Perseus Defense tests cheap missile against drone

Counter-drone missile maker Perseus Defense has released video of one of its small, low-cost interceptors climbing into the sky and hitting a hovering multirotor drone, which the company's chief executive described as the first time an "attritable" missile has shot down a drone. Jason Cornelius, co-founder and CEO of the Texas-based company, posted the eight-second clip on social media on Nov. 2. Attritable weapons are cheap enough that militaries can afford to use them in large numbers and lose them, which is the point of an interceptor meant to be fired at inexpensive drones. The company has also not explained how this shot differs from earlier tests. Perseus said it achieved radar-cued multi-missile launches and fully active guidance intercepts during the U.S. Army's Golden Shield exercise earlier this year, its first military-hosted live-fire demonstration. Other inexpensive guided weapons, such as laser-guided rockets, have also been used to bring down drones, so the "first" label is the company's own description. Perseus is building a missile it calls Harpe, a guided interceptor about 61 cm (24 inches) long with a stated range of 2 km (1.2 miles). The company is aiming for a price below $10,000 per shot, far less than the $100,000-plus interceptors militaries often fire at drones that may cost only a few hundred or a few thousand dollars. In September, Perseus fired its Mk-III interceptor from an eight-round launcher at Yuma Proving Ground, Arizona, during Falcon Peak 26.2, a counter-drone experiment run by U.S. Northern Command, the North American Aerospace Defense Command and the Pentagon's Joint Interagency Task Force 401. The company said each Mk-III cost about $2,500 to build. The launcher weighs less than 36 kg (79 pounds), light enough to move without heavy vehicles, and Northern Command evaluated the system alongside other short-range options for protecting U.S. bases. Cornelius, a former NASA engineer who worked on the Dragonfly rotorcraft for Saturn's moon Titan, founded Perseus in 2025 with Steve Messinger, a former Boeing engineer and the company's chief technology officer. The two met as aerospace engineering graduate students at Penn State. Perseus went through the Y Combinator startup accelerator's summer 2025 batch and has raised $6.5 million in seed funding.