Manufacturing Cool Stuff

The Washington Post's Thomas Heath tours Prototype Productions, Inc. in Northern Virginia:

Until recently, the company was a boutique manufacturer. Other companies and universities and the government would come to PPI with plans and schematics and say, “Can you build this?”
For that, PPI earns a fee. Sometimes, it takes equity in return for its manufacturing. It owns pieces of eight other companies.
PPI is one of the most offbeat companies I have written about.
Co-owners Joe and Italo Travez, brothers born in Ecuador, have built PPI over two decades into a think tank for engineers.
Their business plan for the past two decades has been “have a really cool place with really cool people.”
It’s cool, all right.
I felt like I was walking into a Brookstone store when I took a tour of PPI’s 30,000-foot Ashburn headquarters recently. The company has another 20,000-square-foot manufacturing facility in Rockville.
One wing had tables strewn with a super-engineered Patriot missile rocket nozzle housings, thumbprint readers and a model for something called a Zipnut for the International Space Station. A white board had phrases such as “Hubble telescope” and “driver vision enhancement” scrawled on it. A nearby wall had photos of the solar-powered car one of PPI’s engineers drove across sunny Australia. There was a deconstructed rifle in its various parts.