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The first thing to know about hypersonic missiles is that they\u2019re air-rippingly fast.<\/p>\n
A hypersonic missile, definitionally, moves at least at Mach 5, or five times the speed of sound; one could cross the U.S. coast to coast in under 45 minutes. Unlike ballistic missiles, hypersonics are maneuverable and unpredictable to watchers, with an uncanny ability to fly low, change course, and skirt radar.<\/p>\n
The second thing to know about hypersonics is that China and Russia have them, and the U.S. doesn\u2019t\u2014not really. It\u2019s not for lack of trying: Despite years of research costing billions and some successful tests, the U.S. has yet to fully field a hypersonic missile of its own due to testing complications and production issues. The tech\u2019s been around, but it\u2019s been expensive and difficult to produce at scale. <\/p>\n
That\u2019s the chasm that startup Castelion, valued at $13 billion, is betting it can close, even if the defense giants have so far fallen short. \u201cHumans have done it, just not Americans,\u201d says Castelion CEO and cofounder Bryon Hargis. \u201cI firmly believe it\u2019s doable.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Torrance, Calif.-based startup has become a darling of the defense tech boom, in part because it encapsulates the movement\u2019s raison d\u2019\u00eatre: The U.S. must rebuild its industrial base faster, cheaper, and with an eye to scale. The war in Iran has crystallized that bleak reality: The U.S. is firing missiles faster than it can replace them, by an order of years.<\/p>\n
Castelion was founded in 2022 by three former SpaceX executives: Hargis, Andrew Kreitz, and Sean Pitt. (Hargis started the military-grade satellite network Starshield; Kreitz ran classified finance; and Pitt led sales of Falcon 9s in Europe.)<\/p>\n
The enterprise got off to an almost comically inauspicious start: In an early Zoom pitch to the Pentagon\u2019s innovation outfit, the founders said they planned to compete with Lockheed Martin at building affordable hypersonics. The room laughed, Pitt recalls. <\/p>\n
But the tables have turned: Castelion, in less than two-and-a-half years, took its low-cost hypersonic missile Blackbeard from a drawing to progressing reality\u2014and it\u2019s designated as a \u201cprogram of record,\u201d the elusive and coveted government budget line that makes (and often breaks) defense sector entrants. <\/p>\n
This places Castelion in direct competition with Lockheed, the maker of hypersonic race favorite Dark Eagle, a program that\u2019s been in process since 2017\u2014and is reportedly three years behind schedule. (\u201cDark Eagle has successfully deployed in support of Indo-Pacific exercises and completed multiple successful flight-test events,\u201d an Army spokesperson said via email. \u201cThe Army continues planned operational assessment activities.\u201d)<\/p>\n
In September, the U.S. Navy awarded Castelion a contract worth up to $200 million for Blackbeard, which documents say can be made for less than $500,000 each. (In comparison, Tomahawk missiles can cost millions each.) Blackbeards have had successful test flights on fighter jets like the F\/A-18 Super Hornet, and the company is currently racing to open its 1,000-acre New Mexico site, which could eventually turn out thousands of Blackbeards each year.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis capability is needed now, and you have to sprint directly at what the country needs,\u201d says Kreitz, Castelion\u2019s CFO. Hypersonics are effective not just as weapons but, even more essentially, as deterrents, Kreitz argues. \u201cIt\u2019s really important we have a credible deterrent that we pass down for generations to come,\u201d adds Hargis. He gestures at a Mad Men-esque poster in Castelion\u2019s mid-century office. \u201cCheesy as it is, this was the first poster we ever made for the company,\u201d he explains. \u201cYou can see the tagline was: \u2018Win before it begins.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
Of course, deterrence only has a chance if the weapons exist. And recent conflicts have created an unmissable urgency, Kreitz says. \u201cThis is the capability that will define warfare in the 2030s and beyond,\u201d he said. \u201cThe campaign was basically large, sustained volleys of back-and-forth long-range fires. That\u2019s what the future of warfare will look like.\u201d<\/p>\n
Build, fly, test, repeat<\/p>\n
In 2022, as Hargis, Kreitz, and Pitt were just getting started, they presented to the Defense Innovation Unit, the Pentagon\u2019s tech acceleration division. It didn\u2019t go well. \u201cIt was the tailish end of COVID,\u201d said Pitt. \u201cSo, it was a video presentation, and we explained \u2018we\u2019re here to make low-cost missiles.\u2019 They asked: \u2018Are you going to compete with Lockheed?\u2019 We said yes, and it was not a little laugh. There were a good number of people laughing.\u201d<\/p>\n
In venture capital, 2022 was the bizarre era of peak metaverse. Defense tech was a novelty and largely seen as controversial or ignored. (Anduril, defense tech\u2019s greatest hardware success, had a skyrocketing 2022, but there was no sense that breakthrough was imitable.) The three founders are all candid about the impasse of the very beginning. <\/p>\n
Hargis, who has a forceful warmth and natural deadpan\u2014his father, he says, worked at a nuclear power plant \u201clike Homer Simpson\u201d\u2014doesn\u2019t hold back.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was using my retirement to fund my living,\u201d he said. \u201cI was messaging these guys: \u2018At what point would they have to call it quits if we didn\u2019t make anything?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
Castelion\u2019s co-founders, left to right: Bryon Hargis, Sean Pitt, Andrew Kreitz.<\/p>\n
Courtesy of Castelion<\/p>\n
In their first investment contracts, Hargis, Kreitz, and Pitt promised to return the money if they couldn\u2019t raise $1 million. In the end, they cleared that bar through a SpaceX tender offer, in which Hargis and another employee sold shares and invested in the company. Then, in April 2023, Lavrock, a Washington, D.C.-based VC firm, led a seed round of $5.6 million, a shoestring sum for an aspiring missile-maker. But it was enough: The founders went off into the Mojave Desert, near Edwards Air Force Base, to build their first rocket motor.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe early, early days in the desert were threadbare,\u201d remembers Kreitz, a history buff keenly aware of the lines between past and present. \u201cWe all wore Tyvek suits and respirators, helped make propellant and assembled parts, and we were getting hardware built alongside the engineers and techs.\u201d<\/p>\n
