There’s a lot of hype around both drones and space-based tech, and Radical Aero wants to capitalize on both.
The Seattle-based stratospheric aircraft startup emerged from stealth after a $4.5M seed round last April and is making autonomous solar-powered drones that fly at high altitudes for months at a time. And on Wednesday, the company took a big step towards that goal, announcing the first successful prototype test flight of its new high-altitude UAS, the Evenstar.
High flyer: Stratospheric aircraft, on a basic level, aim to deliver ultra-high-resolution imaging and direct-to-device 5G connectivity at a lower cost than constellation and rocket launch-dependent satellites, and more navigability and payload capacity than high-altitude balloons.
Radical’s flagship platform, Evenstar, is their key to, as they put it, providing “humanity with enduring infrastructure in the sky.”
- It has a 120-foot wingspan, a 33-pound payload capacity, and a total mass of 240 pounds.
- It’s powered by solar panels on those super-wide wings, allowing it to fly for extended periods of time autonomously. Their ultimate goal is multi-month endurance flying at around 65,000 feet.
- On the defense front, that offers “wide area coverage, command-and-control, ISR, atmospheric sensing,” and other capabilities, Radical Co-Founder and CEO James Thomas told Tectonic.
- The prototype cost less than half a million to develop, and they expect the price to drop when they enter full production.
Radical has some work to do before the Evenstar is ready for all that. The prototype they flew in the recent test—which they developed in just three months—flew at a much lower altitude and wasn’t solar-powered. The goals of the test, he said, were “systems functionality and aero performance checks, collecting data, and validating our models.”
They’ve already flown smaller-scale solar-powered prototypes, but installing solar panels on the full-size Evenstar is the next step before high-altitude tests next year.
Cheap and cheerful: Radical isn’t the first company to build endurance stratospheric aircraft. AALTO, an Airbus subsidiary, holds the current record for continuous solar-powered flight at 67 days, but Radical says its competitive advantage is its iteration speed, performance, and price point—the cost of the AALTO Zephyr is expected to run in the millions.
“The cost element is totally different—this is a system that is 10x cheaper than anything else that’s out there,” Thomas said. “And then there’s robustness. You’re normally making a trade with these systems between performance and robustness [in payload capacity]…At Radical, we want our cake and we want to eat it too, and innovations across our system have allowed us to do both of those.”
All the way up: Going up to high-altitude tests won’t be easy, though. “Going up to high altitude changes a lot—the air is much thinner, so the way your power consumption changes, the thermals change,” Thomas said. “We have models for all of those things, and it’s really important to validate that they are accurate. We can do a lot of that in these early tests.”
Despite the challenges, Thomas is confident that his “cracked team of hardcore engineers” will take Radical to the stratosphere and stay there.