(engine roaring) - The space folks and
space enthusiast out there, don't get mad at me for saying this, but failure is an option. - This team is building a
hypersonic autonomous test plane that will go over
3,000 miles per hour. - We are pushing the envelope. - With the ultimate goal of making passenger airplanes six times
faster than they are today. - Success is a possible outcome. Is it the most likely outcome? No. You just keep moving, keep
moving a little bit by bit until we will this into existence. - We are in Atlanta, Georgia right now on location at Hermeus, which is a hypersonic aircraft company. They're building a aircraft which can travel five times the speed of sound and I'm just like super
excited to check it out. I should add, I'm super excited because I actually studied aerospace engineering in college. Yes, your typical first step
to storytelling, I know. That's my voice. - Yeah. - Anyways, I really
geek out on this stuff. (dreamy electronic music) - So what you see behind
me is "Quarter Horse." This is the first aircraft that we're building here at Hermeus and it'll be the first aircraft to break a speed record in almost 50 years. - Hermeus's first demonstrator aircraft, the "Quarter Horse," is a small single engine
autonomous vehicle designed to do two major things; touch mach five ever so
briefly to collect data and to test their chimera engine. - Ladies and gentlemen,
meet "Quarter Horse." (audience cheering) We're not just building
one "Quarter Horse" in this development program,
we're actually building three. So that allows us to take that type of risk in flight test that
normally would not be possible. The other kind of key thing that enables that is the fact that
"Quarter Horse" is autonomous. There are no people on board. - Hypersonic flight isn't new. - The X-15, forerunner
of today's spacecraft and tomorrow's airplanes. - See how these planes are
being dropped mid-flight from another airplane? They're powered by rockets. That's how we've been achieving hypersonic for the last 50 years. But Hermeus is trying to
do something different, build an aircraft that can
take off from sea level, hit hypersonic speeds, and land to be reused all
while using one jet engine. - The way you would design an
aircraft to take off in lands and an engine to do that is
kind of at the opposite end of a spectrum from the
optimum high speed aircraft. You have all these different
kind of constraints pulling you in different directions. So you have to make all
these design compromises to get something that can both take off, break the sound barrier, and accelerate at high speed
all in one set of hardware. - An example of this is
with a high-speed aircraft like the X-15 that has a
wing designed to reduce drag at increased speeds, but at lower speeds, those same features are undesirable because they reduce lift. - The actual "Quarter Horse" vehicle, the challenges with it are we're trying to build
something as small as possible to prove out that we can hit mach five. - This is Danielle. She's the head engineer
of "Quarter Horse". - We have to be kind of
equally bad at everything. If we're really good at going fast, we'll have a really hard time going through that transonic region. We won't be able to get through it and we'll be stuck at Mach 1.2. - Supersonic flight is anything above the speed of sound,
referred to as Mach 1, about 760 miles per hour at sea level. Hypersonic flight is
anything above mock five, five times the speed of sound, which is about 3,800 miles
per hour at sea level. Today, your standard
commercial jet moves you from New York to LA at
about 500 miles per hour. You guys have a landing gear because you're taken off from
the ground and that's unique. - Yeah.
- You know? - You're not just like
dropping this from an aircraft. - Oh, it would make it so much easier if we could just drop it. - If you didn't have to deal with it. - Yeah, if we didn't
have to land the thing, it would be so much easier. - Yeah. Heat is one of the
really unique challenges about hypersonic. Can you tell me about that? - We're targeting a
reusable hypersonic vehicle. Our approach is to have
high temperature materials so that we have what's
called a hot structure. - To withstand the high
temperatures of re-entry, the space shuttle was
covered with ceramic tiles that could be damaged and replaced, but that kept the substructure safe. In space, there's no air, so a spacecraft is free to accelerate unencumbered by air friction. But inside earth's
atmosphere, the faster you go, the more air friction causes the surface of the aircraft to heat up. If this were in the air
traveling at Mach 5 and I were to touch it, it would be approximately... - Eight or 900 degrees.
- Eight or 900 degrees. - And at the front... - The very front will be 2,000. - 2,000 degrees. That's really hot. - The metal grows at those temperatures. Just heating everything up to the right temperatures
is gonna create load on the vehicle that you
have to be able to react. - Whoa. - "Quarter Horse" will be a
terrible subsonic aircraft and it'll also kind of be like a terrible hypersonic aircraft, but its job is to bridge that gap so we can get the data we need to learn so that we can actually build a really good hypersonic aircraft in the
next one with "Dark Horse." - Of all the challenges of
going zero to hypersonic, building an engine capable of that range of speeds
might be the hardest. - On a typical airplane, you'll see the engine kind of hang off the bottom of the wing. Our fuselage, our whole aircraft is
wrapped around our engine. - Okay, so this right here is- - This is where the engine would live. The back end of it is right
here and you can see some of our thermal protection
system's a little crunchy 'cause we fired an engine in here. - A normal jet engine produces
thrust by compressing air, adding fuel, igniting that mixture, and accelerating it through a nozzle. At higher speeds, a different
type of jet is required, something called a ramjet. - They're an incredibly simple device. From a thermodynamic perspective, they do exactly the same thing as a traditional jet engine does, which is compress air, burn it, and exhaust it through a nozzle. Instead of having a mechanical compressor, like you have on a jet engine, that actually uses a natural compression mechanism called a shockwave. - As a plane moves through the air faster than the speed of sound, airwaves in front of it pile up, creating what's called a shockwave. As shockwaves naturally compress the supersonic airflow inside a ramjet, there's no need for a
mechanical compressor. - So really all you have is an inlet that compresses the air naturally, combustor where you're putting fuel into the flow and burning it. - Our breathing propulsion is actually the entire length of the vehicle. So from the tip of the aircraft where we have the inlet section, it goes all the way to the back where we have the the nozzle. So we went from idea and to building this thing in about four months. - Four months?
