Western states, water utilities and ski resorts are now spending millions of dollars a year on cloud seeding, and the one company in that boom flying drones instead of airplanes is Rainmaker Technology of El Segundo, California. The New York Times reported Monday that Utah alone is putting nearly $16 million into cloud seeding and Idaho $5 million, with more in Colorado, Wyoming, California and Texas.

Rainmaker says its custom Elijah quadcopters produced 143 million gallons (541 million liters) of freshwater over Oregon and Utah this past winter. The same practice is a third-degree felony in Florida and banned in Tennessee, and the company’s petition to carry cloud seeding flares on those drones, filed with the FAA in July 2025, has no published grant or denial that DroneXL could locate 13 months later.

DroneXL first covered that petition in September 2025, in “Drones face FAA safety pushback as pilots union opposes Rainmaker’s cloud-seeding plan,” when the airline pilots union asked the FAA to reject it. The drone side of the cloud seeding story has moved a long way since then, mostly in state capitals.

Rainmaker Flies 50-Pound Quadcopters to 15,000 Feet to Seed Winter Clouds

Rainmaker’s Elijah is a quadcopter with a maximum takeoff weight of 50 pounds (22.7 kilograms) and a ceiling of 15,000 feet (4,572 meters). It carries silver iodide into supercooled clouds over mountain basins, where the particles trigger ice formation and, Rainmaker says, snow that would not otherwise fall.

Augustus Doricko founded the company in 2023 on a Thiel Fellowship, bought North American Weather Consultants in Sandy, Utah, and then replaced that firm’s ground and aircraft methods with drones, according to Deseret News. Early flight testing ran at the FAA-authorized UAS range in Pendleton, Oregon. Rainmaker now operates in Utah, Idaho, Oregon, California and Colorado.

The dose is small. Doricko told TechCrunch that a typical operation disperses 50 to 100 grams of silver iodide, and Rainmaker’s technology page describes an onboard aerosol dispersal system on Elijah. The flares in the FAA petition are a separate matter: Sam Kim, the company’s aviation regulatory manager, said they are for research in a controlled environment and not part of ongoing operations. That distinction matters, because the drones the Times describes flying this year are not waiting on the flare ruling. DroneXL laid out the ALPA objection and Rainmaker’s response when the dispute first surfaced.

Rainmaker’s 143 Million Gallon Figure Rests on Its Own Radar

On April 27, 2026, Rainmaker announced 82 radar “seeding signatures” tying precipitation to its flights in Oregon and Utah, which it converts to 143 million gallons of water, the annual use of roughly 1,750 households. The figure is company-sourced and unaudited; no outside body has published a verification.

The method, as Rainmaker describes it, is to fly Elijah in distinctive patterns and then look for matching features in dual-polarization radar and satellite imagery downwind. Doricko’s press release called the company “the first company in human history to unambiguously measure and validate” a cloud seeding operation. The Government Accountability Office still lists the benefits of cloud seeding as unproven, and Deseret News noted the problem every cloud seeding company shares: there is no control cloud.

Independent validation is underway. Rainmaker is working with the National Center for Atmospheric Research and two Utah universities to quantify its results in the Bear River Basin, E&E News reported in January. The Trump administration is trying to dismantle NCAR. Rainmaker told E&E the study would survive NCAR’s end, which is a statement about the study, not about who would referee it.

For scale, Utah’s own estimate for its entire statewide program is 6 to 12 percent more precipitation, as much as 200,000 acre-feet a year, per the Times. Rainmaker’s validated 143 million gallons is about 440 acre-feet. Doricko told the paper cloud seeding will not save the day on its own, but that in the interior Southwest it is perhaps “the only means by which you can really generate new and consequential volumes” of water. The Times also notes silver iodide has been found harmful to phytoplankton and soil bacteria, though companies and scientists say it is not toxic enough to affect humans.

Two States Made Cloud Seeding a Felony After the Texas Flood Conspiracy

Tennessee banned weather modification in 2024, and Florida’s SB 56 took effect July 1, 2025, making unauthorized cloud seeding a third-degree felony punishable by up to five years in prison and a $100,000 fine. Montana’s SB 473 bans geoengineering but explicitly carves out cloud seeding.