It took months, funds dwindled, and it was soon time for a Hail Mary: They found a high-speed cameraman to film a static-fire test. The resulting video, of a rumbling firing motor, drew the attention of the VC firm Andreessen Horowitz, which quickly led an $8.6 million seed extension in Castelion.<\/p>\n
The race then really began. Building a defense company is an amalgamation of tiny precisions, from the rigamarole of clearances to establishing processes for classified information. The endgame, for Castelion and any defense startup, is selling to the Department of War, a bureaucratic behemoth with labyrinthine fiefdoms. Normal startup challenges\u2014from office setup to engineering game plans\u2014are all magnified by the specifics of hardware and defense.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat mattered most for us then was finding a customer who was willing to try something new and was willing to be different in how they approach the acquisition cycle,\u201d said Pitt, who\u2019s wryly persuasive and was a SpaceX spokesperson in his 20s. \u201c[The Navy] gave us that initial contract, $3 million. We did what we said we would for $3 million. That led to a $15 million contract, and it all went from there.\u201d<\/p>\n
Now, Castelion has a program of record with the U.S. Navy. To Hargis, Kreitz, and Pitt, there\u2019s a sense this has all happened dizzyingly fast. Castelion has gone from 159 employees at the end of 2025 to over 400 employees. And the tougher truth is that, from here, the company needs to keep it up or go even faster. \u201cCan you make enough? Are they cheap enough that the country can buy that many? And can you do that in a time frame of relevance?\u201d said Pitt. \u201cThat\u2019s the bar.\u201d<\/p>\n
Much of that scaling will happen at Castelion\u2019s Project Ranger site in Rio Rancho, N.M., where some residents have reportedly balked at a missile factory moving in. The company\u2019s held regular community meetings, worked extensively with local authorities, and its chief engineer has moved to town.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is going to be the defining production site for Castelion,\u201d said Kreitz. \u201cWe, the three of us, will be here all the time. All our senior leadership is going to be there all the time. These are going to be our friends and colleagues. They\u2019re going to be working there. They\u2019re going to be living there. We want this to be safe. We want this to be done correctly.\u201d<\/p>\n
Ultimately, there\u2019s a back-to-the-future quality to Castelion\u2019s efforts. They\u2019re careful not to blast the modern defense primes\u2014after all, the Pentagon\u2019s expressed a great need for both high and low-cost hypersonics. But it\u2019s telling that Castelion\u2019s reference points are further in the past, like the Apollo era, which produced humanity\u2019s first moon landings in about a decade.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn the Apollo era, the country used to build hardware like there was no tomorrow, test it, fly it, iterate and do it all again,\u201d said Hargis.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s partly how other nations have moved ahead of the U.S. in the hypersonic race, in Hargis\u2019s telling: \u201cThe way it was done was with an iterative approach and a lot of testing. America has moved away from that iterative approach over the past decades, and we\u2019re now reaping the expected benefits from that.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u2018We\u2019re in a sprint\u2019<\/p>\n
Castelion could still fall short, it should be said. The company currently has over $500 million in U.S. government contracts, yes, but ultimately they\u2019re in big-swing-or-bust territory. The company, in some sense, is doing a reverse Anduril: The $61 billion defense tech giant started with sentry towers and built out a massive suite of products over time and deals, while Castelion barreled straight into one massive, intractable problem. If they\u2019re right, they\u2019re very right. And if they\u2019re wrong, they\u2019re very wrong. To Pitt, the gamble\u2019s worth it.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe pure existence of Castelion as a credible threat to the primes significantly benefits the country, because behavior has to change to deal with a competitive entrant that\u2019s offering services at a significantly lower cost,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Hargis, Kreitz, and Pitt are all acutely aware of the harshest underlying reality of what they do: They are building lethal weapons capable of destroying military targets and infrastructure, and of killing. \u201cYou have to think about it and confront the fact that one day it can be used for its intended purpose,\u201d said Kreitz. But, he added, \u201cWhen we say \u2018peace through deterrence,\u2019 when we say \u2018deterrence works,\u2019 we really do mean that.\u201d<\/p>\n
Hargis pushed back when I raised a common criticism: that building weapons inherently facilitates war. \u201cIf you want to deter someone\u2019s actions, they have to feel there\u2019s a consequence to those actions,\u201d he said. \u201cHypersonics give the country that ability and a level between economic sanctions and nuclear war, which no one wants to happen, ever.\u201d<\/p>\n
As an uneasy post-Cold War equilibrium morphs into a more geopolitically volatile world, the question hanging over Castelion\u2014and the entire U.S. defense industry\u2014is utterly urgent: What will the next major conflict look like, and will we be ready? \u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re in a sprint,\u201d Kreitz said. \u201cWe\u2019re going as fast as humanly possible. I want to know how much time we have\u2026 We have to act as if it\u2019s tomorrow.\u201d<\/p>\n
#billion #startup #racing #close #Americas #hypersonic #gap<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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