U.S. Navy awards Castelion $90 million for hypersonic weapon

The U.S. Navy awarded Castelion Corp. nearly $90 million to advance its Blackbeard hypersonic strike weapon toward Early Operational Capability, the company announced August 25.

The order funds engineering, technical, logistics and manufacturing work supporting 50 early operational capability weapons and the missile’s transition to a formal Navy Program of Record.

The contract also funds Defense Exportability Features, design modifications intended to speed up potential sales to U.S. allies and partners. Work will be performed in Torrance, California, and is expected to be completed by August 2028.

The order falls under a Small Business Innovation Research Phase III effort tied to the topic “Low Cost Highly Manufacturable Long Range Strike Weapon Production.” Naval Air Warfare Center Aircraft Division in Lakehurst, New Jersey, is the contracting activity, and the action was not competitively bid. Funding includes $50 million in fiscal 2026 defense-wide research funds, roughly $15.8 million in fiscal 2026 Navy research funds, and about $24.2 million in fiscal 2025 Navy research funds, the last of which expires at the end of the current fiscal year.

Blackbeard is designed to fly faster than Mach 5 while maneuvering within the atmosphere, built for both air launch from aircraft such as the F/A-18 and a parallel ground-launched variant compatible with HIMARS. The Navy selected Blackbeard in February as the first weapon candidate under its Multi-mission Affordable Capacity Effector program, known as MACE, which aims to field large quantities of lower-cost, longer-range strike weapons rather than relying solely on smaller numbers of expensive, exquisite systems. The Navy confirmed that link in April, tying the missile to a rapid prototyping effort structured within the fiscal 2026 Navy research budget as part of its Precision Strike Weapons Development Program.

Castelion has received a rapid sequence of expanding Navy contracts for Blackbeard over the past year, each building on the last. Following initial integration awards from the Army and Navy in October 2025, the Navy awarded the company nearly $50 million in February 2026 to fund full-scale prototypes and flight testing at Point Mugu Sea Range. That was followed in April by a $105 million contract modification to integrate the missile onto the F/A-18E/F Super Hornet and support live-fire testing in the Indo-Pacific Command area of responsibility, with work expected to run through January 2028. In June, the Navy ordered 50 early operational capability pre-production prototypes and 50 storage and shipping containers under a $23.4 million contract, the first production-style delivery order for a low-cost hypersonic weapon of its kind. Roughly three-quarters of that work went to Castelion’s Project Ranger manufacturing campus, a 1,000-acre hypersonic production site in Rio Rancho, New Mexico, with the remainder handled at the company’s Torrance headquarters.

Castelion was founded in 2022 by Bryon Hargis, Sean Pitt and Andrew Kreitz, all of whom previously worked at SpaceX. The company describes Blackbeard as the first U.S. hypersonic system engineered from inception for industrial-rate output and commercial-style unit costs, built around continuous flight test iteration rather than the long, singular test campaigns typical of legacy hypersonic programs. Castelion has said its longer-term ambition includes multi-year procurement of 500 weapons annually, a production rate intended to shift the program from a development effort into fielded capability at scale. The company operates manufacturing sites in New Mexico, Texas and California, along with offices in Washington, D.C.

Congress increased MACE program funding by more than $140 million in the fiscal 2026 defense appropriations act, more than doubling the program’s base funding, though lawmakers did not specify how the additional money should be spent. Early budget documents for fiscal 2027 show continued funding growth planned for the broader Precision Strike Weapons Development Program that houses MACE.