How Castelion's Bryon Hargis bootstrapped a hypersonic missile maker on SpaceX stock
Key points
Key takeaways from We The Builders (Suffiyan Malik) interview with Castelion co-founder and CEO Bryon Hargis, recorded at Reindustrialize (October 2026):
Bootstrapped on SpaceX stock. Hargis liquidated a large part of his SpaceX holdings to fund Castelion’s first months: he and a fellow lead engineer covered salaries out of their own pockets from the late-2022 founding until the seed round closed in April 2023, topped up with Ethereum mining proceeds from his GPU-rig days.
Two-thirds, not all-in. Urged by his wife to commit everything, Hargis instead deployed roughly two-thirds of his savings — still allowing the founders to draw far below a Los Angeles living wage for the first two years, with rent topped up from retirement accounts.
The deterrence thesis. Castelion was founded in late 2022 to close an obvious gap: affordable, capable, mass-scalable munitions. Hargis argues credible deterrence requires enough weapons to hold targets at risk at a cost and volume adversaries cannot match, predating the current “reindustrialisation” wave by a year or two.
From the SpaceX kill chain to end-to-end. At SpaceX, Hargis focused on the government applications of satellite technology and a slice of the kill chain; Castelion aims to take that capability end to end, designing weapons in-house for manufacturability from day one.
First Navy order for Blackbeard. A week before recording, the US Navy placed Castelion’s first order for Blackbeard, its debut hypersonic weapon, for early production. Hargis says the company reached a first contract faster than SpaceX’s own programme-record timeline — helped by this being his second, third and fourth time building.
Blackbeard, the weapon. A first-of-kind, low-cost hypersonic munition with two separate motors — staging is unusual for a weapon of its size and buys range, while speed and agility give survivability. It is built for deep integration into the future US kill-chain architecture.
Scale at Rio Rancho. Castelion is building a 1,000-acre site outside Rio Rancho, New Mexico, described as the world’s largest dedicated hypersonics manufacturing facility, with around $250M invested across two of four planned phases and capacity for thousands of Blackbeards a year — underpinned by one of five new-entrant framework agreements with the US Department of Defense.
Demand beyond the US. Foreign buyers want a capable, affordable weapon they can field roughly 18 months after ordering; Castelion is designing its factory sites to produce multiple weapon systems so it can ride cyclical demand without hire-and-fire swings.
Read more: We The Builders (Suffiyan Malik) on YouTube
