What if the first stage of a rocket launch was a fighter jet travelling at twice the speed of sound?
In the latest episode of The Capital Compass, Ricki Lee speaks with Starfighters Space Inc (NYSEAM:FJET) CEO and director Tim Franta about the company’s unusual approach to commercial space launch and high-speed aerospace testing.
Operating from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, Starfighters Space has a fleet of seven flight-ready F-104 Starfighters capable of sustained speeds above Mach 2.
This content has been prepared as part of a partnership with Starfighters Space and is intended for informational purposes only.
Through its Star Launch program, the company plans to use the aircraft as reusable first-stage launch platforms. An F-104 would carry a payload to roughly 45,000 feet before releasing its rocket, potentially reducing the amount of propulsion required compared with a launch beginning from the ground.
But commercial launches are only part of the opportunity.
Franta says high-speed and hypersonic research could become an important business for Starfighters over the coming decade. Its aircraft can provide real-world Mach 2 testing for technologies including avionics, communications equipment, sensors and propulsion components.
The company has worked with organizations including Lockheed Martin, GE Aerospace and the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory. Franta discusses a previous GE test in which rocket igniters were operated in the airflow beneath an F-104 travelling at Mach 2.
Attention is now turning to the company’s launch-development milestones. Planned drop tests will initially examine how a rocket mass simulator separates from the aircraft at subsonic and supersonic speeds, with the resulting data contributing to the company’s work toward launch licensing.
Franta also explains why Starfighters is designing Star Launch as an operational system rather than simply a pathfinder, with plans to pursue greater economies of scale following successful launches.
Watch the full interview to learn more about Starfighters Space’s launch ambitions, aerospace testing business and next development milestones.
Transcript
This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity and readability.
Ricki: What if the first stage of a rocket launch wasn’t a rocket at all, but a fighter jet travelling at twice the speed of sound?
Hello, I’m Ricki Lee, and this is The Capital Compass. Today, we’re looking at Starfighters Space, a commercial aerospace company operating from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
The company operates the world’s only commercial fleet of flight-ready F-104 Starfighters: seven supersonic aircraft capable of sustained speeds above Mach 2. And Starfighters has a pretty ambitious plan for them.
Through its Star Launch program, the F-104 is designed to act as a reusable first stage, carrying payloads to around 45,000 feet before launching them towards space.
But that’s not the only opportunity. The aircraft are already being used as platforms for aerospace research and high-speed testing, with customers and relationships including Lockheed Martin, GE, Space Florida and the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory.
Joining me now to explain how it all works and where Starfighters goes from here is CEO and director Tim Franta. Tim, welcome to The Capital Compass.
Tim: Glad to be here. The only direction to go is up.
Ricki: Indeed. So, Tim, this is a pretty unique business. Let’s start with the aircraft themselves. How do you take a fleet of F-104 Starfighters and turn them into a commercial platform for space launch, hypersonic testing and aerospace research?
Tim: Sure. That is the question, and that is what we do. Basically, the reason there is even a need is because aircraft, payloads and defence technologies are going higher and faster, and so they need access to high speed and high altitude on a regular basis.
While this aircraft is older, it still holds all the world records. It holds the high-altitude record, the high-altitude speed record, the high-altitude assisted record, the low-altitude speed record and the fastest rate of climb. We can climb faster than any jet in Russia, China or the United States.
And so that makes it very applicable to the first minute of a rocket launch, or something that needs that for hypersonics, going at high speed and high altitude. So, we can fly both this way and that way.
Ricki: So let’s dig into Star Launch, then. Instead of launching entirely from the ground, your F-104 effectively becomes the reusable first stage, carrying a payload up to 45,000 feet before launch. What advantages does this model offer in terms of cost, flexibility and launch cadence, and what still needs to happen before you can begin commercial launches?
Tim: So, there’s three main benefits. First, the higher and the faster you can go, the smaller your rocket can be. Since we can go Mach 2, that’s pretty fast, so the rocket can get smaller.
The other thing, from the business point of view, is our reusable first stage is a jet. We know our costs. We understand our costs. We know how much jet fuel costs. We know how much it costs to maintain the plane. We know how much our insurance is. So our first stage, as the first stage of a rocket, is extremely well understood. I know my cost for my first stage.
And the last benefit is that a jet is a movable feast. From the Kennedy Space Center, we can fly about 120 degrees in any direction to launch from and get to where we want to go, but we can also fly out. So if we need to launch 75 miles out at sea, we can launch 75 miles out. If we need to launch 20 miles out to sea, we can launch 20 miles out to sea.
