Some day in the future, this plane could
be the new Air Force One. Shuttling the president of the United States around
the earth at hypersonic speeds. If you’re anything like me, you’re probably
skeptical of that statement. Back in 2021 I got a phone call from Hermeus, the company
claiming they were going to make this a reality. A passenger plane capable of flying at Mach 5.
2.5 times faster than the concorde ever flew. To say I was skeptical would be an understatement,
but then, they released this video. Hello, is that a working turbo
ramjet engine? You have my attention. So I reached back out to Hermeus to take a
behind the scenes look at what they’re building, and honestly, I was blown away by a company that
any aeronautical engineer would dream to work for. What I saw and heard changed me from
a skeptic to an optimistic fan of the company. A company that according to their
CEO AJ Piplica started with humble beginnings. Can you tell me what those early days were like when it was just the four of you in
the basement of, I dunno if you were We were literally, yes, literally in my
basement with our two dogs. It was really exciting. So when we left our relatively
good paying jobs and decided to jump off a cliff and try to build an airplane together
on the way down, we basically gave ourselves and our family six months to figure it out.
Essentially starting from nothing. Can this idea that we've got become a thing, can we
put together a plan that can get us to high speed passenger travel in some reasonable
period of time, reasonable 10 ish years? Can we bring really strong people in to support
that plan? Can we bring capital to support that plan? Can we bring customers? All of those
questions we had to answer within six months. Saying you are going to build
a hypersonic passenger plane is easy. Actually doing it is
a completely different story. Software startups have a massive advantage in that
they don’t actually need to build anything. It’s possible to bootstrap a software start up in a
garage with some passionate and talented founders. Hardware startups don’t have it as easy, and it’s why I didn’t take Hermeus overly
seriously until I saw they were actually building. Pretty renders of futuristic planes
are a dime a dozen. Here are some we created. Designing a hypersonic passenger
plane on your computer is one thing, but to actually start prototyping
it requires money, a lot of money. Raw materials, manufacturing machinery and the
factory space to house them are all costs that software startups do not have to contend
with. And not to mention there is a major short supply of talented design engineers,
with major competition between prestigious hardware companies like SpaceX, NASA and Apple.
Hardware startups are famously difficult to build. One of the first challenges is to demonstrate to
investors that you have a clear path to revenue, and for that you need customers. The
path to selling planes in the commercial aviation industry is extremely tightly
regulated. Even established multi-billion dollar companies like Boeing have tried
to skirt around certification steps when introducing new engines because
it’s so time consuming and expensive. Even government backed ventures like
the Concorde which had a max speed of mach 2 are no longer around, even
the military back planes like the SR-71 and XB-70 with max speeds just
over Mach 3 are no longer operational. Trying to go from nothing
to a hypersonic commercial passenger plane with a max speed
of Mach 5, with no intermediate revenue sources is going to require some
extremely patient and wealthy investors. However, Hermeus’s founders, when they were
conceiving the company in that basement, were well aware of this
treacherous path to revenue. We knew from the very beginning we couldn't
just raise billions of dollars to go build a really fast passenger airplane. We knew that
just like SpaceX, all the steps of technology de-risking and development along the way
we needed to solve important problems for customers. So it took us a while to sort out
like, okay, those problems are in the national security space and they're very, very important.
And that was eventually the thing that I think really got us to the first round of funding is
kind of making that breakthrough of like, yes, there's this long commercial roadmap to
fly passengers across the Atlantic Ocean, but the way you get there is by
solving national security challenges. So, Hermeus plans to solve problems
in the national security space and generate revenue there first. So what
are those national security challenges? One of Hermeus’ leading investors
is the US Air Force, and hypersonic technologies are a hot button topic
in the defense industry right now. “ What were your most surprising findings on the threat environment, in
particular in regard to China” “They are moving SO fast. I think
it surprised us all. There’s one other thing we should bear in mind is that the
things they are producing are very technical, very high quality, they are ahead of us
for example in some of the space issues, and in regard to these very very
fast hypersonic type weapons” The United States government is keenly aware
that they need to catch up to maintain that terrifying prospect of mutually assured
destruction. As hypersonic weapons can evade detection until it’s too late to react. Intercontinental ballistic missiles are designed
to exit earth's atmosphere, travel extremely quickly at speeds of up to 7.8 km/s through
space and then suddenly dive on their targets. They move quickly, but their lofted
trajectory gives their enemies more time to detect and aim anti-missile defenses. Hypersonic missiles are designed to
cruise within the earth's atmosphere at about half the speed of an ICBM.
