The award supports the Navy’s strategy to pursue new approaches to move capability to the Fleet while maintaining operational rigor. Castelion said the contract is intended to accelerate delivery of hypersonic capability to operational forces.
“Delivering hypersonic capability to support the warfighter is what drives this team,” said Bryon Hargis, CEO and Co-Founder of Castelion. “We recognize the trust the Department of War has placed in our team and remain focused on maintaining a sense of urgency to deliver on our commitments.”
Blackbeard, the company’s first product, is engineered for mass production and rapid fielding and uses vertically integrated propulsion and guidance subsystems. Castelion said the system is designed to achieve performance at a fraction of the cost of legacy weapons, supporting the Department of War objective of building credible, nonnuclear deterrent capacity at scale.
The contract is the latest in a series of platform integration awards from the United States Army and the United States Navy for Blackbeard. Castelion also said it recently invested $220 million of its own capital in Project Ranger, a 1,000-acre manufacturing campus in Sandoval County, New Mexico, which it said will become the largest dedicated hypersonic production facility when complete.