And if we need to be somewhere else, like at White Sands Test Range, then we could move the whole show somewhere. So, by being a jet, we’re a movable feast.
Ricki: And you’re not starting from scratch when it comes to commercial demand either. Your customer base has included names such as Lockheed Martin, GE and the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory.
What are customers like Lockheed Martin actually using the platform for, and what does working with organizations of that calibre tell you about the demand for your capabilities?
Tim: Well, some things I can’t tell you what they’re doing. I can tell you what GE did last summer because it appeared in Aviation Week.
A company like GE wanted to test their igniters for their hypersonic rocket, and so that would normally happen around Mach 2. So we flew — and we’re the first ones in the world to do it, hence why it was in Aviation Week — and we lit the igniters going at Mach 2.0 in the airflow under-wing. So, we actually tested how they’re going to ignite their rocket.
It’s things like that. Most customers fall into about four or five categories, where they want to test avionics — things that guide the aircraft — where they want to test communications, where they want to test cameras and things like that, and then they actually want to test the airflow. So, lots of people fly in the same category or same mission type.
Ricki: And beyond launching payloads, you’re also developing the F-104 as what you call a “wind tunnel in the sky” for real-world Mach 2-plus testing. How significant could hypersonic and high-speed testing become as a standalone business alongside Star Launch?
Tim: It’s probably paying the rent for the next 10 years, primarily because of two reasons.
One is hypersonics, which is the ability to go faster than Mach 5. About eight years ago, the United States was number one in the world for hypersonics, and we have fallen behind Russia and China. Russia has used several hypersonic weapons against Ukraine. The first missile fired actually was a hypersonic rocket to take out the Ukrainian spare parts depot for their air force. And China has flown a hypersonic rocket around the world to prove they could do it and also to scare us.
And so the reason why hypersonic testing becomes important is because, if a country or someone somewhere uses old radars that spin around, the rocket will fly so fast by it, the radars won’t even have time to come around.
If you have the modern radars, there’s even another problem. Like when the shuttle returned to Earth, there’s an ionic cloud around the space shuttle; all the plasma builds up around it. So you appear on the modern radars as a fuzzy ball. So it’s hard to attack a fuzzy ball.
The other thing about that is that they’re flying. They can actually move where they are. I don’t want to say it’s pretty easy to track a ballistic missile, but it’s much easier to track a ballistic missile, where you know where it’s going to be, than it is a hypersonic missile that can change direction.
So we test many of those components. And we could also be used for someone’s new system to track us, because we can fly in at any angle at Mach 2 and see if they can detect us. We have a very short profile, a low profile, when we’re coming head-on. There’s only about a metre of surface area. So we’re actually very hard to detect if we’re coming straight towards a radar or something.
Ricki: If only I knew that’s all I had to do to get my rent paid for a year!
But finally, you already have the aircraft, proven propulsion technology and operations at Kennedy Space Center. While the company is working through the FAA launch licensing process, what are the major catalysts investors should be watching now, and what does Starfighters Space look like if you successfully scale this model?
Tim: So, a couple of things. One, they should be looking for our steady stair steps to get done. It’s very iterative with the FAA and with development, and for safety reasons.
So we have a drop test coming up in the not-too-distant future where we don’t ignite a rocket, but we have a mass simulator, which is the same mass as the rocket, and we drop it. We’ll drop one subsonically to make sure it separates cleanly from the aircraft, and then we’ll drop one at closer to probably Mach 1.6 the first time to see how it separates at Mach speed.
We then take all that data and apply for the next thing we need to do. So it’s very much stair steps to get a launch licence. That’s what we tend to do — things like that.
The other thing about scaling — I’m glad you mentioned it — is we are not designing a pathfinder vehicle. We are designing an operational vehicle. We have seen too many people in the past design a pathfinder vehicle, and they can never make their vehicle operational.
So, one of the reasons we’re designing for operations is that, once we have three successful launches, I’ll be able to order them in groups of six or 12 to get economies of scale. That’s one of the things they should be looking for after we have three successful launches: ordering rockets at scale, and we get savings and all sorts of benefits.
Ricki: Well, Tim, thank you so much for joining us today and giving us a closer look at the Starfighters Space story.
Tim: Thank you very much. It’s been a pleasure.
Ricki: For more information, you can visit starfightersspace.com. I’m Ricki Lee, and this has been The Capital Compass. Thank you for watching, and we’ll see you again next time.