After years of little activity, the Ravn X rolled out of a hangar at Long Beach Airport for its very first autonomous taxi tests and caught the attention of local enthusiasts. Designed to launch small payloads into space, its planned first mission in 2021 has still yet to take place.
At eighty feet long and with a wingspan of sixty feet, the Ravn X is a huge autonomous aircraft said to pack two afterburning turbofan engines that allow high subsonic flight up to an altitude of 60,000 feet.
At maximum velocity, the Ravn X is designed to release the rocket-powered second stage which then takes over boosting the 100 kilogram payload into orbit. This fills a niche in providing a responsive launch capability that can be readied at much shorter notice compared to traditional launch vehicles like the Falcon 9 or Vulcan Centaur.
Aevum distinguishes Ravn X from air launch methods (such as Northrop Grumman’s Pegasus or Virgin Orbit’s LauncherOne) as the vehicle is not dropping the rocket but rather accelerating it up through the atmosphere. pic.twitter.com/mVIT8pzmQi
— Michael Sheetz (@thesheetztweetz) December 3, 2020
The U.S. Air Force contracted Aevum in 2019 to provide the launch system for the ASLON-45 mission, featuring a number of cubesats. To this date, the Ravn X has still not flown and as time went on it became questionable whether any development was proceeding on the aircraft.
However quiet the company was about its operations, we can now see that work did continue, and the Ravn X has finally completed its first taxi tests.
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It is not immediately apparent whether this airframe – also marked and registered as N567RX – is the same as the one shown off by Aevum in 2020, which we reported on here. It may still be a mockup rather than a flight representative airframe, and certainly the landing gear appears to be fixed and for ground use only.
No official announcement has yet been forthcoming from Aevum – which is headquartered in Long Beach – or any other stakeholder as to why the Ravn X made such a sudden appearance after years in the dark.
If The Aviationist learns any more about this story, we will be sure to update you.
Many thanks to Long Beach local Matthew Dawson for sending us his images of the Ravn X’s roll out. You can find him on Instagram here.
