castelion hypersonic missile

Castelion profile

Q: Where can I research Castelion directly?

Go to the primary sources: Castelion , Defense News: US Navy awards defense startup $200 million for Blackbeard hypersonic missile , U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission: EDGAR Search . Avoid aggregator summaries when the filing itself is available.

By Jonathan Teplitsky · reviewed against primary sources · updated September 18, 2026.

Castelion is a privately held defense-technology startup headquartered in Torrance, California, that develops hypersonic strike weapons. The company manufactures the Blackbeard air-launched missile, designed to deliver high-speed standoff strikes from carrier-based aircraft at scale.

What Castelion does

Castelion manufactures hypersonic strike weapons using vertical integration of guidance, propulsion, and aerostructures to support high-rate production at lower acquisition costs than legacy defense programs. Operating from facilities in Torrance, California, and Allen, Texas, Castelion designs the Blackbeard air-launched weapon as part of the U.S. Navy Multimission Affordable Capacity Effector (MACE) initiative. The company positions Blackbeard as a lower-cost, scalable alternative to earlier naval hypersonic development efforts, including the Hypersonic Air-Launched Offensive (HALO) missile program. The castelion hypersonic missile provides carrier-based strike aircraft with a high-speed strike capability over a range of roughly 200 nautical miles, configured for direct carriage on the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter and the F/A-18 Super Hornet. Castelion replaces traditional aerospace subcontracting structures with internal manufacturing lines and commercial fabrication methods, aiming to compress engineering iterations and reduce unit production expenses. The company articulates its strategic mission under a Peace Through Deterrence framing, stating an objective to build and test strike systems rapidly and at massive scale to deter future conflicts. Navy contracting momentum began with an initial award of approximately $50 million tied to MACE selection in February 2026. A June 2026 delivery order added $23.4 million to supply 50 prototype and pre-production missiles alongside specialized storage containers. In August 2026, the service awarded Castelion a $90 million contract to advance Blackbeard toward Early Operational Capability, an award matched in the private sector by a $1 billion Series C funding round. Castelion secured its largest defense commitment on September 17, 2026, when the Navy awarded a $200 million production contract structured under the Small Business Innovation Development Act to accelerate hardware delivery while controlling engineering expenses.

The product lines that define the company for research purposes:

Blackbeard hypersonic missile

This profile is qualitative by design. It carries no share price, no price target, no valuation multiple, and no rating — those change faster than any page can honestly track, and the filings linked below are the authoritative source for them.

Castelion drone lineup

The current public product record does not identify a complete aircraft lineup.

No complete-aircraft offering is catalogued for this company; it is tracked here as an unmanned-systems enabler.

Statuses are editorial classifications from the company’s current public catalog: active means currently presented for sale, delivery, or program work; development means publicly disclosed but not a mature production offering; legacy means retained for historical or installed-fleet coverage.

Recent contracts & awards

A dated log of the specific contracts, orders, funding, and deployments reported for Castelion, each tied to its primary source. This is a record of what was announced — a "selection", "award", or "partnership" is not the same as obligated money, so read each source before treating a figure as revenue. No figure appears here unless a source reported it.

ContractSep 17, 2026$200 million
U.S. Navy awards Castelion $200 million production contract for Blackbeard hypersonic missile
On September 17, 2026, the U.S. Navy awarded Castelion a $200 million production order for the Blackbeard air-launched hypersonic strike weapon under the Small Business Innovation Development Act framework. The contract procures operational rounds designed to provide carrier-based F-35 and F/A-18 aircraft with high-speed, long-range strike capabilities while reducing engineering overhead. The award builds upon prior 2026 prototyping and capability orders under the Navy Multimission Affordable Capacity Effector initiative.
Defense News: US Navy awards defense startup $200 million for Blackbeard hypersonic missile

Where Castelion sits in the value chain

Castelion is a pure-play: unmanned systems are the business rather than one line inside it, so the P&L moves with drone demand and has little else to cushion a slow procurement year.

Its disclosed activity spans aerial drones. That placement is the single most useful thing to fix in your head before reading any coverage, because the same headline means different things at different layers: a large platform award is transformative for a pure-play, material but diluted for a diversified contractor, and only indirectly relevant to a component supplier whose exposure arrives later as build-rate demand. Retail coverage routinely applies one story to all three layers at once. For the layer-by-layer comparison across the sector, see the drone stocks research shortlist and the list of publicly traded drone companies.

What to watch

The signals worth tracking are structural, not price-based — they tell you whether the business is changing shape, which is what eventually shows up in the numbers.

Progression of the Blackbeard program toward Early Operational Capability flight demonstrations under the August 2026 U.S. Navy development contract.
Hardware manufacturing milestones and initial delivery timelines for the 50 Blackbeard prototype units and storage containers contracted under the June 2026 delivery order.
Flight testing, carriage certification, and safe separation trials across carrier air wing aircraft, specifically the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter and F/A-18 Super Hornet.
Capital deployment of the $1 billion Series C private financing round into high-rate manufacturing infrastructure and supply chain tooling in California and Texas.
Follow-on procurement options and inventory expansion following the September 17, 2026, production contract executed under the Small Business Innovation Development Act.

How to research Castelion

Every question below has one authoritative source, and using the wrong source is how most retail research goes wrong.

Research question	Where the answer lives	What to look for
Is there anything to buy?	SEC EDGAR full-text search	Whether any registration statement exists at all — absent one, there is no public security.
Is the government work real?	Official DoD contract announcements	Awarding service and scope of work, rather than a company-issued announcement.
What is the acquisition pathway?	DIU and DARPA program pages	Whether the work runs through non-traditional agreements or a conventional program of record.
How would exposure even work?	Fund holdings disclosures	Whether any listed vehicle discloses a stake — indirect exposure is usually thin and unstated.

For reporting on the $200 million U.S. Navy production contract, MACE program context, and Blackbeard flight parameters, consult the Defense News report on Castelion's hypersonic missile award.
For corporate positioning, technical overviews, and regional manufacturing footprint updates, review the Castelion official website.
Because Castelion operates as an unlisted private startup that does not file statutory disclosures with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, researchers must verify contract scopes and delivery quantities through official Department of Defense announcements rather than equity filings.

One failure mode is worth naming explicitly: a company announcement describing a "selection", "award", or "partnership" is not the same as obligated money, and the two are easy to conflate because they use the same vocabulary. Check the filing before treating either as revenue. Our full approach is documented on the methodology page.

Castelion FAQ

What does Castelion do?

Is Castelion publicly traded?

Castelion is not publicly traded, so there is no ticker to buy. Any claim otherwise should be verified against SEC EDGAR before it is believed.

What should investors watch with Castelion?

Progression of the Blackbeard program toward Early Operational Capability flight demonstrations under the August 2026 U.S. Navy development contract.

Where can I research Castelion directly?

Go to the primary sources: Castelion, Defense News: US Navy awards defense startup $200 million for Blackbeard hypersonic missile, U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission: EDGAR Search. Avoid aggregator summaries when the filing itself is available.