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 companys 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 TWZs 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 cant say too much, but they are high-subsonic systems, Fendley told TWZ.
Theyre 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 Valkyries 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 that.
There are various ways to reduce an aircrafts 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 designs 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, thats 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 whats really interesting, when you combine it with a [non-stealthy] fourth-gen or even a third-gen system which, of course, the U.S.
doesnt 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 thats not adding risk to that system.So lets 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 thats hard to detect can, from a, lets 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 cant 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 dont put all that on one aircraft, he continued.
Lets just talk in rough numbers.
Lets say there are six useful mission systems.
And, again, rough numbers.
Lets call three of them sensor-type systems, three of them weapon-type systems.
We wont put all six on any one aircraft.
Well 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?In speaking with TWZ, Fendley also talked about how the modularity of the Apollo and Athena drones could allow them to be better tailored to a customers particular needs from a regional perspective.The European market is very different than the Pacific markets.
The European market is more interested in, lets call it, sensor capability, weapons capability doesnt 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 thats going to the Pacific, but has to fly a long way, so its carrying fuel.
So thats kind of the trade there.Right now, Kratos is working on Apollo and Athena configurations to focus more on that European market, he added.Source: The War Zone