The Fastest Path to the Future: Redefine Test.
Test is the engine of progress—don't let it idle.
Every breakthrough—a new spacecraft, a hypersonic vehicle, a fusion reactor—relies on one thing: proving it works in the real world.
Today, test is the bottleneck between what we build and what we achieve.
Innovative hardware is critical to our prosperity and national security, but hardware Engineers are underserved. Their tools haven’t kept up. Their feedback loops are slow. Their infrastructure wasn’t built for the scale and speed they need.
At Nominal, we have a mantra:
To make this a reality, we need to redefine test from the ground up. Let’s break it down.
Equip Engineers
Software development left mechanical, electrical, and aerospace Engineers behind. Software developers got DevOps: instant feedback, seamless deployment, continuous integration. Test Engineers got spreadsheet exports, file cabinets of logs, and tools that were built for the cold war.
Engineers push the boundaries of what’s possible, but they’re being asked to do more, with less, and faster than ever—while still using the wrong tools.:
Missing test windows waiting for post-processed data from previous tests
Losing insights from asynchronous radio calls, manual logs, and outdated scripting tools
Breaking brittle data pipelines with terabytes of high-frequency, mission critical data.
Every delay costs an experiment. Every inefficiency drags progress.
Engineers need better infrastructure. They need automation. They need test systems that move as fast as they do.
To Deploy Capability
Capability is the outcome that drives prosperity, security, and progress—aircraft moving goods, satellites tracking wildfires, reactors producing power. But capability requires more than design. Every machine must be reliable, repeatable, and resilient.
Satellites, aircrafts, and reactors don’t just exist in CAD models and simulations. They have to withstand extreme heating, violent forces, pressure fluctuations, over and over without failure. The perfect CFD model doesn’t predict the flutter that appears at Mach 2. The solid-looking thermal margins vanish when the hardware gets bolted together. The physics is there in the data, but it’s always messy, never simple.
Deploying capability is about closing the gap between theory and reality.
At Scale
Scaling isn’t just about building more machines—it is proving thousands of machines can operate, interact, and adapt in unpredictable conditions.
A fighter + drone fleet isn’t 200 individual aircraft. It is a distributed system of pilots, maintainers, and logistics that needs to coordinate in real time.
A hypersonic test range can’t rely on hand-configured ground stations. It needs automated infrastructure that scales across every altitude and Mach regime.
A satellite constellation can’t be updated one spacecraft at a time. It needs continuous test and simulation infrastructure that scales across launch, deployment, and in-orbit operations.
Modern CONOPS (”Concept of Operations”) should optimize for operator:machine ratio first.
One operator should oversee hundreds of testbeds. One control center should command a swarm of autonomous systems. One soldier should be able to validate entire fleets.
The systems we build today aren’t static. They are evolving, networked, and constantly tested in the field.
In the Shortest Time Possible
For the last decade, we optimized production—automated factories, additive manufacturing, and AI-driven design have accelerated building.
Our systems aren’t waiting on better designs or manufacturing. They’re waiting on validation.
Autonomous aircraft can be built in months, but take years to certify.
Spacecraft designs can be iterated with AI, but stall on a 9 month waiting list for access to test infrastructure.
A fusion reactor that fires one shot per week will take a decade to reach ignition. A reactor that fires ten shots per day could do it in a year.
We’ve treated test like a necessary delay. The final step before operations. A process to check boxes and meet regulations.
But this decade, test is progress.
The future moves at the speed of test.
From “Test Like You Fly” to “Test Continuously”
Hardware development and operations have been built as separate worlds, each with their own tools, infrastructure, and workflows. That separation slows down progress.
Today, every machine is a test stand. And should be treated as such.
The Falcon 9 booster landing on a drone ship is just another run in an evolving dataset.
The Waymo on Main St. is a rolling test lab streaming live data on torque, battery health, and software performance.
A fusion reactor shot at noon produces terabytes of data to inform the next ignition attempt at 12:15—and the Monte Carlo runs at 12:05, 12:10, and 12:12.
The moment a system is deployed, it’s still generating data, still validating assumptions. The test phase never ends. Which means testing infrastructure can’t be an afterthought.
The old mantra was “Test like you fly.” That’s obsolete. Test as you fly. Test in sim, the lab, and the field. Nominal is heralding the new rule: Test continuously.
To achieve continuous test, we need to break down the barriers between development and operations. We need continuous validation.
We need a modern test stack.