- Four months, yeah. - From zero, to drawings, to putting the whole thing together. - Since Hermeus' aircraft will be taking off and landing from the ground, their engine needs to work as a standard jet engine
and then transition to operating as a ramjet
only once at higher speeds. - The trick with ramjets is that they don't work until
you're flying about mach two or above and they don't get real efficient until you get to about mach three. So jet engines, you know, tend to work up to about mach two-ish. So there's this kind of gap between the two that you have to bridge in one way or another. - Hermeus argues that each of the component technological
capabilities they need have been in existence for decades. The challenge is bringing
them all together. - We're taking an approach that is like fundamentally focused on engineering and not science. We're not inventing any new materials, we're not inventing any
new propulsion systems. - Engineers are a bunch of nerds that don't like talking to other people. - Help me. What are we looking at? What's going on? - We're looking at two J-85 engines. We name our engines. This is Amelia. - Amelia. - Yeah. - Okay. - So we're taking this,
the core turbine section, the part that spins to do the lower speed portions of flight. All of this comes off and
we put our own afterburner. - Oh! Okay, okay. - It takes years and years
to build one of these and we showed in the seed round that we can take a commercial jet engine, pull off its afterburner,
put our own afterburner on, and run it way high up, way higher speeds than it's designed for. - An afterburner, as the name suggests, sits at the end of a jet. It adds more fuel to the exhaust coming through the jet and ignites it, producing even more thrust and allowing the aircraft to travel at even greater speeds. - How we transition
from a turbo jet engine at low speed to a ramjet
engine at high speed, that's something that's
never been done in flight. So we'll do it in a wind
tunnel on the grounds and then we'll have to do it
in flight with "Quarter Horse." That's a big risk. - All right, all right, all right. Whoa! This is really big. - Yeah. So this our turbo based
combine cycle engine, chimera. - The chimera engine is
the engine that powers it and it's designed to operate from not moving on the grounds up to, you know, mach four to five up at
about 80 to 90,000 feet. - Gas turbine engine
does its magic, right? Pumping the air into the
afterburner during the, you know, lower speed, mach zero to
mach, you know, three range. We'll bypass that air around. There's multiple fuel circuits. There's a flame holder in
here that you can't see, but then a combustion
chamber and then a 2D nozzle. - So air comes in here. - That's right. - And runs through here
until you get to mach... - About mach three. - About mach three.
- A mach three. - And then the air passes around this and goes straight into the
afterburners essentially? - That's right. And so we dual use the
afterburner as a ramjet, so it's what we call our ram burner. - I'm gonna say got it
'cause I think I got it, but that was all very,
very technical stuff. You're clearly very smart, Glenn. Thank you for breaking that down for us. - You're welcome. - Hermeus has successfully
tested their chimera engine over 100 times, including for elected
officials late last year. We were supposed to see
a test when we visited. Instead, we had a chance to
chat with the co-founders about an engine test failure
that happened off camera while we were onsite. Just who you wanted to see, right? A film crew. - So what happens if "Quarter
Horse" crashes next year? (man laughing) - Well it's not an if,
it's probably a when. We're going to push the bounds of what the aircraft can do in flight. We fully expect to lose an aircraft at some point in the development program. You know, there are any
number of different types of failures that we could have in flight that could cause, you know, catastrophic loss of the vehicle. It's a single engine vehicle
so you can lose flight control, exceed the limits of material, hundreds of pounds of difference between the brains of the aircraft. So, yeah. There's no shortage of
challenges, you know, here. - Whatever you wanna share, it's pretty interesting to us and cool that you're being open about,
hey, not everything is easy. But yeah, just tell me,
like, what happened? What's going on? Are you cool, comfortable,
like just rolling on it? - Straight forward? - A lot of things can happen
when you're testing, you know, energetic systems and things like that. We pushing the limits of what it could do. Chucked a little bit of hardware out the back end and burned
some grass out the back, so no big deal. We just had to call the fire department to come put out the brush
fire, but that was about it. - A jet needs to
constantly combust new air as it's coming through. This requires a continuous flame. The flame holder, that piece of equipment that got chucked out the back of the chimera, is a part within the engine that prevents that flame from going out. As Hermeus was testing their engine right before we arrived on site, it broke. - You know, whenever you
lose a piece of hardware, it can seem like really, really bad, but given the way that we did
it, it was very intentional. This was specifically a
component that we saw indications that it wasn't sufficient and so we wanted to see and push the life on it. We have the replacement hardware in work. We're gonna replace it relatively quickly. - There's a certain set of