Florida’s bill passed the House 82 to 28 after Gov. Ron DeSantis endorsed it on video as a crackdown on activity associated with so-called chemtrails. Then the July 2025 floods in central Texas killed at least 135 people, and within days social media posts were tying the disaster to a Rainmaker flight conducted days earlier and hundreds of miles away. Former national security adviser Mike Flynn reposted one such claim; the two posts drew more than 1.6 million views, according to E&E News. Doricko replied on X that Rainmaker did not contribute to the floods. Atmospheric scientists TechCrunch consulted said the same.

The real drone story from that flood was an authorized search and rescue drone that stalled at altitude and struck a Black Hawk, which DroneXL covered in Authorized Drone Failure Disrupts Rescue Helicopter in Kerrville Flood Response. A quadcopter releasing 100 grams of silver iodide over Utah was not it, and anyone who follows this beat knew that.

The conspiracy still reached Congress. Then-Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene introduced the Clear Skies Act that July to criminalize atmospheric releases intended to change the weather, with Reps. Tony Wied and Thomas Massie as co-sponsors. Greene has since left office. Rainmaker responded with $450,000 in federal lobbying in 2025, more than three times its 2024 spend, plus about $100,000 in Washington Metro ads, per E&E News. The company has raised more than $50 million from investors, according to PitchBook data cited in the same report.

The FAA Flare Petition Has No Published Decision After 13 Months

Rainmaker filed Docket FAA-2025-1630 on July 2, 2025, seeking relief from Part 107.36, the rule barring small drones from carrying hazardous materials. The FAA’s acknowledgment letter cited a 120-day decision target. DroneXL found no grant or denial in the Federal Register or FAA exemption listings as of August 24, 2026.

The Air Line Pilots Association told the FAA the petition posed “an extreme safety risk” and lacked modeling of where ejected flare casings would land. A 15,000-foot ceiling puts Elijah inside controlled airspace on the mountain routes airliners use, and Rainmaker’s answer was that it would fly in Class G unless authorized and that its non-public safety submissions covered the rest. The FAA responded with a request for more information rather than a ruling. That is where the public record stops.

The agency can move quickly when it chooses. It approved Hylio’s swarm exemption for agricultural drones heavier than 55 pounds in March 2024, and Part 137 spray operators have carried regulated pesticides under exemptions for years. Unlike the mostly DJI spray fleets caught in the FCC fight DroneXL covered in January’s Texas Farm Bureau story, Rainmaker’s airframe is its own design. The drag on this program is federal hazmat policy, not country of origin.

DroneXL’s Take

This is drones for good, and the laws written against it are the mystery-drone reflex in a chemtrail costume. A company flew a 50-pound quadcopter into a Utah cloud, and days later accounts with a million followers blamed it for a Texas flood. I have fought that pattern for years.

Whether the object was an airliner over New Jersey or the constellation Larry Hogan photographed over Maryland, the reflex is the same: something in the sky, something bad on the ground, and a story that connects them faster than the facts can. Cloud seeding drew the same crowd, with a felony statute at the end of it.

ALPA’s objection deserves better than to be lumped in with that. A pilots union asking where ejected flare casings land at 15,000 feet is doing its job, and Rainmaker’s reply, that flares are a research sideline and the real system is an onboard disperser, conceded the point by changing the subject. The FAA’s silence is the problem there, not the union’s filing.

Florida’s law makes no such distinction. It takes a 100-gram release of a compound Doricko says the EPA and state agencies have studied for decades and hands it the same felony as stratospheric aerosol injection, a planetary-scale idea that cloud seeding has nothing to do with. When I wrote about ALPA’s filing last September, the FAA had already sent Rainmaker a request for more information. Eleven months on, the public record I can find shows nothing further. An agency that cannot decide a 50-pound drone exemption in 13 months has little standing to complain when state legislatures fill the vacuum with felonies.

My read is that Rainmaker’s biggest exposure is neither Tallahassee nor ALPA. It is that its credibility now rests on a validation study run partly by NCAR, an institution the administration Rainmaker is courting wants to break up. Watch whether that study publishes before the winter seeding season, and whether Docket FAA-2025-1630 shows any movement by then. If neither happens, Rainmaker will be selling 143 million gallons on its own radar for another year, and every legislator with a chemtrail constituency gets to say nobody has checked.

Sources: The New York Times, Rainmaker Technology, Federal Register, E&E News, TechCrunch, Florida Senate, Deseret News.

DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo.