Castelion, a small California defense startup, has won a $105 million US Navy contract to ready its Blackbeard hypersonic missile for use aboard the navy's carrier-based F/A-18 fighter jets, clearing the way for the weapon to move from the laboratory toward the battlefield next year.
The award matters because the United States is expending the kinds of weapons it would need to stop China from seizing Taiwan by force. Unlike a ballistic missile fired from land, Blackbeard can be carried aboard a navy aircraft carrier and launched from an F/A-18 - putting the weapon within striking range of Chinese missile sites and warships that a land-based weapon could not easily reach.
Because Blackbeard travels faster than five times the speed of sound and is designed to be cheap enough to buy in large numbers, the United States could use it to make a Chinese military commander think twice before ordering an attack.
"The most sacred targets in our engineering process are schedule and affordability. That forces more creative solutions - instead of waiting 52 weeks for a space-rated computer, we use automotive-grade components backed by tens of billions in commercial investment annually, and they work," Sean Pitt, Castelion's co-founder and Chief Operating Officer, told Reuters.
The navy contract will fund hardware and software integration of Blackbeard onto the F/A-18, flight testing, and the full system safety and airworthiness certification the military requires before a weapon can be cleared for storage, loading and carriage from an aircraft carrier at sea — the last major hurdle before the navy decides whether to buy Blackbeard in volume for the carrier air wing. Castelion expects to clear that hurdle and have weapons ready for fielding next year.
To support anticipated production orders, Castelion has privately funded Project Ranger, a manufacturing campus being built entirely with company money at a cost the company puts at $250 million.
The company already operates facilities across Texas, California and Washington, and when fully operational the New Mexico campus will be capable of producing thousands of Blackbeard missiles annually, with that capacity expected to be in place by the end of next year.
Pentagon budget documents released this week show the navy plans to buy 4,500 air-launched hypersonic missiles for F/A-18E/Fs over the next five years, with an average unit cost of about $384,000 — a relatively low figure for hypersonic-class weapons.
Castelion's contract award was posted to the government's awards database on Friday.
(Reporting by Mike Stone in Washington; Editing by Matthew Lewis)
