Karl Muth, JD, MBA, MPhil, PhD. Council Member, Council on Global Competition and Innovation – CGCI
In the famous scene in The Graduate, Dustin Hoffman’s character is given sound investment advice: to care about plastics. Indeed, innovators in plastics, composite materials, composite resin-set fabrics, and eventually exotic plastic-like materials like CFRP (carbon fiber reinforced plastic, the reason the bumpers of newer Teslas are so expensive to replace) made a fortune over the past fifty years and today we can make strong, resilient, rust-free, paintable structures in shapes that could only be imagined in the late sixties.¹
A similar investment opportunity exists today in the area of ceramics, and a mixture of public and private capital is needed to fully exploit the opportunities available. This aligns closely with the principles of GCI investing, as advanced materials like ceramics represent a critical sector where Global Competition and Innovation (GCI) investments can drive both economic growth and national security. The Council on Global Competition and Innovation – CGCI champions such market-led investment approaches to ensure that private capital supports technologies vital for U.S. and allied strategic interests. Undoubtedly, security and defense broadly (including aerospace, space/orbital, and terrestrial weapons tech) will be both a focus of investment and a center of excellence in this next generation.
Ceramics were invented over 27,000 years ago to make figurines and idols. Seven millennia later, artisans in China began fashioning from ceramics the use case most people associate with the material, vases and vessels. “Ceramics” today is a general term that describes not only earthenware or pottery but also oxides, carbides, nitrides, and even some materials that are liquids at room temperature (like certain exotic glasses, called silicates). Importantly, all industrial ceramics today are made from inorganic and nonmetallic primary ingredients.
The history of modern ceramics in the U.S. is a choreography of government funding (including defense funding), private investment, and increasingly-exotic use cases.
The key year for the first generation of this epoch of material science was 1981, with the highest-performance manmade items benefiting from ceramics. In 1981 the first Formula 1 car made from carbon fiber, the McLaren MP4/1, stunned the world, winning the British Grand Prix; in that same year, the first space shuttle (Columbia) launch occurred, lasting two days, followed by a dramatic re-entry to land at Edwards Air Force Base with its ceramic tile belly glowing red hot from the enormous thermal stresses of atmospheric re-entry.
These events, watched worldwide on live television, made clear that these new materials were not just strange laboratory creations, but had real-world, practical uses that could not be ignored by high-performance organizations, whether they were trying to win the Formula One championship, build high-performance aircraft, or accomplish other goals impossible to reach with more traditional materials. That same year, the U.S. and U.K. militaries created research efforts around ceramics, which matured quickly (by the mid-1980s) into the ceramic matrix armor used on the dominant main battle tank in today’s world, the M1A1.²ˏ³
While the ceramics people are familiar with in their kitchens are very different from these exotic materials, it is worth exploring the biggest difference, which is resilience to both thermal change and vibration/shock. People are familiar with Corningware plates and Pyrex vessels, both of which are high-performance silicates with high resistance to thermal change and moderate resilience to vibration. To be clear, a Corningware plate might survive being dropped into the kitchen sink or being heated in the oven straight from the refrigerator, but these are the limits of its versatility; it would not survive atmospheric re-entry, for instance.
Most key use cases for these resilient materials involve some degree of both physical/vibrational endurance and heat-cycle/thermal resilience, the key characteristics of the space shuttle’s thermal protection system (TPS tile, or sometimes referred to colloquially simply as “shuttle tile”). Hypersonic weapons systems, for instance, quickly accelerate room temperature missiles (or, in the case of submarine-launched weapons, often very cold fuselages) into a brutal environment of heat, vibration, and high-g-force maneuvers; only with the most advanced ceramics protecting its computers and guidance systems can these weapons hope to reach their targets. On the terrestrial battlefield, the once-familiar “streak sled” sound of rockets leaving their steel racks has all but vanished, as launchers increasingly have DLC ceramic-coated rails to launch from.