The atmosphere slows them down, but their low trajectory means they suddenly
appear on the horizon, previously being hidden by the earth’s curve, giving their targets
minimal time to detect and intercept them. This is the national security
challenge Hermeus can help address, but not necessarily by building those weapons. One of the major challenges in developing
hypersonic technologies is in testing. We visited the hypersonic wind tunnel in UTSA last
year to meet with Dr. Chris Combs to make a u-haul go hypersonic for the laugh, and while we were
there we asked about his perspective on Hermeus. “One of the things I found interesting
that their CEO said was “it would be cheaper to build an airframe and make a
hole in the desert than to test this in a hypersonic wind tunnel. How
much truth is there to that?” There's, so there's a broad spectrum of test,
right? On the hypersonic wind tunnel side, even there's facilities like ours where the
costs are relatively low, but the scale is smaller and the flight temperatures are low. So
there's certain types of facilities where you can run in for, you know, relatively low cost where
that statement about, you know, uh, wind tunnel test being more expensive than a flight scale
test, uh, that wouldn't necessarily be true. But on the other end, if you go into one of
the large scale DOD production wind tunnels where you could, or at a NASA facility where you
could maybe start to approach something at scale, um, yeah, that might be the case.
You might be looking at hundreds of thousands of dollars to million dollars a
day or week to test. Which, um, you know, it kind of depends on, on how you set
things up, a cheap sounding rocket test would probably be about 10 million. And
so we're not talking about flight test, we're still talking about scale. Uh, so it,
it really, it depends on how big is the thing you're trying to test. Are you trying to test
the actual vehicle or not? Um, what type of wind tunnel conditions do you need? There's a bunch
of variables there, but at the end of the day, if you wanted to do a full scale vehicle fully
integrated, there's not a facility in the world where you can actually do that on the ground.
So a flight test does become your only option. And that’s the first market Hermeus is planning
to attack. Real world flight testing. That’s what Hermeus’ first aircraft, Quarterhorse, will
provide. It will be a reusable hypersonic test bed. Providing flight testing services for
companies seeking to validate hypersonic designs. It will be an autonomous hypersonic aircraft
that will not just provide Hermeus valuable lessons in developing a hypersonic vehicle,
but provide them their first revenue source. Competing with the likes of those
10 million dollar sounding rockets, while being able to provide much more
data as rockets can only fly through the desired flight regime for a very short
time as they ascend through the atmosphere. This is a valuable market with deep
pocketed clients like the US Air Force, NASA and even SpaceX could use. Helping bridge that revenue gap to
their final goal of a commercial passenger aircraft and gaining the confidence
of investors. In April 2021, Hermeus received a 60 million dollar jointly funded contract from
the US Air Force and in March 2022 they secured 100 million dollars of series B funding with
OpenAI founder Sam Altman as the lead investor. With this money they have been busy working on the next critical step in developing
a hypersonic plane. The engine. Boom, the commercial supersonic aircraft start
up, suffered a massive set back when Rolls Royce decided that the commercial supersonic market was
no longer a priority and pulled out as an engine manufacturer, and have since had to scramble
to develop their own engine, the Boom Symphony. Hermeus wisely skipped the step of relying on a
third party to solve their engine needs. Their first goal with that early seed money was to
develop their own subscale turbo ramjet engine. Skyler Shuford, Hermeus’ Chief Operating Officer,
gave me a tour of their very first engine. So this was our humble beginnings. So the first
engine, a subscale demonstrator that we made. And so just to take a step back, our engine
architecture is a jet engine at low speed, just an off the shelf jet engine, which
is this section here. And then we wrap the high speed bits around it. So everything from
here back is all custom, mostly 3D printed, but could have been traditionally manufactured
as well. So this is our shared afterburner, ramjet combustor. And then up front we have our
pre-cooler, obviously ground scale hardware, pretty battleship rugged scale
hardware. But the pre-cooler is what allows the jet engine to get up to the
point where the ramjet can then take over. Okay, let’s pause for a second because
I want this video to be as accessible as possible to people that aren’t experts in
ramjets, or afterburners, or precoolers, or whatever the hell battleship
rugged scale hardware means. By that Skyler means the prototype
engines, which aren’t intended to fly, are not built with low weight in mind. They
