Latest news with #XQ-58Valkyrie
Yahoo
09-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Two Secretive Loyal Wingman Drones Aimed At European Market In Development From Kratos
Two new drone designs, Apollo and Athena, are in development at Kratos with a particular focus on collaborative operations with other crewed and uncrewed aircraft, and an eye toward sales in Europe. The modular Apollo and Athena designs are smaller than the company's XQ-58 Valkyrie, and could be configured to carry weapons, electronic warfare systems, or additional sensors. Steve Fendley, President of Kratos' Unmanned Systems Division, shared details about Apollo and Athena in an interview with TWZ's Howard Altman on the sidelines of the annual Modern Day Marine exposition last week. In December 2024, Kratos confirmed to us that it secured contracts for both drones, but said it could not provide any additional information. During a quarterly earnings call in August 2024, Kratos CEO Eric DeMarco had disclosed the Apollo contract and said one for Athena was expected in the coming months. The company has yet to release imagery of either design. 'I can't say too much, but there they are high-subsonic systems,' Fendley told TWZ. 'They're quite a bit smaller than the [XQ-58] Valkyrie. So, much smaller footprint.' Fendley also said that Kratos was targeting a sub-$5 million unit price for both Apollo and Athena, which have highly modular designs to allow them to be configured for multiple mission sets. Per Kratos' website at the time of writing, the company says the Valkyrie is 30 feet long, has a 27-foot wingspan, a dry weight of 2,500 pounds, and a maximum takeoff weight of 6,000 pounds. The drone also has a stated cruising speed of 0.72 Mach, a maximum speed of 0.85 Mach, and a maximum range of 3,000 nautical miles. In 2022, the company also announced it had developed a Block 2 version with a heavier overall weight, but did not provide a specific weight figure. A number of additional variants have been developed since then, but specific details about their configurations remain limited. Kratos has also said in the past that its goal is to eventually drive down Valkyrie's unit cost to around $2 million. However, last year, the company told TWZ that the price tag for a single XQ-58 was still between $4 and $6 million, depending on the exact configuration. In general, Kratos has historically focused on lower-cost designs and ones that can be manufactured relatively quickly. Apollo and Athena 'are designed to be hard to detect,' Fendley added, but did not elaborate on. There are various ways to reduce an aircraft's radar cross-section, as well as its infrared, auditory, and visual signatures. For instance, the external moldline, the shape and position of the engine intake and exhaust, and other features of the XQ-58 contribute to that design's low-observability (stealthiness). 'The big focus' with both of the new drones 'is interactive collaboration of multiple aircraft at the same time,' Fendley explained. 'So multiple uncrewed aircraft at the same time, collaborating, [and] performing' missions with, 'basically, any fighter or attack aircraft in the inventory, that's that's the intent.' 'So joining those [Apollo and Athena] aircraft, or even Valkyrie, up with a fifth-gen[eration stealth] fighter, you have some capability to get to go out in front. You have some capability to basically light up the enemy,' he continued. 'But what's really interesting, when you combine it with a [non-stealthy] fourth-gen or even a third-gen system – which, of course, the U.S. doesn't do much of that anymore, but the international customers do – what you really do is you substantially increase the capability of that third or fourth-gen system because now it has off-board capability that's not adding risk to that system.' 'So let's pick an F-16. The F-16 can have a Valkyrie or an Athena or Apollo doing part of a mission that it normally would do, but it would have to be within a risk area to be able to conduct that part,' he added. Speaking in more general terms about drones with the kinds of capabilities that Athena and Apollo are expected to offer, 'one use case is a system that's hard to detect … can, from a, let's say, from an EW [electronic warfare] perspective, can detect potential threats or potential targets of interest without being detected itself, which again, brings a capability that you can't do with a third or fourth-gen fighter system,' Fendley said. 'The other use case is if you have a group of them [the drones] and a handful of them are configured for EW, and a handful of them are carrying actual weapons – either air-to-surface, air-to-ground, or air-to-air – the sensor system can identify the target, can point out the target, basically pass the coordinates, and then the weapons aircraft can conduct the termination mission.' 'One of the other things that allows us to be more cost-effective than others is we don't put all that on one aircraft,' he continued. 