Calibre interview: Chad Steelberg, CEO of Tiberius Aerospace

Tiberius Aerospace is on a mission to change the artillery space through the development of Sceptre, a ramjet-powered projectile through  rapid iterative testing. CEO Chad Steelberg is spearheading this transformation and simultaneously implementing “Grail,” a collaborative manufacturing alliance that mirrors software-style innovation to bypass traditional defence production bottlenecks.

By Sam Cranny-Evans, published on February 12, 2026.

Once a month in a desert in America, a team of engineers gather around an M777. Two of them take a large cylindrical object called Sceptre out of a box and carefully fill it with JP-8 fuel before loading it into the waiting breech of the M777. The breech block closes and the engineers move away from the gun. A short count-down later, and the gun barks a short muffled report. The reduced charge needed to get Sceptre up to speed and out of the muzzle has done its job. The projectile accelerates, quickly reaching Mach 2 when its ramjet ignites and propels it to Mach 3.5 along the rest of its trajectory. This is a limited test, not intended to fully stretch Sceptre’s abilities. The range isn’t big enough. The team is from Tiberius Aerospace, and they have been meeting at this range once a month to test fire Sceptre. 

“We’re taking the Elon approach, he was crashing a rocket every 30 days. The faster you can fail, the faster you can learn and innovate,” Chad Steelberg, the CEO and founder of Tiberius Aerospace told me during a short interview at DSEI 2025. “Hardware can’t move at the pace of software; if it took two years to adjust a weapon, we would be toast. But our test cycle can occur continuously,” he continued. Chad explained that they have been testing Sceptre with launches every month. “The range we are using is used to seeing the same company only twice a year,” he laughed. 

Referring back to the rapid innovation, he told me that, “our engineers are working on the next iteration with 4000 GPUs on the drive back from the test range. Then we go back to the manufacturing network, get the parts made, and go back out and shoot. We would like to get that down to two weeks,” he said, adding that, “We already have great obturating band and thruster performance, which is being tested at sites around the US.” An obturating band is typically a band of soft metal that sits around the outside of an artillery or tank shell. When the round is fired, the soft metal digs into the rifling of the barrel creating a very tight seal. Success in this regard is key to Sceptre; without it, it would be difficult to get the shell up to Mach 2 so that the ramjet could ignite.  

Much of this testing is internally funded, reflecting Chad’s faith in the product and approach. He provided the initial backing and startup capital, but they recently closed $4.5 million in “strategic capital,” and have secured a contract with the British MoD to develop and test-fire Sceptre.  

So it appears that things are going well for the young company, which only made its presence and products public in May this year. But those successes have not come without friction. “Governments don’t provide much support and the primes have secured the ranges forever so you can’t get in there,” Chad explained. Nevertheless, Tiberius has secured a gun, a range and found ways to test everything involved in Sceptre. Chad smiled again and referred to Of Course I Still Love You, the drone ship used by Space X to land rocket boosters. “They wouldn’t let Elon use the space ports, so he built his own at sea. We’re having to find our own routes in the same way,” Chad said. 

Grail, Tiberius Aerospace’s plan to revolutionise defence production

The network that Chad referred to is the 22 companies involved in the production of Sceptre. Conventional artillery ammunition is often manufactured by a small handful of companies; one for the shell, one the explosives, a fuze manufacturer, and propellant manufacturer. Sceptre is designed to be produced in parts from readily available machine tools, enabling civilian enterprises to convert their production to defence uses with ease. This allows a network of manufacturers to produce the system and its components. To streamline this process, Tiberius Aerospace has announced Grail. In essence, Grail is designed to bring a collection of companies together to design components for a complete system. “It is a collaborative cooperative of hundreds of SMEs, spirally developing their own components against a collective blueprint of a new system,” Blythe Crawford, the new director of Grail explained to Calibre Defence via email back in September.

“We have over 100 manufacturers now, and we’re stress testing the manufacturability of this system. How do those build differences vary into the way the round fires. So, we are looking at the ecosystem of mass production at the same time as product development,” Chad explained. The Grail Alliance as the company calls it, is also designed to support innovation. “All of the vendors are qualified and certified, and they can submit their bid and the prime [Tiberius in this case] can pick the best fit. If a vendor has a better design, then that will become the new design standard for the weapon.” This enables companies to innovate to develop new products and solutions and pitch them. It effectively creates a survival of the fittest scenario, where the products that are best able to meet the needs of the manufacturer are selected over those that do not.  

“We know that as Sceptre evolves, there will be more advanced electronics requiring more power. So, through Grail we would open up that component, and make clear what the addressable market is. If three batteries came in and all met performance, we would certify all of them. Ensuring there is a secure supply chain and the prime can’t block them from selling.” Chad referred to the example of the CEO of Intel, who realised that keeping innovation close would stop it from happening. Opening up development of a product, such as artificial intelligence, enables many different companies and individuals to work on the problem, producing new solutions quicker. “Already there are companies innovating on Sceptre, with companies offering new battery chemistries at a fraction of the cost,” he added. 

This approach upends much of traditional defence manufacturing where a company will tend to identify suppliers and use them repeatedly. On the one hand, this can create some supply chain security, but on the other it can lead to instability. If, for example, a government places a large order in one year, and then no further orders are received for a decade, it is likely those suppliers will find other sources of income. The supply chain could be lost as a result. Chad believes that defence systems should be opened up, “if you create closed proprietary systems, the innovation gets truncated. If you can’t innovate you lose,” he told me, as he hurried away to yet another meeting.  

Calibre comment: How is defence production changing?

There is a widely acknowledged need for European states to increase their ability to produce weapons and platforms. Several hopes have emerged from this, the most prominent of which is probably the drive for autonomous “attritable” systems. It is likely that many of those systems will be too expensive to be attritable in the true sense of the word. Instead, they will be assets that can be lost, but the armed forces would probably prefer not to. The other is production methodologies. Tiberius is demonstrating a new route to producing smart ammunition through Grail, which certainly does have its appeal. The UK MoD contract indicates some government level interest and the company’s openness with it could help build that momentum.  

Others in the space are also looking at their supply chains. Helsing and Anduril are building their own factories that they state use commercially available parts to reduce production timelines. However, Grail provides a platform to manage that type of supply chain, baking innovation into production and giving all companies an equal opportunity to shape a product’s performance. This approach is unusually open for a defence company, and could provide new opportunities for domestic production capabilities when combined with the subscription model for Sceptre. 

Credit for the lead image is Tiberius Aerospace, it shows CEO Chad Steelberg.