When Your Mom is an Astronaut

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What if the single most critical piece of American infrastructure is something you've never heard of, and the people who know how to build it are nearly gone?

When a $50 drone can take out the power grid and it takes seven years to replace the transformer that keeps the lights on, one founder is betting $500 million that AI and old-school manufacturing can save the day.

In Season 1, Episode 6 of America's Angels, co-hosts Jenny Kaehms and Andrea Kalmans sit down with Bridget Youngs, CEO and founder of Terminus Industrials, and yes, her mom was an astronaut. Bridget shares her extraordinary journey from growing up at Johnson Space Center, to investment banking at Evercore, to utility-scale power investing, to serving as chief of staff at USAID during the DOGE project. Then came the lightning-bolt moment: the realization that America has lost the ability to manufacture high-voltage transformers domestically, leaving the grid dangerously dependent on foreign suppliers with 3-to-7-year wait times and documented security threats.

Bridget breaks down how Terminus is reshoring transformer production to Central Texas using AI-driven design, standardized manufacturing, and a vertically integrated facility that compresses production timelines from months to days. She dives into the national security implications, the supply chain crisis, her Tesla-veteran head of manufacturing, her software-focused co-founder building "Foundation OS," and why she believes private industry, not government, holds the future of the country.

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