Divergent, CoAspire 3D-print cruise missile, reach first flight in 16 weeks

A clean-sheet, additively manufactured cruise missile went from concept to first flight in 16 weeks, a pace Divergent Technologies and CoAspire say they achieved by pushing the entire airframe through Divergent’s AI-driven Divergent Adaptive Production System, or DAPS.

Divergent and CoAspire publicly announced on April 24, 2025 that CoAspire’s Rapidly Adaptable Affordable Cruise Missile, RAACM, had been designed, developed, manufactured, and flight-tested under a timeline that looks more like a consumer hardware sprint than a traditional defense program. Divergent laid out a roadmap that called for first delivery of fuselages, wings, and fins within 10 weeks, integrated test rounds entering ground testing within 14 weeks, and a successful flight test that met “customer and programmatic requirements.” Divergent CEO Lukas Czinger summed up the pitch as “production ready hardware within 10 weeks,” while CoAspire CEO Doug Denneny said Divergent had “rewritten the rules of development speed for complex flight vehicles.”

CoAspire, the prime contractor for RAACM, describes the weapon as a 3D-printed cruise missile and says it has successfully flown in tests from an A-4 Skyhawk jet fighter. The design intent is bluntly manufacturing-first: reduce assembly tooling and touch labor, keep the architecture modular enough to swap payloads, then scale up, with larger variants potentially traveling “hundreds of miles.”

Divergent has said RAACM is under contract with the U.S. Air Force and sized in a familiar sweet spot: roughly the footprint of a 500-pound class Mk-82 or GBU-38. The company also says the missile can be launched from any aircraft compatible with the GBU-38, a detail that matters because integration is where “cheap missile” projects often go to die, long before anyone argues about print settings or material allowables.

Inside Divergent’s Torrance, California facility, the manufacturing claim is not about a single miracle print but about throughput. Reporting in March 2026 described an AI-driven system the size of a shipping container printing cruise-missile airframes in aluminum and “proprietary advanced metals,” with each Divergent printer capable of producing “hundreds” of missile airframes annually. The same reporting put completed missiles, including components from other contractors, in the $200,000-$500,000 range, compared with “legacy standard missiles” priced at $2 million-$6 million each.

This did not come out of nowhere. On Nov. 28, 2023, General Atomics Aeronautical Systems released an additive-manufactured Advanced Air-Launched Effects vehicle, A2LE, from an MQ-20 Avenger weapons bay at Dugway Proving Ground in Utah, built with Divergent using DAPS, as an early validation step for rapid, lower-cost air vehicle development.

The timing also lines up with the Air Force’s broader appetite for volume. Aviation Week reported in March 2026 that “low-cost” cruise-missile-like weapons under a Family of Affordable Mass Missiles effort have included publicly discussed requirements such as a 500-pound class weapon with at least 250 nautical miles of range, production goals around 1,000 rounds per year, and unit cost targets not exceeding $300,000, with deliveries provisionally scheduled in April 2026 at a rate of 25 missiles a month. Whether RAACM becomes a template or a one-off, it is already the clearest signal yet that additive manufacturing in defense is moving from bracket-printing headlines to complete, flight-tested vehicles on a schedule measured in weeks.