Will Drewery is a manufacturing and supply chain executive with experience spanning across automotive, construction, and industrial automation robotics industries. As Astra’s VP of Supply Chain, Will is responsible for identifying, sourcing, and distributing the materials and services necessary to operate the business.
Prior to Astra, Will led Tesla’s capital expansion supply chain team, where he managed expansion programs for Tesla’s global manufacturing operations. Will subsequently served as the VP of Manufacturing at Social Construct, a prefab construction tech startup.
Will previously served on the board of Old Skool Café, a nonprofit youth-run restaurant and supper club that employs at-risk youth as an intensive real world vocational program.
Why are you excited about running Supply Chain at Astra?
As the first true high production volume rocket manufacturer, Astra will be able to take advantage of supply chain volume and robotic automation levers that are currently out of reach for most other manufacturers.
Astra has strategically chosen repeatability for this reason. Astra’s plan to produce and launch daily rockets means that we’ll need to manufacture 300+ rockets per year. While this may seem like a lofty target, it’s actually comfortably within the bounds of reality, given the automated production capabilities currently available to most manufacturers.
Why is automation an important element of this?
The keys to unlocking automation are simplicity and repeatability. Automation works best when applied to products that are reliably predictable. Astra’s rocket vehicle is beautifully simple, consisting of standard parts with reasonably tight tolerances and employing the use of commonly understood manufacturing processes. This will enable us to automate assembly of the rocket vehicle, especially now that we have Pablo on board.
What are you doing differently about supply sources?
Astra is currently identifying next-generation suppliers. Long lead times stifle innovation by limiting the original equipment manufacturers’ ability to release new products quickly. By applying strategies from the automotive and consumer electronics playbooks, we’ll be able to significantly increase the pace of innovation.
How will your customers benefit from Astra’s logistics capabilities?
Our eventual goal to be able to launch into any orbit will prove to be a very valuable capability to our customers. As we build out our logistics capabilities, we are working on innovative ways to pack, sequence, and deliver our rockets to various launch locations. This focus on optimizing our launcher for ease of setup will be critical as we approach our goal of providing daily space deliveries.
Interested in learning more? Will is hiring.