Mach Industries Unveils Vertical-Takeoff Cruise Missile

California-based startup Mach Industries is developing a vertical-takeoff cruise missile demonstrator for the U.S. Army’s experimental Strategic Strike program, the company said March 4.

The missile concept by Mach Industries, founded by former Massachusetts Institute of Technology student Ethan Thornton, envisions a transformation in the striking power of the Army’s company or battalion-sized maneuver units.

Instead of being limited to mortars, towed howitzers and other short-range capabilities, the Strategic Strike missile concept proposes to equip small units with a weapon that can travel as far as 290 km (180 mi.)—a distance company officials acknowledged is limited only by policy, not the inherent performance of the turbojet-powered missile.

“I truly think the product team we’ve assembled here will drive generational value to the U.S. at this critical time,” said Thornton, who, now 21, secured a seed investment by Sequoia Capital in 2023.

The concept anticipates that the Strategic Strike missile will be cheap enough when ordered in volume to compare with the unit price of short-range, guided rockets, such as the Army’s Guided Multiple Launch Rocket System, Thornton said.

“It's low-cost enough to use like you would rocket-based artillery at very, very, very high volumes,” Thornton said.

To deploy such a weapon, the Army would need to extend command-and-control systems for long-range fires to the small unit level, rather than reserve such technologies for brigade or division-level formations.

But the Strategic Strike concept proposes to give small maneuver units an option to target a new class of enemy threats, such as long-range Iranian Shahed and Russian Gerat one-way attack munitions.

The idea remains at the experimental level. The contracting agency, the Army Applications Laboratory, ordered five Strategic Strike missiles from Mach Industries last September for proof-of-concept testing.