Program roadmap
The milestones we are building toward, in the order we expect to reach them. None of these has happened yet. When one does, it moves to a newsroom with the date it actually occurred and the number it actually measured — including the parts that do not go the way we planned.
9 entries · nothing here has occurred
Every entry below is a target with a date we have not reached. The figures are the acceptance criteria we intend to test against, not results. We publish the criteria in advance specifically so that when a test happens, the number cannot be moved to fit it.
Planned. 1,100 acres on the Savannah River are under purchase option; no site work has started. Mass grading is scoped at 4.1 million cubic yards balanced on site. A jurisdictional wetland delineation is expected to take the buildable envelope from 1,100 acres to about 760, which is the number the schedule is built against. The deciding factor in the site choice was the federal channel at the property line: a 190-tonne hull has no road route.
Planned. An 18,400 lb mass-and-inertia simulator leaving a 60 ft transportable rail under rocket assist — 3.4 g axial for 2.9 seconds to 155 kt, from an unimproved hardstand. Acceptance includes erecting and aligning the rail in under 30 minutes with four people. This test qualifies the launcher, not the aircraft. It is the question the concept lives or dies on: whether a Group 5 airframe can reach flying speed in sixty feet with no runway anywhere in the plan.
Planned. The objective is a month-scale submerged transit with no drydock, no lift over 30 tons and no operator contact after departure. The trial article is intended to be a 68 ft energy, propulsion and autonomy testbed; no hull has been laid. The result that would matter is navigational — holding position without a GPS fix by acoustic one-way-travel-time ranging against surveyed nodes, to a bound we will publish before we attempt it.
Planned, and tied to FORGE-1 first article. Airframe 001 is intended as a full-scale structural and systems integration article, not a flight article. The test frame would cover limit and ultimate load cases including the 3.4 g launch-rail case, the 9 g airframe limit, and asymmetric mission-bay loading. WRAITH has not flown. First flight is targeted for 2029 Q1, and we will publish the date it actually happens rather than the date we hoped for.
Planned. The requirement is a nine-minute turn from an unattended pad: the interceptor lands, the pad exchanges the energy module and re-arms the rail, and the aircraft signs its own readiness state into the ledger before the gate will permit another launch. A machine that cannot attest to its own condition does not get to fly, and turns refused by that check will be counted in the number rather than excluded from it. Counter-UAS magazine depth is an availability problem, not a missile problem.
Planned, against a purpose-built void in hard rock. The acceptance criterion is a plan-position fix tight enough to support a breaching plan rather than a survey. Seismic and gravimetric channels alone are expected to bound the target to tens of metres; the cosmic-ray muon flux deficit is the channel intended to collapse that ellipse, and the one an adversary cannot spoof, because the source is the atmosphere. Target detector stack: 620 kg, 210 W, trailer-mobile, no ground coupling.
Planned. The STYX hull is in design and would not sail before 2029, so the mission deck is intended to be trialled as a surrogate installation on a chartered workboat. The objective is launch and recovery in Sea State 4 with meaningful deck heave, and recoveries waved off by the deck’s own gate will be recorded as such. The point of the trial is not the boat — it is whether an arsenal ship can regenerate its own magazine at sea.
In preparation. A paper proposing on-node hash-chained signing as the evidentiary baseline for autonomous engagement, written for acquisition officials and their counsel rather than for engineers. It will publish the record schema, the key hierarchy, the peer-witnessing scheme, the export format and an offline verifier, and map each to a requirement in DoD Directive 3000.09. The verifier is built and under test; neither it nor the paper is published yet. We intend to propose it as a standard, not a product feature — if it is adopted widely and we never sell a line of code because of it, the argument was still worth making.
Site selection is complete; the parcel is under purchase option and nothing is built. Eleven candidate sites were screened on one variable before any other was considered: can a 190-tonne hull leave the property under its own buoyancy. Three had a federal navigation channel at the property line. North Charleston was rejected on contiguous acreage, not on water. Savannah then won on the ordinary variables — I-95 and I-16, an aerospace and high-rate assembly workforce already trained in the region, Fort Stewart and Hunter Army Airfield inside 45 miles for test, and no winter that stops a concrete pour.
Nothing on this page has happened yet. When a milestone is reached it moves to a newsroom, dated the day it occurred and carrying the number that was actually measured — including where that number is worse than the criterion above. Enquiries: press@fantom.aero.
Media enquiries and policy
How we work with reporters
Write to press@fantom.aero. We answer within one business day, including to say that we cannot answer.
We do not trade access for coverage, and we do not offer exclusives in exchange for framing. If you are working on a story that is unfavourable to us, you get the same response time and the same engineer on the call as anyone else. Where a number on this site is a design target rather than a measured result, we will say so before you print it, because a correction later costs us more than the paragraph costs now.
What we will not discuss: classified programs, the identity or operations of customers who have not chosen to be identified, and any technical data controlled under ITAR or the EAR. That restriction is a legal obligation rather than a communications preference, and it applies equally to flattering questions.
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