▸ 27 September 2026 · Dr Joni Sytsma
Rocket Fast Drones named a finalist in the US Army's xTech|Apex Intercept competition
The US Army has published the finalist roster for xTech|Apex Intercept, its search for low-cost interceptors to work alongside the Patriot air and missile defence system. Rocket Fast Drones is one of thirty finalists, under Topic 4, Fire Control and Flight Guidance.
The US Army has published the finalist roster for xTech|Apex Intercept, and Rocket Fast Drones Pty Ltd is on it. We are competing under Topic 4, Fire Control and Flight Guidance Implementation, with a submission titled “Controlled Rocket: Open-Architecture Flight Guidance and Fire Control for Low-Cost Interceptors”.
The finalist award is USD 25,000 and a place in Part 2, an in-person demonstration in front of US Army and Department of War evaluators and end users.
What the competition is for
The Army is looking for low-cost interceptors that can work alongside the Patriot air and missile defence system against air breathing threats, cruise missiles, and close-range and short-range ballistic missiles. The competition is run by the Army’s FUZE xTech Program together with the Capability Program Executive for Defensive Fires, and it is split into four topics: complete interceptors and their fire control, solid rocket motors, seekers, and the fire control and flight guidance implementation that aims and steers the interceptor. Ours is the fourth.
The Army took white paper submissions of up to five pages between 7 and 24 July, with an optional five minute video, and selected up to thirty finalists. Part 2 demonstrations run between 1 October and 30 November. The Army intends to name up to eighteen winners by 31 December 2026, with USD 7.25 million set aside across the four topic areas out of a total prize pool of up to USD 8 million.
Who else is on the list
Reading the roster is the most useful thing anyone can do to understand what this means. The thirty finalists include RTX, which builds the Patriot missile, along with Northrop Grumman, L3Harris, General Dynamics Ordnance and Tactical Systems, Anduril, AeroVironment, QinetiQ, Ursa Major, X-Bow Systems, Leonardo DRS, Persistent Systems, Technology Service Corporation and Toyon.
Three Australian companies made the thirty: Advanced Navigation, DefendTex and us. Cambridge Aerospace is British. The competition was open to small, medium and large businesses in the United States and allied countries, and the list reflects that.
What this is, and what it is not
A prize is a prize. It is not a contract, it is not a program of record, and nobody in the US Army has endorsed anything we build. People who assess this work for a living read what we submitted and decided it was worth a closer look. At our size that matters a great deal, and it is also exactly that and nothing more.
We cannot describe what we proposed. The Army treats every submission as privileged information, and Australian export rules apply on top of that. The competition name, the topic name and our submission title are public because the Army published them. Everything past that is not ours to publish, and the answer will be the same every time it is asked.
How we got here
Rocket Fast Drones started with a small cooperative research grant from the Queensland Defence Science Alliance. That work was about battlefield medical logistics, and what it taught us is that speed saves lives. It is the reason our aircraft are fast, and it remains the mission the AEROMed configuration is built for.
The EP250 that grew out of that thinking is not a medical aircraft. It is a multi-role one. Over the past year we have taken it from a logistics airframe to a plausible end to end guidance and fire control chain for an interceptor, and that is what we put in front of the Army.
Plausible is the right word and we have chosen it deliberately. The individual flight regimes are demonstrated in flight. The terminal guidance is validated in simulation, not flown. The whole chain has not yet been flown as one, and the Part 2 demonstration is where we intend to show how far it has come.
The numbers behind the submission
Everything we publish is flown rather than modelled. Demonstrated cruise is 143 km/h and demonstrated maximum is 179 km/h. Our longest single flight is 12.2 km, flown over six laps on 1 July 2026, landing with 40 per cent of the battery still in reserve.
As at today the published record stands at 267 logged flights across 53 flying days, with 208 soft landings. Every one of those flights is listed with its date and its landing quality at docs.rocketfastdrones.com/flight-record, including the ones we did not land softly. It costs Brisbane rent to build one of these, at the scale we build them.
Two engineers did the work behind this submission, in a workshop in West End, Brisbane. Between them they have delivered more since the white paper was written than was in it.
What happens next
We demonstrate. Affordable defence against cheap mass is one of the more important unsolved problems in the world right now, we are one of many companies working on it, and we are looking forward to finding out how our approach measures up against the rest of the field.
Designed, built and flight tested in Brisbane, Australia.
Media enquiries: joni.sytsma@rocketfastdrones.com