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Alabama rocket startup Aevum just unveiled the world's biggest drone - a 28-ton autonomous behemoth that may soon rocket US military satellites into orbit
Once a satellite reaches Aevum's spaceport, company founder Jay Skylus says a mostly autonomous system can rocket it to orbit within 180 minutes.
Science & Tech
Scrappy launch startup Aevum unveiled the world's most massive drone on Thursday.
Called Ravn X, the 55,000-pound UAV is designed to drop a rocket in midair, which will shoot small satellites into orbit.
The US Air Force picked Aevum to fly a $4.9 million satellite mission in 2021. Aevum has also contracted a commercial mission.
Jay Skylus, Aevum's CEO and founder, says his company's aiming to launch customers' satellites within three hours of receiving them at a spaceport.
"We are not just a launch company — I can't emphasize that enough," he said.
Aevum, a quiet, scrappy, and ambitious rocket-launch startup, unveiled the biggest drone in the world on Wednesday.
Called Ravn X, the fully autonomous vehicle is 80 feet long, has a wingspan of 60 feet, and stands 18 feet tall. It's not the largest unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) by size - the wings of Northrop Grumman's MQ-4C Triton stretch nearly 131 feet. But the Ravn X wins on mass, weighing 55,000 pounds when you include the rocket that will drop out of its belly in midair and shoot a satellite into space.
Despite its unusual size and mission, the drone isn't so different from your standard aircraft. It flies like a typical plane, and it and its rocket use Jet A, a very common kerosene-based fuel, says Jay Skylus, the CEO and founder of Aevum.
"We don't need a launch site. All we need is a runway that's one mile long and a hanger," Skylus told Business Insider. (Even small commercial airports have runways that easily meet that mark.)
Aevum has toiled over the design for roughly five years in its makeshift headquarters: an old textile mill-turned-tech incubator in Alabama. Skylus said he mulled over the concept a decade prior to that as he hopped from NASA to one space startup after another. After being disappointed with the approaches he saw and resistance to new ideas, Skylus said, he scraped together a bit of funding and got to work with some aerospace colleagues.
Once Ravn X reaches the right location, speed, and altitude, its two-stage rocket is designed to drop, ignite within half a second, and launch a roughly 100-kilogram (220-lb) payload into low-Earth orbit. The approach is similar to air-launched rocket systems developed by Virgin Orbit's and Pegasus, though Skylus claims Aevum's unmanned version is more efficient, cost-effective, and enterprising.
Aevum is presenting a "new paradigm of access to space," Skylus said. "There's now ground launch, air launch, and autonomous launch."