are rugged and reliable, they use cheaper off the shelf components where possible. They are
technology demonstrators. Intended for rapid iteration. Spending a lot of time optimizing
for weight and other characteristics doesn’t make sense this early in the process. So if
they can use a cheap actuator designed for a battleship instead spending an extra few
thousand dollars on a specialized actuator intended for something like the SR-71,
they will. Next, what ever are ramjets? To understand that we first need to understand what causes normal jet engines
to have a physical speed limit. Jet engines need to compress air before it enters
the combustion chamber in order to extract as much energy as possible from the fuel. A normal
jet engine does this with a compressor section. Where air enters the engine and is squeezed down
into a smaller volume by the compressor blades. The compressor is driven by the
turbines, which extract some of the energy released in the combustion
chamber to drive the compression stage. This type of engine has a speed limit
because of all those moving rotating parts. As the speed of the aircraft increases,
the incoming air is compressed more and more as it’s forced down the inlet of the engine,
which results in ever increasing temperatures, which can eventually exceed the material
limits of the compressor and turbine blades. Ramjets get around this by using the forward
motion of the plane to ram air directly into the combustion chamber. So we don’t need any
compressors or turbines at all. The forward motion of the plane provides enough compression
alone. However it’s not quite that easy. The plane needs to be traveling fast enough to
achieve the necessary compression for combustion. A pure ramjet needs some other method to get up to
speed, like being dropped from another aircraft. However, we can create a hybrid engines. A turbo ramjet engine. The same
kind of engine the SR-71 used. It used a conventional jet engine with an
afterburner, which is simply an additional fuel injector at the outlet of the turbine to
provide additional thrust. Basically an air breathing rocket nozzle. It used this to get
up to speed and then once going fast enough, air was channeled around the compressor
and turbine section and dumped directly into the after burner and began
operating as a ramjet. This is what Hermeus has built and there have been
plenty of problems to solve along the way. Making the transition between turbojet engine and ramjet engine is not easy.
It’s not an immediate switch. Several things need to happen as the engine
transitions from turbojet to ram jet and in that time the aircraft is going to be rapidly
decelerating as drag acts on the supersonic aircraft. If this transition isn’t fast enough
the plane could end up not having enough speed to light up the ramjet, or for a passenger plane
the sudden deceleration could just be jarring. A lot of first time flyers find
the sinking feeling of an airliner decreasing thrust after takeoff a little
disconcerting. Imagine that on steroids. To ease the transition we need to
push the turbojet to its limit, getting as fast as possible before mode switching. To help with this Hermeus have installed
a precooler. Something the SR-71 did not have. This cools the incoming air and
allows the turbojet engine to operate at much faster velocities before the blades
reach their max operating temperature. An engine created in the Japanese Space
and Astronautical Science institute used a liquid hydrogen precooler placed
in the inlet of the jet engine, in front of the air intake spike. The liquid
hydrogen then travels through the inlet nozzle and combustion chamber where it absorbs heat
and turns into high pressure gas. This high pressure hydrogen is then injected into the
combustion chamber as a fuel source. [REF] The details of Hermeus’ precooler are secret, but they are using a precooler to push
their off the shelf jet engine to extremes. So that's what we did here. So we took an off
the shelf jet engine designed to about Mach 0.8, using our pre-cooler, we pushed it up to
about Mach 3.3 conditions, so around where the SR 71 flew in terms of temperatures. So
it was about 800 F air coming in. We cooled it down to about 150 F. The jet engine had
no problem. And then all of this hardware, our afterburner combustor was running during that
whole operation. And then we pulled this out and connected the Ramjet combustor directly to the
facility and started it at about Mach 2.8 ish. What do you mean by the facility? So yeah, so to be able to test the
temperatures and the flow rates associated with HighSpeed flight, you
could do it a couple of different ways. So there's full tip to tail free jet testing
where all of the flow is coming in at high mach conditions, but for us, because
everything internally is all subsonic, we can do direct connect so it's not flowing high
speed around, it's just kind of flowing directly into the engine. We did that testing up at Purdue
University and they were able to provide the high temperature air associated with high-speed
flight so we could prove out all the different, Is it just high temperature?
