Torrance defense-tech company Castelion has landed another major U.S. Navy award as it races to move its Blackbeard hypersonic weapon from development toward operational use.

The Department of War announced August 25 that Castelion received a $89,997,162 firm-fixed-price order from the Navy.

The new work covers engineering, technical support, logistics and manufacturing services intended to advance Blackbeard toward what the Navy calls Early Operational Capability.

The award comes at a remarkable time for the Torrance company.

Only days earlier, Castelion announced a $1 billion Series C financing package intended to dramatically increase production of Blackbeard and accelerate development of additional longer-range weapons systems.

Blackbeard is designed around a different model from traditional hypersonic weapons programs: Castelion says the missile is being engineered from the beginning for lower-cost, high-volume production rather than extremely limited quantities.

The latest Navy award is also part of a growing series of military contracts for the program. Earlier this year, Castelion received Navy awards to advance Blackbeard testing, integration and production, including plans to integrate the missile onto the F/A-18 Super Hornet.

The significance for Torrance is increasingly difficult to ignore. Within the same city, companies are now developing satellite communications systems, autonomous drones, nuclear microreactors and hypersonic weapons — sectors that once would have been scattered across entirely different aerospace centers.

Castelion’s latest contract is another indication that Torrance’s emerging defense-tech cluster is not merely attracting investment. Its products are increasingly moving toward actual government deployment.

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