Divergent and CoAspire design and deliver additively manufactured RAACM cruise missile in record time
May 1, 2025
Divergent Technologies Inc., located in Torrance, California, USA, and CoAspire, LLC, have announced the successful design, development, manufacture, and flight testing of CoAspire’s Rapidly Adaptable Affordable Cruise Missile (RAACM). The partnership between CoAspire and Divergent has enabled the RAACM to progress from concept to flight in record time, proving the capability of building and scaling weapons systems for changing operational needs.
CoAspire, in close coordination with Divergent, developed an ambitious programme roadmap requiring delivery of first fuselages, wings and fins from Divergent within ten weeks, with fully integrated test rounds entering ground testing within fourteen weeks, culminating in a successful flight test that met customer and programmatic requirements. To deliver fuselages at speed, Divergent leveraged extensive in-house digital tools, enabling the team to rapidly align on a cost-effective, manufacturable version of CoAspire’s unique cruise missile design that optimised for fuel tank capacity while meeting all structural performance requirements.
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The Divergent team seamlessly transitioned from digital design to Additive Manufacturing and automated assembly, with manufacturing instructions generated from the designs dynamically assigned to the company’s software-defined manufacturing assets. Following the first hardware deliveries in week ten, Divergent continued to support the CoAspire team by delivering digital design, analysis, and manufacturing artefacts required for the airworthiness approval process.
These accelerated results were made possible thanks to the Divergent Adaptive Production System (DAPS), Divergent’s end-to-end engineering design, industrial-rate Additive Manufacturing, and robotic assembly to enable structures development and manufacturing at higher performance, speed and scalability than conventional manufacturing processes.
“Our strength is this next generation capability to digitally engineer and manufacture to deliver first-time-right, production ready hardware within 10 weeks. RAACM is a case study in what’s possible when adaptability is built into every phase of development,” said Lukas Czinger, President & Chief Executive Officer of Divergent.
Doug Denneny, Founder & Chief Executive Officer of CoAspire shared, “Divergent has rewritten the rules of development speed for complex flight vehicles. The flexibility that Divergent has provided on such a tight schedule was key to enabling our flight-test and program success.”
Under contract with the Air Force, RAACM is designed to be modular, scalable, adaptable and rapidly deployable across air, land, and sea platforms. RAACM is roughly the size of a 500lb class MK-82 or GBU-38, and features a deployable wing, turbojet engine, guidance system, and lethal payload; it can be launched from any aircraft compatible with the GBU-38. CoAspire is the prime contractor on RAACM and has built a supply chain spanning 26 US states and two European countries.
