WASHINGTON: Castelion, a small California defence startup, has won a US$105mil US Navy contract to ready its Blackbeard hypersonic missile for use aboard the Navy’s carrier-based F/A-18 fighter jets, clearing the way for the weapon to move from the laboratory toward the battlefield next year.
The award matters because the United States is expending the kinds of weapons it would need to stop China from seizing Taiwan by force.
Unlike a ballistic missile fired from land, Blackbeard can be carried aboard a Navy aircraft carrier and launched from an F/A-18 – a jet flying off a carrier deck – putting the weapon within striking range of Chinese missile sites and warships that a land-based weapon could not easily reach.
Because Blackbeard travels faster than five times the speed of sound and is designed to be cheap enough to buy in large numbers, the United States could use it to make a Chinese military commander think twice before ordering an attack.
“The most sacred targets in our engineering process are schedule and affordability,” Sean Pitt, Castelion’s co-founder and chief operating officer, told Reuters.
“That forces more creative solutions – instead of waiting 52 weeks for a space-rated computer, we use automotive-grade components backed by tens of billions in commercial investment annually, and they work,” he said.
The Navy contract will fund hardware and software integration of Blackbeard onto the F/A-18, flight testing, and the full system safety and airworthiness certification the military requires before a weapon can be cleared for storage, loading and carriage from an aircraft carrier at sea. — Reuters