'Let's just talk in rough numbers. Let's say there are six useful mission systems. And, again, rough numbers. Let's call three of them sensor-type systems, three of them weapon-type systems. We won't put all six on any one aircraft. We'll distribute that. It allows each aircraft to be much less expensive. It also allows you in a large mission, it allows you to distribute your risk and make it very hard for the enemy to decide 'do I want to shoot down a sensor airplane or a weapons airplane?'' For years now, TWZ has been highlighting the inherent benefits of distributing systems and associated roles among individual drones in a fully networked swarm or other collaborative environment. Beyond helping to reduce the cost of each uncrewed aircraft, including just by allowing them to be smaller and less complex, this also offers valuable operational flexibility since different drones can be performing multiple tasks simultaneously. It also means that the loss of some number of drones is less likely to immediately render the entire group ineffective. That stealthy 'loyal wingman' drones that also feature high degrees of autonomy and collaborative capabilities could be especially valuable force multipliers when paired with fourth-generation crewed combat jets is something TWZ has noted in the past, as well. This was a particular key point in a detailed case we previously laid out for how the trilateral Australia-United Kingdom-United States (AUKUS) defense cooperation agreement could offer an ideal framework for the shared development of loyal wingmen-type drones. In speaking with TWZ, Fendley also talked about out how the modularity of the Apollo and Athena drones could allow them to be better tailored to a customer's particular needs from a regional perspective. 'The European market is very different than the Pacific markets. The European market is more interested in, let's call it, … sensor capability, weapons capability doesn't need the long legs, the long endurance that you do for the Pacific,' he explained. 'What that allows you to do is that allows you to really load that airplane up with more weapons, for example, than you would for an aircraft that's going to the Pacific, but has to fly a long way, so it's carrying fuel. So that's kind of the trade there.' Right now, Kratos is working on Apollo and Athena configurations 'to focus more on that European market,' he added. There is already extensive work ongoing on various tiers of drone 'wingmen' across Europe, including in the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Poland, and Turkey. This reflects a global trend, as well. However, if Kratos can offer a particularly low-cost option that is readily adaptable to multiple mission sets, it could be very attractive to smaller air forces looking to bolster their airpower capabilities and overall capacity, and that cannot afford more exquisite crewed or uncrewed platforms. The core attributes of Apollo and Athena could be of interest to larger air arms, as well. The U.S. Air Force has indicated that it may now be leaning toward cheaper and simpler designs for the second iterative development phase, or Increment 2, of its Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) program. Kratos, which was notably absent from the CCA program's Increment 1 competition, has said on several occasions that it is interested in taking part in Increment 2. General Atomics and Anduril are currently developing designs, now designated YFQ-42A and YFQ-44A, respectively, under Increment 1. The Air Force has also previously said that Increment 2 could be the first phase of the CCA program to weave in foreign participation. The U.S. Marine Corps has separately said it is looking into whether certain roles and missions that are typically associated with larger, more exquisite drones, could be performed, at least in part, by smaller designs. It's worth noting here that the Air Force and the Marine Corps are also currently the only two known operators of Kratos' XQ-58. The U.S. Navy has also outlined a vision for future carrier-capable CCA-type drones that would be low-cost enough to be 'consumable,' and then expended as one-way attack munitions, or as targets in training or testing, at the end of relatively short service lives. CCA-related work across the Air Force, Marine Corps, and Navy is directly intertwined via a joint service agreement. With Kratos now having secured contracts for both Apollo and Athena, more details about both of these specific designs may begin to emerge. Contact the author: joe@
Yahoo
05-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Kratos Close To 'A Couple' Final Versions Of XQ-58 Valkyrie For The Marines
Kratos' XQ-58 Valkyrie continues to rapidly evolve, with the company being close to final configurations of the drone for the USMC, which has been testing it extensively. This comes as the USAF also now appears to be looking for less expensive designs for the second increment of its Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) program. Kratos has historically focused on lower-cost designs that can be manufactured quickly, which they hope will put them in a good position for breaking their way into the Air Force's high-stakes CCA program. Currently, Anduril and General Atomics are providing aircraft for CCA's Increment One. TWZ talked with Kratos Defense President of Unmanned Systems Division, Steve Fendley, about Valkyrie developments, as well as some of the company's other combat drone programs, on the show floor of the annual Modern Day Marine conference in Washington, D.C., last week. 'So we're obviously, we've been doing a lot of development work for the Marines, a lot of integration of mission systems, a lot of ground and flight test of those mission systems,' Fendley said. 