The next generation of manufacturing is not in Aerospace

Over the past few years, the U.S. has poured enormous funding into “re-industrialization,” much of which has gone toward aerospace and defense manufacturing startups. But in many ways, aerospace manufacturing is exactly what distorted, and ultimately weakened, the broader U.S. manufacturing ecosystem. Look at the typical mom-and-pop machine shops in California. Most of them chase low-volume, ultra-precise CNC work. People celebrate getting a contract with Boeing to make one or two parts, instead of celebrating a contract with an early-stage hardware startup trying to build hundreds or thousands of units. Aerospace work pays extremely well, often tens of thousands of dollars per part, and because a shop can earn more by producing fewer pieces, many shifted away from the traditional model of high-volume production with tight margins. That shift makes sense economically, but it’s a disaster for the hardware sector. Manufacturing at its core is about volume: producing large quantities of parts consistently, cheaply, and quickly. But shops optimized for aerospace simply don’t want to take on low-margin, high-volume parts for startups. As a result, young hardware companies end up spending months searching for a production partner who can actually scale with them. If we are building the next generation of manufacturing in the U.S. It can not be build on the aerospace model. It has to be built on volume, speed, and accessibility, the very things that made Shenzhen the global hardware capital.