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Wind Tunnel in the Sky
Starfighters Space is what happens when a wind tunnel gets tired of sitting still and decides to fly. Built around the world’s only fleet of flight-ready F-104 Starfighters, our airborne test environment gives customers real Mach-speed conditions in the sky — not in a box with a fan and a very serious engineer.
Instead of static ground tests that are over in seconds, Starfighters can deliver exposure durations up to 20 times longer than legacy wind tunnel testing. That means more data, more realism, and fewer “well, that looked good on paper” moments.
Our underwing test platform turns each F-104 into a high-speed flying laboratory with both attitude and altitude. We test instrumentation at Mach speed, active control surfaces integrated with avionics at Mach speed, ignitors at Mach speed, and inlet technologies for ramjets and scramjets at Mach speed. In other words, if it needs to survive being blasted through the sky really, really fast, we’ve probably got a place for it.
For customers, that means less waiting, less guessing, and a lot less time begging for tunnel slots. Traditional facilities are expensive, oversubscribed, and about as flexible as a brick. Starfighters Space provides a mobile airborne platform that helps validate hardware sooner, generate better data, and reduce development risk — without turning your schedule into a cautionary tale.
By combining heritage aircraft performance with modern payload integration, Starfighters Space offers a one-of-a-kind test ecosystem for government and industry customers who need speed, precision, and repeatability. It’s not just a test platform — it’s a supersonic shortcut to better answers.
At a time when the nation faces a growing shortage of scalable wind tunnel capacity — alongside rapidly increasing demand driven by hypersonic development — this platform is not just useful, it’s necessary now
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