Is it high velocity as well? So like I said, everything after
the normal shock is all subsonic, so it doesn't have to be high speed. Now
it does create a little bit of risk because you're decoupling the supersonic inlet from the
subsonic flow path, but that's how we were able to do it. We did all of this with a team of
eight people in nine months for 1,000,005. You heard that right. They developed a
functional turbo-ramjet with just 1.5 million dollars. Now of course this is a
subscale version not intended for flight, it’s a proof of concept, but
they haven’t stopped there. Once this concept was proven they
moved onto developing Chimera, the engine that will be used in Quarterhorse. We took a quick drive from Hermeus’
factory over to their test facility at Dekalb-peachtree airport, where
I witnessed a test of Chimera. Everyone Ready? Ready Ready Ready
Throttling to 50. 50
70. 70 90. 90
Light, Light Now if you can’t tell by the
big stupid grin on my face, I was having a great time. It felt like the
entire test building was trying to take off. This was a test of the inhouse afterburner which
will also be used as the ramjet after transition. After the debrief Skylar gave me a tour of
the modified General Electric J85 engine, the same engine used in the Northrop F-5. But yeah, so as with talking down the other
subscale engine, but we have the JD five core, the turbo machinery core right here, and
then everything from this spot back is all of our custom hardware. So obviously these
valves are battleship valves. They're not going to be something that we fly. It's going
to be a lot bigger, but really focusing on the core pieces here that we need to test on the
ground. And so that's what this configuration is. So everything is currently, the designs
are being flight weighted, but even this, we're using it as a test bed and iterating a
lot on, so the hardware that's inside of here went in two weeks ago, and so that's what the
team has been working on is expanding of some design modifications for life for endurance
or performance. And so we can use this as a test bench to just rapidly turn through things,
3d print some stuff, traditionally manufacture some stuff, and then get the performance
and duration out of this set of hardware. With these valves, they're in
the valves or what are they? Yeah, so these valves are to
represent some of the pressure differential blowoff that we're going to
need when we do the two mode operation. Right, kinda like bypass? Exactly. So when we transition from
turbojet to Ramjet, there's going to be a set of valves that move some of
the internal systems around via pressure, and this is the ground representation of those. Is there a pump involved with that
too? Obviously you're getting ram air from normal bypass air. How do
you simulate that with a static test? Yeah, so that's why some of this is blanked
off and so we just get as close as we can. So you're just kind of relying on the
air from this kind of dragging it in. Yeah. So you still have all
the compressor powering, doing all the work against
the ear tunnel, pull it in, And you're testing the nozzle as well. Do you think that's what your nozzle
geometry will look like too? Oh, definitely not that big. It'll
obviously have to be a lot smaller. Right, but just the two ramps, are you just going to a two ramp or is it
going to be more of a circular type thing? Yeah, so the flight vehicle, the high
speed tail will have a two D inlet, but when we're flying with the off the shelf
turbo jet, the off the shelf 85, which is some of the earlier flight vehicles, we'll just use the
stock afterburner that has a axi symmetric nozzle Back in the factory I asked Skyler more
about why they selected the J85 engine. So these are out of production, the J 85s. So
we didn't work with GE at all. It was all just us working with, we were really working with
the maintenance, repair and overhaul shops for them. That's really where the expertise
and knowledge lies. These engines were, I think originally designed in the fifties.
There's not a lot of electronics on board. There's no firmware we have to work through. And
really, it's a pretty elegant but hydro mechanical system for all the controls. So really it was
about understanding the configuration of it and you can kind of chase down all the different tubes
and everything to understand how it works. And then there's a suite of documentation out there.
