The factory of the future is back, baby.
Yesterday, hypersonic missile company Castelion announced that they’re breaking ground on a new, state-of-the-art facility in New Mexico that (at full capacity) will be able to churn out “thousands of Blackbeards [Castelion’s flagship hypersonic] a year,” Castelion COO and co-founder Sean Pitt told Tectonic.
Pitt said that the company will invest $100M of its own cash money in building the facility—nicknamed Project Ranger—and that they’ll officially kick off construction in January.
“Project Ranger represents a critical step in restoring America’s capacity to produce the advanced systems our country needs,” Castelion co-founder and CFO Andrew Kreitz said in a statement. “We’re proud to partner with a community with a long history of innovation that has powered some of our nation’s greatest leaps forward.”
“We raised our Series A this year,” Pitt added, “This is a pretty dramatic expansion of capability for a new business.”
FWIW, Pitt says that currently the company can produce about a hundred of these missiles a year. That’s a big step up.
Speedy quick: Castelion has made a name for itself in the hypersonic world pretty damn quick (bad pun intended.)
The company was founded back in 2022 by three SpaceX alums—Bryon Hargis (CEO), Sean Pitt (COO), and Andrew Kreitz (CFO)—and set out to build affordable, mass-producible hypersonic weapons.
- The company raised a $14M seed round in May 2023 and a $100M Series A in January of this year.
- Just a few months later—in July—they raised a $350M Series B. See what we said about quick?
- The company’s flagship hypersonic missile is called the Blackbeard and is designed to be a more affordable version of something like Lockheed Martin’s “Dark Eagle” Long Range Hypersonic Weapon (LRHW), which costs about $41M apiece. Pitt told Tectonic that Blackbeard runs into the “hundreds of thousands of dollars.”
Last month, the company won “multiple awards” to integrate Blackbeard onto operational US Army and Navy platforms.
- The Navy and Air Force have also awarded Castelion contracts worth over $23M, according to Obviant data.
- This summer, the Army requested a cool $25M budget carveout to develop a Blackbeard variant that could be launched from a HIMARS. Earlier this month, the company carried out a “successful depressed trajectory flight” with the service.
- The Pentagon has also highlighted hypersonics as one of its new Critical Technology Areas (CTAs). Lucky, that.
Dig deep: Pitt said that the campus will be up and running in the second half of next year and will be at full capacity—able to produce thousands of missiles a year—in 2027.
While he said that they only intend to produce Castelion products at the site, he said they chose New Mexico because of the massive missile-flavored ecosystem already there (Sandia National Labs and Los Alamos, anyone?)
“There is tremendous heritage [for aerospace and defense] in New Mexico and a talent pool with expertise in hypersonics who are comfortable working around missile systems,” Pitt said, “That’s important.”
The company says that Project Ranger will create about 300 jobs—evenly split between skilled technicians and mechanical and manufacturing production—and generate over $650M in “economic output” in the next decade.
Pitt also said that they’re looking to open more facilities like this across the US and around the world—especially in Australia. The company already has facilities in Texas and Arizona.