U.S. Navy Awards $50M for Blackbeard Hypersonic Missile to Enable Scalable Strike by 2027.

The U.S. Navy has awarded Castelion Corp. a nearly $50 million contract to advance its Blackbeard hypersonic missile into full-scale prototypes, flight testing, and early operational fielding through 2027. The move signals a Pentagon push toward more affordable, manufacturable hypersonic strike options that can be produced at scale and integrated across existing launch platforms.

Castelion Corp. has secured a nearly $50 million U.S. Navy award to push its Blackbeard missile from prototypes into flight testing and early fielding, a move aimed at giving U.S. forces a faster, harder-to-stop long-range strike option that can survive inside modern air-defense environments. The $49,998,005 firm-fixed-price order funds full-scale prototypes, flight tests, and operational fielding work through November 2027, signaling that the Navy is not only buying engineering effort but also positioning Blackbeard for near-term operational experimentation. The order was placed against a previously issued basic ordering agreement and will be executed in Torrance, California, under the Naval Air Warfare Center Aircraft Division contracting authority in Lakehurst, New Jersey.
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Blackbeard is a low-cost hypersonic strike missile built for production, delivering precision hits on moving or hardened targets. Its maneuvering flight reduces warning time, complicates defenses, and supports dispersed HIMARS-class launches (Picture source: Castelion).

While the contract notice does not disclose the intended launch platform, the contracting activity choice matters. NAWCAD Lakehurst sits at the center of naval aviation integration and test infrastructure, which aligns with earlier indications that the Navy has been examining an air-launched path for a lower-cost hypersonic strike weapon. That requirement has become sharper since the Navy halted its HALO program, an air-launched, air-breathing hypersonic anti-ship concept, citing budget constraints and schedule pressures before publicly refocusing on affordability. In parallel, the Pentagon’s first program-of-record hypersonic strike systems have been slowed by the realities of test cadence, launcher integration, and industrial capacity. The Army now expects to complete fielding activities for its Dark Eagle Long-Range Hypersonic Weapon battery in early 2026 after multiple slips.

Blackbeard’s value proposition is not simply speed: hypersonic weapons matter because they compress the defender’s decision cycle and complicate interception by combining sustained high speed with non-ballistic flight behavior, including maneuvering in the atmosphere at altitudes that can stress radar coverage and interceptor kinematics. China and Russia have spent years operationalizing that logic, and the United States is now trying to close the gap with a mix of exquisite systems and, increasingly, affordable mass approaches that can be produced in meaningful numbers.

Technical specifics on Blackbeard remain partially protected, but enough is known to outline its operational envelope. U.S. Army budget language has described Blackbeard Ground Launch as a seeker-based, hypersonic precision-fires weapon intended to engage time-sensitive moving targets and hardened targets at far lower cost than comparable inventory options. The Army also frames Blackbeard GL as an interim round compatible with existing HIMARS, while being envisioned as a primary munition for the Common Autonomous Multi-Domain Launcher, an autonomous or optionally crewed launcher family intended to improve survivability through rapid displacement and reduced crew exposure. Critically, Army documents emphasize that Blackbeard GL is not a replacement for Dark Eagle because it will not reach similar velocities or range, instead targeting roughly 80 percent of the planned Precision Strike Missile Increment 4 capability at a significantly reduced cost.

That positioning implies a tactical-operational niche: mid- to upper-tier hypersonic performance and long-range reach sufficient for theater strike, but packaged for launchers that can disperse, hide, and reload more readily than heavy strategic systems. Reporting has indicated the program plans to demonstrate an existing air-launched, extended-range Blackbeard design fired from a modified MLRS-family pod, then transition to minimum viable ground-launched prototypes with flight-termination instrumentation for HIMARS test events. If executed, that approach would reduce integration friction by reusing launcher interfaces and fire-control pathways already proven for MLRS pods, while leveraging hypersonic flight profiles to reduce time-to-target and increase survivability against modern surface-to-air missile networks.

The project’s development model is as strategically important as its aerodynamics. Blackbeard is being advanced under a Small Business Innovation Research Phase III pathway tied to an Air Force topic focused on low-cost and highly manufacturable long-range strike production, and Castelion’s leadership has emphasized vertically integrated propulsion and guidance to shorten learning cycles. The company has articulated an ambition to build thousands of weapons annually at a target unit cost in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, a radically different scaling logic than today’s premium-priced hypersonic rounds. Blackbeard has been engineered from inception for industrial-rate output and continuous flight-test iteration, echoing commercial space-sector production philosophies now migrating into the missile industrial base.

For operational commanders, a lower-cost hypersonic weapon changes targeting behavior. High-end hypersonics are often rationed for the most strategic, heavily defended targets, partly because magazine depth is thin, and the cost per shot is severe. A more affordable option enables commanders to plan hypersonic salvos for suppression of enemy air defenses, rapid strikes against mobile launchers, maritime targets of opportunity, and hardened nodes that demand steep terminal energy. It also supports distributed operations. HIMARS-class launchers and future Common Autonomous Multi-Domain Launcher vehicles can maneuver under contested ISR, fire, and displace quickly, reducing vulnerability to counterfire and creating multiple axes of attack that stress adversary sensors.

The U.S. Department of Defense assesses that China possesses the world’s leading hypersonic missile arsenal and continues to advance both conventional and nuclear-armed hypersonic technologies. China’s DF-17, an operational road-mobile medium-range missile equipped with a hypersonic glide vehicle, is assessed with a range in the 1,800 to 2,500 kilometer class and is designed to pressure regional bases and naval forces by reducing warning time. Russia, meanwhile, has leaned heavily on hypersonic branding for deterrence and signaling. The Kinzhal is characterized as an operational nuclear-capable air-launched ballistic missile with a reported 1,500 to 2,000-kilometer range class, and Moscow continues to demonstrate the Zircon hypersonic cruise missile through high-profile launches during major exercises. The U.S. response cannot rely solely on a small number of exquisite weapons. It must also create scale and resilience in production, test throughput, and platform integration.

The immediate question is whether the Navy’s Blackbeard order can convert rapid prototyping into credible early operational capability without colliding with the same test and integration bottlenecks that slowed earlier programs. The Navy has already demonstrated a sea-based hypersonic launch approach for Conventional Prompt Strike using cold-gas ejection techniques to enable safe shipboard launches, underlining how integration details can dominate schedules. If Castelion can sustain flight-test tempo, prove manufacturability, and integrate across operational platforms, Blackbeard could become a template for how the United States fields hypersonic strike at scale rather than as a boutique capability.

Written by Evan Lerouvillois, Defense Analyst.

Evan studied International Relations, and quickly specialized in defense and security. He is particularly interested in the influence of the defense sector on global geopolitics, and analyzes how technological innovations in defense, arms export contracts, and military strategies influence the international geopolitical scene.