So it was really on us to learn how it worked. I would've assumed you were
working pretty closely with the engine manufacturer since I imagine it'd
be pretty valuable for them too to have. We certainly will be with Pratt and Whitney
on the F 100 scale engine that has digital control. It's a much higher performing
engine, so we'll need to understand the details of that a lot better. So that one
we certainly will be, but this one has been around for a long time. There's a lot of
people who understand this engine and the performance needs out of it are a lot less than
what we're going to need for the future vehicles. Uhm we'll talk about Quarterhorse
and the kind of scale of that, but this will power, and then over here
is the F 100, the Pratt and Whitney F 100. And that will power darkhorse. So the
vehicle that comes after quarterhorse How many, is it just one engine? Two engines? Two engines. Two engines on
darkhorse. And it'll be various engines on Quarterhorse depending on the test that
we're doing.Uhm, but yeah. So it gives you a sense of scale. So this puts out about 5,000
pounds. This puts out about 30,000 pounds. So it seems Hermeus are well on their
way with the development of their ramjet engines with both the J85 and much larger
F100 versions being actively worked on. So, what’s next for Hermeus? Well, they just tested Quarterhorse Mk 0. The
ground vehicle we saw being constructed in the factory. This vehicle was intended to help Hermeus
develop their in-house manufacturing techniques. A lot has changed since the days of the SR-71 and
this has unlocked may manufacturing techniques that the engineers in the 1960s could have
only dreamed of, like large format 3D printing. So we're also investigating large
format additive. So that was very fine, very precise. But with large format additive,
you can deposit a lot more material and so you can build larger structures a lot
faster. So you can see the resolution's a bit worse, but you can put down a lot
of material and build large structure so There's no real grain on the
end. Has that been processed to Polish? So it's like a weld processed,
so you have pretty consistent material properties throughout and so that's what
we're looking to quantify and get very, What material is That? This is Inconel as well. It's so much heavier than I
expect. It is. Just steel. Yeah, it's steel. Yeah, it's high nickel steel. It's just one of those things that you read about
it constantly, but I've never actually held it and in my head I was thinking it would be closer
to a titanium, but yeah, no, it's just heavy. It's heavy. Its kind of less exciting too when
you're actually looking at it. It's like, yeah, I mean I'm just nerdy about this sort of
stuff. This is where I get properly just excited. Material science. I just think
it's so cool. There's some voids in there. So this is a very large weld process. So wire
comes in big laser and you can deposit a lot of, yeah. And so that's actually in here. You
can kind of see the robot arm that prints it. I'll take that. So it's not active right
now, but you can kind of see the laser arm. At this point in the tour extremely loud high
pitched grinding started, which is a common theme on these documentary shoots, so I am going
to save your ears and explain the rest in VO here. Hermeus have been manufacturing much of the
Quarterhorse Mk 0 inhouse using a mixture of small and large format 3D printing
and an absolutely massive CNC machine. However, one of the most exciting
manufacturing techniques that Hermeus mentioned was with Machina Labs new AI driven
robots. A robotic panel forming process that could form the outer skin panels of the
planes. This technology could drastically decrease the cost of development. Body panels
in both automotive and aviation industries are frequently manufactured by huge hydraulic
presses that force sheet metal into a mold. Those molds are expensive to make and making
small adjustments to a design often require making an entirely new mold. This is also
even more difficult with high temperature alloys like titanium and inconel, something the
engineers of the SR-71 seriously struggled with. The US didn’t even have hydraulic presses
with enough pressure to form the panels The best forge in the United States at that
time could only produce 20% of the pressure needed to form these titanium parts. Clarence
L. Johnson, the manager of Skunk Works at the time pleaded for the development of an adequate
forging press, which he stated would need to be a 250,000 ton metal forming press.Because of
these inadequacies in forming capabilities, the final forging dimensions were nowhere
near the design dimensions and much of the forming process had to be completed through
machining. Meaning, most of the material was cut away to form the part, resulting in 90%
of the material going to waste. When your raw material is extremely difficult to refine
titanium, this kind of waste really hurts. This also makes design iteration extremely
difficult, but machina labs are already forming titanium and inconel parts. This to me is a key
enabling technology, but of course even with the most advanced manufacturing techniques don’t solve
all of Hermeus technological challenges, which is why Hermeus have limited themselves to mach 5,
the lower end of the hypersonic flight regime. And you'd mentioned earlier that like Mach
five, there was a specific reason why you're aiming for Mach five. What is the advantage
There? So we do get the hypersonic bump because most people say Mach five is where hypersonic
takes over, but it's not really about the buzzword, although that does help sometimes
get people excited or make them very skeptical sometimes too. But it's really about that is where
the technology cliff is. So on the engine side, it's where you can use RAM jets rather than
scram jets. About mach five and a half is where you have to go to SCRAM because your
performance losses caused by the normal shock become too much to have net thrust going
forward. And then on the material side, the temperatures that the gross acreage sit at are
in a place where metallics can still close. What Does that mean gross? The acreage? Yeah, the primary structure. So the primary
structure of about mach five sits at eight or 900 degrees versus the 1900 degree leading
edge. Right? Okay. And so that means that we can use metallics for the primary structure
versus ceramics that are still kind of in the development phase or the early researchy
phase. So we want stuff that can be produced at scale and is relatively available. And
so that is kind of the cliff. And so we're really at just the very, very low end of
hypersonic. When people see hypersonic, they're like, oh, it could be up to Mach 25.
