(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!