in cash flow. As it relates to the core business, we're pretty much steady state at this point.

Your next question comes from the line of Myles Walton of Wolfe Research.

There was quite a bit of movement in the NASA budget from a White House proposal that showed a $6 billion cut to a reconciliation bill that added $10 billion to it and obviously going through the congressional process for the full appropriations bill. But Dylan, can you comment on what you're seeing in the budget, where the pluses and minuses are? And then maybe with the Space Solutions business ex the Space stock's contract, what that outlook for acceleration looks like?

Yes. Great question, Myles. Yes, so the key things that we're monitoring are the programs we're on, which is the existing ISS mission management business and then, of course, CLD. And as I mentioned earlier, the CLD funding is actually quite robust. It actually increased in the outer years compared to what was previously submitted. So that funding appears to be intact and quite solid. So no concerns there.

ISS mission management revenue, it's really difficult to know because as you saw, there were some cuts in the science budget as well, and some of those missions are science related. What I would say is there's always a bottleneck for getting things on the manifest with NASA. So if science missions were to decrease, I think commercial missions would increase. So I don't anticipate any impacts to our -- substantial impacts to our business from that change or that, call it, mix in -- change in product mix.

The real ones that have been flagged as vulnerable, which is primarily SLS would be the biggest one. And to a lesser extent, Gateway, although Gateway appears to be back front and center in the latest budget. We really don't have any exposure at all on SLS. And on Gateway, we do have some revenue in our backlog on Gateway. But as I said, it appears that Gateway has been fully restored in the latest budget. So we're not concerned there.

So I think in general, business as usual is what I would say. But the other thing that I would just point out, Myles, is the more disruption in sort of how NASA is procuring services, the more commercial NASA is thinking about things that actually plays to our strengths because our platform, as you know, is very highly maneuverable.

We're very entrepreneurial. It's easy for us to pivot. It's easy for us to bid on new opportunities. It's more difficult for the larger companies, traditional aerospace primes to do that. So in some respects, the fact that there's a lot of changes happening at NASA actually plays to our strengths, I would say.

And Myles, just to maybe tack on just from a financial planning perspective, anticipate, obviously, the low-margin NASA services wind-down impact to continue here through the second half of the year. In fact, the second half impact will be greater than it was in the first half. Overall, we anticipate Space stock too, which is that contract, to be down $18 million year-over-year with about $12 million of that year-over-year decline in the second half. We'll continue to face some headwinds there through the first quarter of next year. And then from that point forward, I anticipate Space Solutions to see greener pastures if you return to growth rates but still a bit too early to predict 2026 from a guidance perspective.

Okay. And then just one follow-up on the growth within Defense & National Security, you cited NGI clearly, but there was an undisclosed contract I imagine it's classified, but any color you can provide as it relates to that contract, either scope, scale, duration, size, anything?

Sure. A little that I can disclose and in part that's because I don't actually have my own clearance. But think of it as actually being our largest contract within -- or revenue driver within the quarter, about $14 million. It is to another prime. It is obviously a contract we can't discuss. We did see a significant acceleration sequentially in revenue associated with that contract.

Don't anticipate as much revenue contribution from it over the course of the second half, but we're working closely with the customer, and we see additional opportunity to potentially enhance that as we go forward. We'll provide more updates, obviously, to the extent that we can as we move along.

Your next question comes from the line of Michael Leshock of KeyBanc Capital Markets.

I wanted to ask on defense spending, specifically internationally with the target for some European NATO allies to increase defense spending to 5% GDP over time. I know international is a smaller piece for Voyager today, but do you see any opportunities internationally should budgets increase?

Yes. No, for sure. It's a great question. Thanks for bringing it up, Mike. Yes. So just a reminder, Airbus is a key partner for us on Starlab. And Airbus, of course, is the largest A&D prime in Europe and is likely to capture a lot of this increase in defense spending in Europe. We've got a very good relationship with Airbus. We have a contract with them right now delivering software-defined radios for Airbus U.K. So we're already doing business with them in Europe. That's the lion's share of our European revenue to date.

I think Airbus sees us as an innovation partner for them and someone who can help them because if you look at their challenges, they've been asked to take on this additional defense spending and then create capabilities around that. And of course, there is a supply chain in Europe, but maybe not -- to be fair, maybe not as much innovation in Europe happening as here in the U.S. So I think we're very well positioned with Airbus or other partners like [ Tazzi ] in Italy and others to be an innovation partner for them.

So it is a key part of our long-term strategy is to increase our global capability and revenue. Part of the challenge there is export control, as you're aware. And so thinking through what technologies we're allowed to export into those geographies, I think, is an important consideration. But we're very bullish on the increase in defense spending in Europe, and I think we're going to be able to create a lot of growth vectors around that given our relationships in that region.

And then maybe a follow-up on Starlab. If we look at the ISS today, it's a global collaboration, and that's certainly a strength for Starlab and your JV partners. But I'm wondering, are there other countries that maybe currently are represented on the ISS today, whether they built a module or operate it in some way that might not necessarily move operations directly from ISS to Starlab and maybe they're seeking alternatives versus whoever wins the CLD award. And if that is the case, is that something that's reflected in your long-term assumptions?

Yes. So if you look at the partners, I mean, let's take Russia out for the time being. You've got the European Union, you have Canada and you have Japan. And of course, our JV partners reflect those different geographies as well. I don't anticipate any of those partners to have their own space station solution. I think that might have been part of your question. So I don't anticipate that. I think they'll be part of larger programs. And I think they see Starlab as the most international of the different CLD Phase 1 competitors. So I think we're well positioned there.

In all cases, I think our vision for LEO is multiple space stations, right? We see capacity and demand for multiple space stations over the future. I think what is more likely to happen versus geographical specialization, if you will, is probably more functional specialization, things like science dedicated space stations, manufacturing dedicated space stations, biopharma dedicated space stations, things like that. I think that's more likely the differentiation and subset of space stations in the future. But Starlab is very well positioned, as you mentioned, to capture a lot of that international spend. And I think that's the beauty of the JV we've created. So we're feeling like we're very well positioned there.

There are no further questions at this time. With that, I will turn the call back over to Dylan Taylor, Chief Executive Officer, for closing remarks. Please go ahead.

Yes. Thank you very much, operator. So just to reiterate, we've entered the next chapter with strong momentum, clear alignment to long-term industry priorities and a differentiated platform built for high growth. We're executing across key programs, expanding through innovation and are positioned to capitalize on the tailwinds shaping the future.

We're very proud of the foundation we've built and confident in our ability to deliver long-term value for our shareholders. I want to thank you all for joining and we look forward to speaking to you on the next earnings call, next quarter. Thanks so much.

Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today's conference call. We thank you for participating and ask that you please disconnect.