From protecting the fragile onboard electronics of hypersonic missiles to providing thermal isolation for small format nuclear reactors to dealing with the incredible thermal demands of today’s highest-performance computers, the contemporary challenges not met by any readily-available, traditional material are too many to count, despite a catalogue of materials available to engineering teams that exceeds by 5000% the size of a similar 1950s catalogue. Today, one can purchase a four-door family sedan with ceramic brake rotors that represent high-temperature, high-durability ceramics four generations more advanced than TPS tile.
While the Space Shuttle is unlikely to ever fly again, and likely to be replaced by private sector vehicles (piloted, remote-piloted, and uncrewed), the almost-unimaginably harsh conditions facing any vehicle transiting in and out of Earth’s atmosphere (and, eventually, Mars’s atmosphere or the peripheral spaces surrounding other planet-sized bodies) have not changed. Each generation of improvement in these materials means fewer tiles replaced between flights and faster turnaround time, which means more payloads reaching their destinations and lower total cost of operation for the spacecraft operator.⁴
Larger firms in this space, including Saint-Gobain (focused on silicates), SINTX (focused on silicon-carbides), and CeramTec (focused on matrix carbides), are leading a new era of materials science exploration, often with the U.S. government as a research partner, customer, or both. Startups focused in areas traditional firms have been slower to explore, like ceramic additive manufacturing and exotic multipart epoxies, may enjoy an advantage and may become attractive acquisition targets. High-performance firms not in the ceramic business may stumble upon innovations that are important and potentially-lucrative.⁵
It is neither surprising nor coincidental that all key firms in the ceramics materials research space have some link to defense. In the waning days of the Hawker defense program in the UK, Hawker turned to automotive firms McLaren and Aston Martin for help in the materials science area. Valmet, which produced the mid-engined Cayman GT4 sports car for Porsche (which utilized both carbon fiber and ceramic structures), is now involved in fitting ceramic armor to diplomatic and military vehicles, producing vehicles more similar to its rival Jankel’s ballistically-resistant trucks than Porsche’s sports cars.
Even luxury brands that have done research in this area are exploring how their materials and know-how might be applicable to defense. Very-low-friction ceramic coatings developed by Seiko and Rolex (which save tiny amounts of energy in watchmaking) are being explored as options for ensuring smooth movement of key components in defense systems without the risk of static electricity and sparks carried by other materials. The newest generations of coatings like Cerakote (from NIC Industries) and Rolex’s Cerachrom are already finding their way into defense applications, with NIC landing multiple contracts in recent years to protect DoD assets with its tough and low-friction ceramic coatings and Rolex experimenting with various partners to find new uses for its research into exotic ceramics and alloys.
Much as Corning revolutionized the Cold War kitchen with Corningware and Pyrex, advanced ceramic materials will transform spaces where many believed the performance envelope had been reached; to invest in that future, or the materials from which it will be built and with which it will be coated, to paraphrase The Graduate, “Just one word. Ceramics.”
Disclosure: Muth is an investor in Canopy Aerospace, which develops and commercializes ceramic materials that are highly resilient to many of the challenges and stresses discussed here; Muth is also an investor in an ETF that invests in firms producing and/or utilizing exotic materials, including ceramics.
¹ The Graduate (Embassy Pictures 1967) (“I just want to say one word to you. Just one word. Plastics.” McGuire to Braddock).
² Most of this research was undertaken at the Military Vehicles and Engineering Establishment in Chobham.
³ Ukraine supplements the M1A1’s already stout armor loadout with Kontakt-1, Soviet-origin reactive armor.
⁴ NASA has stated STS-135, which concluded 21 Jul. 2011, was the vehicle’s final planned mission.
⁵ An example is auto company McLaren, which is famously secretive about its manufacturing processes, recently inventing an aerospace-grade tape made from carbon fiber preimpregnated with a ceramic epoxy. See Jason Marker, McLaren Adapts Space Age Carbon Fiber Tape Process To Car Production, Jalopnik (10 Mar. 2025), available at: https://www.jalopnik.com/1807622/mclaren-carbon-fiber-tape/.
