That looks like something from the First Order! Very cool technology. Someday we will have aircraft that can transform into spacecraft and back at will.

Just looking at the drone's landing gear, I can see it's just a cheap mock-up. Still a good-looking craft, reminiscent of Boeing's Loyal Wingman, and a good idea to save weight in the launch vehicle. Here's hoping Aevum make it all work!

This would be a great time to buy a dozen 747s, and fly them in a vertical formation after using refueling-like techniques to link them with a single rope. Then, they can do a pass down the runway and pick up a very heavy 2nd stage from a souped-up truck.

The concept of ground launched rockets never really made sense when you can (on earth anyway) more efficiently use the principles of lift to get your payload a lot of the way to the space boundary.

Why all the focus on how little runway is needed, or hangar space? Seems to me that a sufficiently powerful aircraft (manned or unmanned) will allow for larger payloads or higher orbits. Speed and altitude are the relevant factors, and there are plenty of airports with two-mile-long runways.

Snazzy video, but it doesn't appear as though the drone has even flown.

When will be the drone's first flight?
What will be the launch vehicle?
When is the first launch?
What is the mass to low earth orbit?
What is the cost per kg to LEO?

Melodramatic sound track and non-running fake but slick-looking prototype in the YouTube video aside, there’s something off about this company. Their site is almost devoid of real content and evidence of something real actually being built and tested. The site reads more like a feed the children philanthropic organization. One hopes the US taxpayers are not too deep into this endeavor via the US Air Force without more concrete evidence of real world progress. Slick talk aside.

Couldn't they have just taken an old F-15, make it robot controlled and they would have what we see here at a fraction of the cost?

It is sad, seeing mankind spending billions to kill each other, instead turn this money into space exploration.

So, take a high time used ex military fighter/interceptor, remove all the weight and complexity of life support systems so it can climb higher, hang a non reusable rocket in the belly of the beast to take small cube sats into LEO. No big deal.