stakes when we're doing this on the grounds, but it's exactly what we're gonna be doing when
we're in the air as well. - It's still kind of hot. - Oh, it's definitely warm from tests. - So I can't see the flame
thrower 'cause it's out there. - Flame holder, yeah. (men laughing)
- Oh yeah, exactly. - A day and a half after the
accident saw the airframe and its original jigs at the factory. The damage that seemed
crippling was quickly repaired and the broken halves rejoined. - Just the willingness to try
and the willingness to fail. We haven't had that in
hypersonic development at least since the pre space shuttle days. Back then, we were willing to fail a lot. I mean, we broke an X-15 in half and then we put it back
together and flew it again. We'd never do that today. - And even from failures,
lessons are learned. - I love what you were saying in the interview about the X-15 and like how like people
haven't been willing to really push the bounds and break stuff. What you guys are trying
to do is move fast and things are gonna break,
there's gonna be failure. That's a necessary part of
really innovating at this speed. - It only works though if
you're moving fast enough and you've built enough hardware that you can get back into tests quickly 'cause if you haven't, if you haven't prepared for that failure, then it's gonna take you a
much longer time to return. And then you're also
gonna be a little bit less willing to take risks
and fail the next time. - One thing that Hermeus
says makes their approach different is their reliance on a vertical integration process modeled after ones used by
private space companies. - Hypersonic aircraft are
incredibly coupled systems. One small change can
have large implications on the overall vehicle performance or what the power system needs to do. It's really hard to design kind of one part by itself and then
put everything together. You have to design the whole
thing at the same time. And vertical integration
allows you to continue to make trades across the
interfaces between those systems, not from the very beginning when you don't know a lot about it, but all along the way
as you're developing it, as you're building it, as
you're manufacturing it, as you're flying it. - Ladies and gentlemen, welcome
aboard Hermeus flight 1025 with nonstop service
between JFK and Tokyo. - Were you a flight
attendant in another life? - Maybe, maybe. If Hermeus can pull
this off and build their 20 passenger aircraft, the "Halcyon," Maybe you're wondering, what will hypersonic flight be like? There won't be any windows
because of the extreme heat on the outside of the aircraft. Instead, passengers will see
the curvature of the earth and some darkness of space
thanks to high-res camera feeds projected onto LED
screens on the cabin walls. What about (engine roaring) that? The sonic boom that
happens when an aircraft breaks the sound barrier. (engine roaring) After Air Force testing over Oklahoma City in the 1960s led to tens
of thousands of complaints, the FAA banned civil
overland supersonic flight. It's one of the factors that complicated Concorde's ability to stay in business. - The one thing that has
changed since Concorde's days is that the number of passengers traveling over water routes has grown substantially. The market is large enough just on those oversea routes
to sustain a couple of different competitors probably. - I think it's safe to
say that most people don't find air travel to be luxurious. We put up with it because it gets us where we wanna
go relatively quickly, which makes the promise of hypersonic flight
all the more exciting. While there are other startups
like Boom and Eon focused on getting passenger travel
back up to supersonic speed, Hermeus, with the money it's raised, its contract with the Air Force, and less risk averse approach, seems to be right now the
most legitimately positioned private company to achieve
hypersonic commercial flight. - It was an airshow that I went to in middle school that kind
of really set me on my path. I saw a C5 Galaxy fly, so it's one of the largest cargo aircraft that we have in the US Air Force, and it just kind of broke my brain. To see something like the
size of a building flying just didn't make sense to me. It's like, okay, I gotta
figure out how they did that. - Ready? Wanna hold my hand? - I firmly believe that that face-to-face communication is kind
of the key to humanity. This is one the fastest
airplanes ever built. We have a lot of
challenges that we have to solve as a species to
open access to the world and really make it
regional is really a key to kind of unlocking the potential
of what humanity can do. - What Hermeus is
attempting is a moonshot. Bigger companies like Boeing
have been at it for decades. What was inspiring about
talking to the team at Hermeus was how clear eyed they are about their potential for failure, yet in spite of that, how determines they are to pull this off. - I'll put it this way. Failure is still the most
likely outcome, and every day, that inches a little
bit closer to success. And there'll be days when
we go the other direction where we learn something we didn't know, where we fail in a test
and we take a step back. I don't see a way where this
isn't physically possible. Now it comes down to execution. - So we're here on set. What's up, man? At Hermeus... Now I feel like a presenter now. Sunglasses or no sunglasses? I'm not live. I'm here. I'm live. Coming to you live and direct!
