America just threw almost everything it could at Golden Dome and Golden Dome shot it all down.

That’s the good news. But the less good news is what we didn’t throw at it…

Hypersonic missiles.

Those may ultimately be among the most dangerous weapons Golden Dome will ever be asked to defeat.

And right now, America has a problem…

Because before you can build a defense against a new weapon, you have to be able to test that defense.

Over and over again.

Under realistic conditions.

And when it comes to hypersonics, America simply hasn’t been able to do that nearly often enough.

That’s created what the Pentagon’s own Defense Innovation Unit calls a “national bottleneck” in hypersonic development.

And one tiny aerospace company is helping GE Aerospace break it wide open.

Golden Dome Just Proved It Can Fight

A few weeks ago, the Pentagon put real pieces of the emerging Golden Dome architecture through an integrated missile-defense test.

And this wasn’t supposed to be an easy demonstration…

Golden Dome program manager Gen. Michael Guetlein emphasized that the military is deliberately pushing the system toward failure.

It’s trying to discover where sensors, software, interceptors, and command systems break before an enemy gets the opportunity to find out for us.

Yet the latest exercise delivered a remarkable result:

“We shot down everything that we put in the air in a matter of 34 minutes,” Guetlein said.

The Pentagon hasn’t disclosed exactly what targets were used or which interceptors destroyed them.

But the point of the exercise was bigger than any single missile.

Golden Dome isn’t one weapon.

It’s supposed to be a gigantic network tying together satellites, radars, sensors, command systems, and multiple kinds of interceptors into one integrated shield.

And the latest testing indicates that important pieces of that architecture can already work together.

That’s a huge step forward.

But it’s only a step.

Because the threats Golden Dome is ultimately supposed to defeat include something far harder…

Hypersonic weapons.

The Missile That Doesn’t Play by the Old Rules

Traditional ballistic missiles are incredibly fast but they’re also comparatively predictable.

Once detected and tracked, their trajectory can be modeled. Missile-defense systems can calculate where the warhead is going and try to put an interceptor in its path.

Hypersonic weapons change that equation…

They can travel at more than five times the speed of sound while maneuvering through the atmosphere.

That combination of speed and maneuverability dramatically compresses reaction times and makes predicting their path much more difficult.

China and Russia have poured enormous resources into these systems.

And Golden Dome is explicitly being designed with maneuvering hypersonic weapons among the threats it eventually needs to counter.

There’s just one major problem:

If we want to learn how to shoot down hypersonic weapons, we need realistic hypersonic targets to shoot at.

And those are extraordinarily difficult and expensive to produce.

The Pentagon has dozens of hypersonic programs underway, but the Defense Innovation Unit says progress has been constrained by a shortage of affordable, reusable, high-cadence testing platforms.

Think about that…

You can design the best radar in the world.

You can develop a revolutionary interceptor.

You can create advanced algorithms capable of predicting the movements of a maneuvering missile.

But eventually you have to leave the computer simulation behind.

You have to put hardware in the sky.

And you have to do it again.

And again.

And again.

That testing bottleneck is exactly what the Pentagon’s HyCAT program — Hypersonic and High-Cadence Airborne Testing Capabilities — was created to solve.

And last week, that program took another major step forward.

GE Aerospace Just Got the Call

On September 1, GE Aerospace announced that the Defense Innovation Unit had awarded it a new contract to advance development of a hypersonic test bed under HyCAT.

GE will develop a liquid-fueled system consisting of a booster and hypersonic cruiser that can be combined into a complete test vehicle.

The goal is relatively simple to explain: Give the military a more flexible way to repeatedly put hypersonic systems into realistic flight conditions.

That could allow engineers to test propulsion, materials, guidance, sensors, communications…

And eventually technologies designed to track and defeat hypersonic weapons.

Now, GE is one of the biggest aerospace companies on Earth.

But buried deeper inside this story is a company that’s a tiny fraction of its size.

Starfighters Space (NYSE American: FJET).

And it’s been working on this problem for years.

A Mach 2 Laboratory in the Sky

Starfighters owns and operates a fleet of F-104 Starfighter aircraft.

These jets were originally designed during the Cold War to intercept Soviet ICBMs.

But today, Starfighters is using them for something completely different…

Research, testing, and eventually, air launch.

You see, the F-104 can sustain roughly Mach 2 flight and carry experimental equipment into real supersonic conditions.

That effectively turns the aircraft into a flying laboratory.

And GE Aerospace has already used it…

Starfighters previously joined the HyCAT effort as a subcontractor working with Innoveering, which GE Aerospace acquired a few years ago.

Then, as part of GE’s Atmospheric Test of Launched Air-breathing System program, Starfighters flew an advanced propulsion test vehicle aboard one of its F-104s during three successful supersonic captive-carry flights.

That matters because hypersonic development doesn’t begin at Mach 5…

Before a new engine, sensor, material, or vehicle ever reaches hypersonic speeds, engineers need to understand how it behaves during acceleration, at altitude, in extreme airflow, and under real aerodynamic stresses.

Starfighters provides a relatively inexpensive way to gather that data in the actual atmosphere rather than relying entirely on a wind tunnel or simulation.

And now that GE is advancing the next phase of the HyCAT program, the opportunity could become much bigger.

You Can’t Build a Shield Without Something to Shoot At

This is the part investors shouldn’t overlook…

The hypersonic arms race isn’t simply a competition to build the fastest missile.

It’s creating an entire supporting industry.

America needs better propulsion systems, better heat-resistant materials, better sensors, better guidance, better tracking, better interceptors, and an enormous amount of testing.

The Pentagon says its existing test infrastructure is one of the biggest obstacles standing in the way.

And that makes companies capable of increasing testing cadence strategically important.

Because ultimately, Golden Dome’s effectiveness against hypersonic threats won’t be determined by a PowerPoint presentation.

It’ll be determined in the sky…

We’ll have to launch realistic threats, track them, predict their movements, and destroy them.

Then we’ll need to make the test harder and do it again.

That’s how missile defenses mature.

And that’s why the latest Golden Dome success may actually make the hypersonic testing problem even more important.

We just demonstrated that large pieces of America’s future missile shield can work together against the threats we can currently test.

Now we have to prepare it for the threats that are much harder to reproduce.

GE Aerospace is helping build that capability.

And quietly flying alongside one of the largest aerospace companies on Earth is tiny Starfighters Space.

Sometimes the biggest defense programs create opportunities in unexpected places.

Golden Dome could become one of the largest military technology projects America has attempted in decades.

But before its most advanced interceptors can defend the country from hypersonic missiles, someone has to help give America the ability to test them.

And Starfighters may have found itself directly in the middle of that mission.