'And that's that's continued to where we're, we're pretty close to having a couple final versions of the aircraft.' Fendley continued, 'So we've been working PAACK-P [Penetrating Affordable Autonomous Collaborative Killer program] for a number of years, and like I say, we've got a couple mission configurations of the system that we've developed for that, for the Marines, for that purpose. And those exist. You know, those exist today. We're obviously producing the aircraft in Oklahoma City on a regular basis. So we're basically teed up to be able to accept a more substantial production-type order.' It's unclear what the two variants will be, but we do know Kratos has previously said it was working on at least five XQ-58 variants, including one that was optimized for electronic attack. The Marines have been testing XQ-58s with precursor electronic warfare payloads. This will likely result in an electronic warfare variant that you can read about here. The ability to conduct kinetic strikes would also be high on the list, but we cannot say for sure if that will be one of the two mission configurations. There is also the shadowy XQ-58B designation, and the exact configuration it represents remains unclear. When asked about the B model, Fendley would not address it directly. For the USMC, the XQ-58 makes a lot of sense, especially for its ability to be launched and recovered from very austere locations that do not feature a runway. The base model Valkyrie launches via rocket booster from a rail system and is recovered via parachute. Now the company has put forward two new capabilities that will allow the XQ-58 to be launched from traditional runways. One is a wheeled launch trolley that can put a standard XQ-58 into the air via a runway, but the aircraft will still recover via parachute. The other and newest adaptation of the Valkyrie sees it gaining landing gear, so it can operate like a normal aircraft from a fixed runway. This has certain benefits, including enhanced sortie rates, but it also has drawbacks. Fendley says the landing gear model will sacrifice payload bay capacity for its landing gear, with the ability to carry two Small Diameter Bombs (SDB) internally instead of four on the rocket and trolley-launched models. It can still be rocket-launched, though, as it has the same gross weight as the standard version. This also opens the possibility for rocket-launched, but runway-recovered operations. Regardless, being able to more seamlessly operate alongside its manned counterparts where runways are available is a huge plus for the Valkyrie family and opens the door larger for a possible USAF CCA contract win in the future. The landing gear-equipped version of the Valkyrie is slated to make its first flight this year. The trolley-launched configuration was first demonstrated last year. 'We're continuing to work with the Air Force evolving different versions of the Valkyrie, and of course, not necessarily related to Valkyrie, but the Air Force's CCA program is obviously well underway, and we're obviously still very, very interested in that,' Fendley said. 'Can't talk much about that, of course, that's classified, but very high level of interest from the company on that program. I think you've probably heard recently that there's probably going to be a focus there on a lower-cost system. And you know, of course, we're optimized [for that]. That's been our focus the whole time – 'how do we optimize performance per cost?' … Yeah, we're very interested in pursuing it… we are aggressively pursuing interest in that program.' Fendley elaborated further on how the company, which is best known for its target drones, has deep roots in balancing cost against finite requirements: 'I would say the Kratos' approach to developing systems in the first place, which is we always… pick a cost target, and then we'll allocate that cost target across the subsystems that make up a system. And as the designers and developers are going through developing it, they keep closing a loop on that cost, so when they come up with something and say, 'oops, this is 10% more than our cost target,' well, we throw it out and say, 'no, refine it. We've got to get to this cost.' So it's specifically designed to meet a certain cost level. And that's really our major discriminator against the traditional primes.' We also asked if Kratos put forward a proposed aircraft for CCA increment one. Here what Fendley said: 'It's a complicated question because of the stages that occurred on that, the development of that program. There are multiple configurations of CCA-type aircraft that Kratos has… We've made those known. However, the specific public requirements for Increment One vary a little bit from the traditional Kratos approach, which is more cost optimized… It's a more exquisite type approach than we traditionally take.' Finally, we also got an update on Thanatos, the company's stealthy drone that remains largely shrouded in secrecy from Fendley, who said: 'Thanatos is progressing well. There's some international interest in it, too. We don't have approval yet to do any kind of export, but we may get that… I can't give specific details on the aircraft or the specific customers, but it's progressing well, and it's a unique capability, but again, tied to the high performance per cost ratio.' The initial flight testing of the shadowy Thanatos was completed late last year, and similar testing of a fully mission-configured aircraft is now quickly approaching, Fendley continued. 'So treat this as the basic aircraft, the non-fully-mission aircraft was effectively completed late last year and looked very good. And as we're moving forward, it's more integration of mission systems and integration of autonomy elements.' Fendley said testing of this more production representative craft would begin in the third or fourth quarter of this year. Howard Altman contributed to this story. Contact the editor: Tyler@