It's like, no, we're barely hypersonic. Right? Yeah, that was overwhelmed by the amount of
questions to actually ask here, but so you're just going bare metal for the actual skin Of the brain. There is going to be some judicious
use of ceramics that we'll probably use right? In places that you might imagine. But for most of
it we can stick with off the shelf metallics. What's the reusability like there in canals
fine for going through those thermal cycles? I mean, it's definitely going to be a challenge.
And so that's part of the work is to be very incremental about that. And our first vehicles
are not going to have much life at all. And really it's about accessing these flight conditions and
starting to test at these conditions and then the later vehicles will start to solve it. But really
you almost have to reeducate people around the life of the vehicles because most airliners or
even aircraft, the way that they think about life is time under wing hours of engine operation,
hours of flight. That is a horrible metric for us because you're not in the air that long. It's
really about cycles. It's thermo cycles that are going to drive the life of these vehicles. And
to be honest, we just need more data to be able to really anchor the long-term maintenance,
repair and overhaul models for these things. Could you see yourself using, would ablatives
even work at Mach five if needed it? I mean it's definitely possible.
It definitely works. But for the long-term vision that we have of being aircraft
flight operations, because they are aircraft, you have to use things that don't ablate or
else you're having to replace 'em every time. The X 15 had a lot of issues with the
ablate of just sticking to windows and Things like that. So that was when they started
really pushing the flight condition up to mock like six and a half towards seven for the first
vehicles. They just had straight raw in cannel on the outside and that thing, I think they flew
199 times with half a dozen or so vehicles. So that was highly reusable for the first time they
were even starting to get to these conditions with a human rated craft rocket base. So a little bit
different, but yeah. Just kind of an interesting Point for this power speed. What's the biggest
problems you've solved there so far? Have you had the opportunity to test the actual airframe and
see what sort of issues you're going to have with That? Not yet. So I mean, that's part of
the work to be done, but there's a slew of other risks and problems that we have
to solve. So the engine one was where we wanted to focus. You can't find aircraft
without an engine. So that was where we started and has spent basically all of the
time in the company up until this point, and now we're at a place where the major
technical risk has happened or has been de-risked in terms of the mode transition. And
now we're onto the airframe side. So even just high speed takeoff and landing of a remote piloted
vehicle is a challenge. Both of those are solved simultaneously. What's the challenge with, so
the challenge is for a hypersonic vehicle, you want to have very short stubby wings because you
don't want to take all that drag into high speed. That's really, really bad for takeoff and landing.
So you're having to thread three needles to be able to have a vehicle that can traverse all of
these flight conditions. Takeoff and landing is one where you want really big wings and you
want to go very slow for us not able to do that. And so by adding the speed component,
now the control system has to be tighter, all solvable, but not something that we have done
as an organization. So that's what we're kind of focusing mark one on. So our first variant of
quarterhorse mark two will be around pushing the jet engine up in flight to the mode transition
point. So making sure the right flow is being fed to the engine, making sure our pre-cool works
in the actual environment. And then the third mark will be the mode transition capable high
speed break and airspeed record vehicle. And so being incremental about that. So we're not
going to really start to understand the thermal considerations in flight until mark two, but
we're going to be doing ground testing along the way to be able to understand that where we're
heating up sections of the airframe, making sure that the joints and everything move the way we
expect them to under load and under temperature, Assuming each mark of the
quarterhorse is a success, Hermeus will be moving on to build
their second vehicle. The Darkhorse, which will be a fully reusable uncrewed vehicle
designed for defense and national security missions. It will be Hermeus’ primary defense
product, likely serving a similar role that the SR-71 did before it. Avoiding interception
with incredible speed and high altitude flight. Then finally we have Halcyon.
The hypersonic passenger plane. It bears some similarities to the
XB-70 with its folding wing tips, which could actuate downward for supersonic
flight. This in combination with the triangular wedge air inlet increased the amount of
compression lift the plane could generate. Compression lift occurs as a result of the
extremely high pressure air can be created underneath an aircraft as a result of shockwave
formation. Shockwaves are basically just areas of extreme high pressure after all. The triangular
lip of the air intake creates shockwaves that travel underneath the wings. The folding wing tips
were positioned to reflect this shockwave back underneath the wings to increase compression lift
further. This increase in lift helped increase the range of the XB-70 which was designed as a
deep penetration nuclear strategic bomber. [REF] The lowering of the wing tips also
shifts the center of pressure forward, which helps counteract a phenomenon
where the center of pressure moves backwards in supersonic flight that
can create flight instabilities. No crewed aircraft has used
compression lift since the XB-70, so it’s quite cool to see the Halcyon
taking advantage of this phenomenon. It could potentially fly passengers from
New York to Paris in just an hour and a half. Practically commuting distance for
whoever can afford it, which Hermeus claims could unlock 4 trillion dollars of GDP for
economies with access to the the technology. Yeah, so looking back in history when we've
seen accelerations of transportation networks, like when Rome built out the roads, we switched
from sail power to steam power and marine shipping or in China built out high-speed rail in the
20th century. All of those were accompanied by multiple single digit point G D P growth of
the affected region. And the kind of reasoning behind it is when you reduce the barriers to
goods moving around and people moving around, you increase trade and that increases G D P.
