AJ Piplica on Acquisition talk podcast

October 8, 2021

Podcasts are great because they allow for long-form conversation.

When discussing topics like raising private capital, government acquisitions, and hypersonic technology – it’s nice not to be limited to a sound bite or 280 characters.

Our CEO AJ Piplica chatted with Eric Lofgren, the host of Acquisition Talk recently and got into some great conversation about the state of Hermeus and the plan to make commercial hypersonic flight a reality.

Here are some highlights:

The Perfect Storm

It's not an easy mountain we've picked to climb here. But when we looked at, of course, the technology, the national security applications of the technology, and then the private funding environment that we're in today, it was pretty clear to us that we're in this perfect storm of timing to actually make something like this a reality today where five years ago this wasn't the case.

Hypersonics was not the priority that it is today. I think you've seen on the private side a number of big exits where folks have been validated in their investments in aerospace companies, which hadn't been the case before that. So that's really pushing folks to find the next small satellite market or a small launch market given that those two are relatively saturated at this point.

The hunch that we had was, hey, this high speed aircraft thing could be it. I think we'd seen what other companies had been able to do, Aerion at the time, and Boom. And others putting together large chunks of private capital. And we thought they were not necessarily going about it the right way, because at the end of the day to get to a passenger aircraft, you're going to need billions and billions of dollars. So how do you finance? That's frankly a harder challenge than the technology itself. And for us it was always you had to solve problems for customers along the way.

I'll harken back to SpaceX plenty I'm sure over the course of our discussion, but they didn't set out to make humanity a multi planetary species and expect to do that without bringing in some pretty significant revenue along the way. That's how we've set ourselves up from the very beginning to go achieve this goal.

Iteration

If you look at every flight and I'm going to use SpaceX too much in the course of this interview. But every time they flew a vehicle for a customer, that was leveraged as an R&D flight test opportunity. I don't think they necessarily get enough credit for this. But every mission, every commercial mission they flew with Falcon 9, every NASA mission they flew with Falcon 9 was an opportunity for them to attempt recovery. And they failed a lot. And the blooper reel is one of my favorite videos on the internet.

But through that, they figured out all the things that you had to do to get it to work. And they did from a flight test "standpoint" without spending a dime of their own money because they're leveraging opportunities that are already there. So yeah, I think being very creative about how you go get the data and do the iteration that you need, because most customers who are buying launch services, they don't want the rocket to change.

But if you look at the first like 20 Falcon 9s, I don't think any of them were the same. So the ability to change, but still provide a reliable software solution or service or products to your customers is huge. Because if the way you can gain reliability into what you're doing is by saying, okay, we did this, it worked. It's never going to change, then you're going to have a very hard time improving on that in the future. But if you've set up your processes to accept that the only constant in life is change, then you're going to be much better off to take everything that you learn and actually integrate it and improve the current product or future products much faster than would otherwise be possible. I think that's where that kind of software mentality comes into hardware.

Testing

Look back at the '50s and '60s, the golden age of aviation. We built a lot of aircraft. We crashed a lot of aircraft too, but we learned, and we iterated very quickly, and we didn't have anywhere near the digital tools or computing power that we have today. As those modeling and sim capabilities have become more and more ubiquitous, they're relatively easy to use, they're by comparison, or relatively speaking, quite inexpensive. So it can be very tempting to rely on them very heavily to say, "Hey, we don't need to go to a wind tunnel, we've got CFD. We don't need to test this thing, we've got FEA."

But the real power, and I think this is one of the biggest lessons we learned coming out of New Space was you have to put those two together. You leverage the modeling and sim capabilities to get yourself in the ballpark, get to the 80% solution, but don't spend two years analyzing a problem that can be solved in two weeks by spending some money and testing. So it's really yeah, a mix between the two that's really necessary to move fast and be successful with that.

Engine Overview

The engine is what's called the turbine-based combined cycle engine. It's actually a combination of two different types of engines so you have a traditional gas turbine engine, which is very similar to what on today's aircraft. It's a straight turbojet on Quarterhorse. And we use that for all of our flights up to about... or by itself, all of our flight up to about Mach 1.5, Mach 2.

That's kind of what that engine, the J85, was designed to do. It powers the F-5 supersonic fighters. Then the other piece of the engine is a ramjet. No moving parts, uses compression of air that happens over a shockwave to compress the air, burn it, and then exhaust it out a nozzle. It's a fairly simple device in and of itself, but unfortunately can't operate until you're going supersonic speeds.

The turbo jet's there to get us up there. We start the ramjet up in the Mach 3 range. Then once it's started, we accelerate up the rest of the way. So there's this gap between about Mach 2 and Mach 3, where ramjets don't really work well enough because there's not enough compression and turbo jets don't work well enough because you can't burn them hot enough with the turbine downstream of the combustor. That's the question is how do you bridge this valley of death, if you will, in the propulsion world to actually get this engine to work.

The way if we come up with doing that is putting up pre-cooler in front of the gas turbine engines. Essentially, air at Mach 3, the air coming into the engine is around 800 degrees Fahrenheit and the pre-cooler cools down the air so that by the time the air gets to the compressor face and the gas turbine, it's down to about 125 degrees. It cools it down 675 degrees in about a tenth of a second. It's not a very efficient system. It's important that we accelerate through that regime relatively quickly and then transition to the ramjet, which is much more efficient and keep climbing from there.

ABOUT HERMEUS

Hermeus is a venture-backed startup with the long-term vision of transforming the global human transportation network with Mach 5 aircraft. At Mach 5, travel is not just supersonic, it's hypersonic. At these speeds – over 3,000 miles per hour – flight times from New York to London will be 90 minutes rather than seven hours. Mach 5 aircraft have the potential to create an additional four trillion dollars of global economic growth per year, unlocking significant resources that can be utilized to solve the world’s great problems.

Contact: info@hermeus.com