I’ll hand over to Ian to talk a little bit more about KARGO and sort of the trajectory that we see there, but that’s sort of the accounting of it.
Ian Walsh: Yes, exactly. So we obviously have a very important program with KARGO underway. As we said from the beginning, our investment strategy is milestone-based. We just talked about the contract we’ve got with U.S. Army, we are partners with New Earth Autonomy, which is very exciting. We’ve also talked about first flight. I know people are interested in that. We were months away, obviously, as the program ramped up, or weeks away, and now we’re days away, which is very exciting. But I think from an R&D perspective, we’re being very, very thoughtful, very mindful around not only the investment necessary to get KARGO to market and hit certain milestones in our competitive fly-offs and things for next year. And also, obviously, what’s going on underneath with the rest of the fuzing program.
But really, it’s a balance with Engineered Products. Our Engineered Products segment also has a very healthy R&D budget. All those businesses that sit in that segment have a very robust pipeline of innovations and things we’re attacking from a share perspective or a customer perspective. So really balancing best we can with KARGO and Engineered Products.
Jacob Moore: Okay. Got it. That’s helpful. While we’re on the KARGO or maybe the MULS-A program, can you just remind us the timeline milestones within the MULS-A program that you’re planning to hit? And then maybe a follow-up to that, is this Army demonstration basically just a larger scale model of the current design?
Ian Walsh: Okay. So two things. One is from a milestone perspective. Yes, we are tracking towards with the U.S. Marine Corps on MULS-A, which is a fly-off. No set time yet for next year, but we anticipate it being in the later half of next year. So we’re tracking the schedule there. And then from there, as I’ve expressed before, typically, what happens is the winner, it could be one or it could be others. We then get follow-on contracts to build multiple variants to be field-tested. And that’s the next step. That would be over a year, 1.5 years or so. You collect all that data, use these prototypes in different environments, get that customer feedback and then you go to kind of a low-rate production environment, which would be in a ’25, ’26 timeframe, typically.
Army, a little bit same but different. So the demonstration that we’ve been invited to, which, by the way, is invite-only. You have to submit some proposals. It’s not just an open-ended competition or demonstration. So you have to be invited. The same MULS-A that we have, as I mentioned, the capability there, hits the requirements what the Army is looking for a medium lift platform, autonomous platform. So this is ARMY Futures Command. This is a demonstration that they’ve been hosting to really look at technology because they have the same problem the Marine Corps has, which is how do you move things around in extended battlefield. So extend logistics, contested logistics, things like that. So what we don’t know yet is after the Army milestone, where they go from there.
It’s a little bit different process. But I can tell you that the Army’s demand for unmanned KARGO capability is probably the largest in the services just by nature of what they do. So that’s kind of our path and milestone with those two programs on the service side.
Operator: [Operator Instructions] I am showing no further questions at this time. I would now like to turn the conference back over to Matthew Petterson for closing remarks.
Matthew Petterson: Thank you for joining us on today’s conference call. We look forward to speaking with you again as we report our fourth quarter results.
Operator: This concludes today’s conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.