So there's plenty of math and stuff behind it, but it's happened in the past and we have kind
of normalized to the speed at which the world moves around. So that's what I mean by this
untapped resource that we have. And I think the pandemic taught us quite a bit about how much
face-to-face really matters, especially when in the early days of bringing complex goods into
fruition and getting them into a marketplace. If you're selling a commodity, do you need to be
in person to sell coffee or a refrigerator? No, a nuclear reactor or a hypersonic airplane,
something like that. Yeah, probably. How important do you think accessibility to the
technology is in order to achieve that goal and how accessible do you see very far down the line
of how a normal person flying on something like This? Yeah, so the kind of math that we've done
and the markets that we've looked at is focused on business class and first class travel only because
I think that's the realistic entry point to the market now. I mean, we've had seven or eight
generations of subsonic passenger aircraft now, and we're incredibly efficient at them and
still continuing to get more efficient prices coming down, safety improving, of course. Is
the first generation of high-speed airplanes going to do that? No, it's going to take time to
get through that, but I do think it will be very, very difficult to operate a service like this
at a price point where an economy and a premium economy ticket makes sense with the technology
set that we're pursuing today. I do think there are additional technology sets that are less
mature, either broadly or in an aviation context specifically that can really kind of rewrite
the rules of the test there and take that step. But it's not something that I want to sign
up to do in the first generation or two. So I think the approach here is very much a kind of
Tesla master plan, focus on the premium product, if you want to call it that, get that
right and then drive either efficiency into the system or as a decade's worth
of technology development has happened in either energy storage or energy production.
I think that that's the key technology area that actually enables that flip to operating
cost points that make this widely accessible. AJ mentioned energy production and energy storage being two key technologies that could
make the technology more accessible, and that’s because one of the largest costs
associated with a flight is the cost of fuel. Ignoring profit margins on a 100
dollar ticket we can break down where your money goes to cover the
costs of an airline. On average, about 19 to 21 dollars goes to fuel,
fluctuating with fuel prices. [REF] For a hypersonic plane that fuel cost is
going to be much higher, as drag increases with the square of the velocity, although
that will be mitigated somewhat by the much lower air densities at a cruising altitude
3 times higher than a typical airliner. Regardless, these aren’t going to be
cheap tickets and that’s going to be compounded by halcyon's relatively small
internal volume and the increased cost of maintenance for a plane dealing with extreme
aerodynamic heating each and every flight. The reality is Hermeus won’t be selling these
planes to commercial airlines any time soon. Perhaps one day we will see a hypersonic air
force one, allowing the president of the United States to appear first on the scene when it
matters most. A powerful diplomatic tool. I often judge companies by the
people working within them, and it’s hard not to get invested in the
vision of these companies when people like Tonio Martinez at leading it, Hermeus’
VP of Production. Tonio is among the most experienced engineers in the world in this
field. Having worked on the X-51 waverider, the SpaceX Crew Dragon, and Divergent’s 3D
printed supercar. Experience he is bringing to developing the machine that builds the
machine, where he is focusing much of his efforts on ensuring everyone in the company
is communicating and learning from each other. Not a lot of engineers get the opportunity
to work with both the engineering process and the actual manufacturing process.
