German startup POLARIS Spaceplanes has flown its COBRA prototype for the first time. The company said the sortie was “perfectly smooth,” covered more than 20 km and involved a takeoff mass above 600 kg. Follow-on flights are planned in the coming months.
COBRA is the airframe for AirLAS — Airborne Launching and Attack System — a joint project with Diehl Defence. The point is not dogfighting. It is an uncrewed truck for the IRIS-T air-to-air missile: take the missile off a fixed launcher, put it on a moving jet-powered drone, and fire from wherever the aircraft can reach.
A Missile With a Runway of Its Own
Diehl and POLARIS signed an exclusive cooperation deal at the 2025 Paris Air Show and showed a Cobra 600 demonstrator at ILA Berlin in June 2026. The six-metre flying-wing design uses small turbojets and a top-mounted rail for one IRIS-T. Images from the first flight show the prototype without a dummy missile. Later sorties are expected to carry a representative mass.
Launched from the air, IRIS-T would start with more energy than a ground shot and could be repositioned against aircraft, drones, cruise missiles or helicopters. That is the sales pitch to air-defence units that cannot put a Patriot or IRIS-T SLM battery on every approach.
From Spaceplane Tests to a Weapon Truck
POLARIS is better known for reusable spaceplane demonstrators such as MIRA. COBRA reuses that small-jet, flying-wing work at aircraft scale rather than orbital speed. First flight had slipped from 2025 into 2026; clearing the airframe now lets the companies start the slower work of carriage, release and eventual live-fire trials.