Starfighters Space advances "Wind Tunnel in the Sky" Mach 2+ flight-testing platform

Starfighters Space, Inc., the space company operating the world's only commercial fleet of flight-ready Mach 2+ F-104 supersonic aircraft, today announced the next phase in development of "Wind Tunnel in the Sky," a reusable airborne platform designed to help commercial, government, defence, and research customers evaluate advanced technologies during sustained Mach 2+ flight in real-world atmospheric conditions.

The Company is designing a unique underwing platform that is modular, reusable, and able to host a variety of sensors, test articles, and other payloads for long-duration exposure to both high-speed and low-gravity conditions. This underwing platform is expected to support aerodynamic test articles, avionics, sensors, communications systems, electronic equipment, advanced materials, and other technologies for hypersonic programmes and microgravity research.

Leveraging the Company's operational F-104 fleet, a typical 45-minute mission can include up to a 10-minute Mach 2+ test window, providing significantly longer exposure than traditional wind tunnel test runs, which typically can last only seconds at a time, and compressing what could otherwise take days of facility scheduling into a single flight.

"As demand for hypersonic and advanced aerospace systems continues to grow, access to specialized test infrastructure remains limited, increasing demand for complementary commercial flight-test capabilities," said Tim Franta, CEO of Starfighters Space. "While ground wind tunnels remain essential for aerospace research and development, airborne testing can expose hardware to combinations of weather variation, vibration, acceleration, dynamic pressure, temperature and operational conditions that cannot always be fully reproduced in a fixed facility."

Wind Tunnel in the Sky builds on Starfighters Space's previous subsonic and supersonic flight-test experience, including testing conducted in support of its STARLAUNCH 1 demonstrator. As development progresses, the reusable platform is expected to expand commercial access to the Company's F-104 fleet for testing for next-generation aerospace, defence and space technologies.