Aircraft
Starfighters Space Sells Mach 2 Testing by the Sortie
Company says F-104 Starfighter jets offer a “wind tunnel in the sky”
Two Starfighters Space F-104s in flight
Starfighters operates eight F-104s from Kennedy Space Center and a second base in Midland, Texas. © Starfighters Space/Matt Haskell Photography

Getting time in a U.S. supersonic wind tunnel can take over a year, and new aerospace technology developers typically pay for the whole facility by the week. Starfighters Space thinks it can sell those customers something better: several minutes at Mach 2 under the wing of a fighter designed in the 1950s, with less wait time.

Based at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida with a second base at Midland International Air & Space Port in Texas, the company has a fleet of eight Lockheed F-104 Starfighters. It sells time on them to defense contractors, government laboratories, and universities that want to expose hardware to sustained flight at Mach 2, twice the speed of sound.

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