What is that like developing that? That's a good question because a lot
of companies are much more siloed where engineering and manufacturing oftentimes aren't
even in the same building. And so that was a very important part of establishing this company
was having engineering and manufacturing in the same building. And what that allows for is
the engineers, as they're designing their parts, they can come out and work with the technicians
who will be putting things together and say, what about this? What about that? Make sure that
the things can actually be assembled. And the same thing with the machine shop design engineer has
to get a part made. They can go out and talk to the machinist who's going to make their part and
get pointers on, use this cutter and make it that radius and these cut types of things that the
engineer may not just intuitively know, but they can get that information from the technicians to
make their designs that much better to begin with. And then when the parts get made and they're
actually integrating the parts onto the vehicle, you'll see the engineers and the technicians
working side by side to integrate those parts and put them in. And so the engineer gets the
opportunity to go through that process of, I designed this thing and this is what
I was thinking when I designed it in terms of how this thing could go together
and ease of installation and those kinds of things. And then when they actually see
that process or participate in that process, then they get to, oh, you know what, if
I had done this a little bit different, it would've been a little bit easier. And so you
get to go through those iterations at a company like this where a lot of other companies,
you just don't get that kind of opportunity Feel like that's the most, I've had a
little bit of experience with that with, I worked in a biomedical device startup
and very humbling experience going to the machine shop for the first time. They're
like How this radius is not possible. But it was the most fun part of it of seeing
even to like you learn about tolerant, but you never fully understand it until you
see two parts not going together properly. Precisely. And that's been I think a lot of
the, that's been part of what's enjoyable to me is seeing the look on the engineer's face
and the technician's faces and the machinist faces as they're collaborating and working
together and they're actually putting the parts on and either it's like frustration or
yeah, we did it joy, but to see that happening, especially with some of the newer engineers that
are just starting to go through this process, it's pretty awesome because you can feel the
level of intensity and energy increasing within the team and the cohesion and just we need
this fast pace of iteration within the team and within all the processes that we build in
order to reach our super challenging objectives. It's funny, I think most engineers actually
crave that environment as well. Most engineers become pretty discontent when they're
pigeonholed too much into it's ultimately a creative field. I think engineers are
just mathematically inclined artists, so they like to be thrown into the thick of it. Yes, and that is absolutely correct. I think some
companies have so structured their environment that the engineer really gets pretty boxed in
by boundary conditions, by constraints, by their environment to where sometimes you can go up to an
engineer and a big company and say what vehicle is at for? And they may not even know because it's
just so pigeonholed into a specific thing here. We really encourage critical thinking across the
entire team. So if a machinist is making a part, they should have a good idea of what this thing is
for and what it's going to do. If the technicians are installing stuff on the aircraft and working
with the engineers, we should see the interaction between these two different disciplines doing
the critical thinking thing because they get, because you actually get to do that critical
thinking and you get to make decisions based on that critical thinking because again, we are
pushing the decision-making to the extreme. And by doing that, we eliminate a lot of bottlenecks
for decision-making as well as really making sure that the decisions are being made in the hands
of those who are actually most qualified to make those decisions, which is usually at the front
lines. And so all of our processes are structured around enabling the engineer and the machinist
and the technician to work together to find solutions and then just execute without any overly
constrained or heavy oversight on that process. I know for a fact that any engineer listening to that conversation has their
heart pumping a little faster. So many companies pigeon hole their engineers
into every increase specializing to the point it’s hard to see the forest for the
trees, and you kind of just stop learning and evolving. Every ambitious engineer
wants to work in a company like this, where your creativity is not only
enabled, but encouraged. And in a company with people as experienced as Tonio
Martinez, you are going to learn a lot. I realized the opportunity I had with this
channel to connect enthusiastic engineers with companies like this last year. Helion
told us after our documentary with them last year that they actually hired a
specialized nuclear engineer because of our video. I feel incredibly proud
that my work can serve both my audience and help develop new technologies, and I
think we can take it to the next level. So, to help even more, I’m launching
our latest project. Propeller. Propeller is our new engineering hub, where you can find the coolest jobs
currently hiring in engineering. Hermeus currently has 40 job roles open. And they
are looking for a Lead Manufacturing Engineer, a Principal Thermal Engineer, a
Principal Structural Engineer, a Senior Mechanisms Engineer and many more. Relativity, who are a rocket company that launched
their Terran 1 3D printed rocket last year, currently have 171 roles to fill. With roles like
Senior Director of Quality, Senior Aerothermal Engineer, Propulsion Test Engineer, Senior
Manager of Test Fluids Systems and many more. Go to StartPropeller.com and take a look. If
you don’t see anything suitable right now, make sure to sign up to our newsletter. This
is just the start of Propeller and we will adding many more new features and jobs to
the site over time. If you sign up to the newsletter we will keep you posted on all the most
exciting opportunities and news in engineering. If you are a company that’s interested
in advertising your jobs with us, reach out to us with the contact
page on StartPropeller.com
