Hermeus, the Atlanta-based startup developing Mach 5 aircraft, has announced the signing of a $60 million U.S. Air Force partnership for flight testing its first aircraft. Called Quarterhorse, the aircraft will validate the company’s proprietary turbine-based combined cycle (TBCC) engine (based on a GE J85 turbojet) and is the first in its line of autonomous high-speed aircraft. By the end of the flight-test campaign, the company says that the Quarterhorse will be the fastest reusable aircraft in the world and the first of its kind to fly a TBCC engine.

The award was made under the AFWERX Strategic Funding Increase program led by the Air Force Life Cycle Management Center’s Presidential and Executive Airlift Directorate (PE) as a follow-on to a Phase II SBIR contract awarded to Hermeus in August 2020. The collaboration also includes support from the Air Force Research Laboratory.

“Reducing risk in high-speed transport technologies, as we are doing with this contract, provides near-term and long-term benefits to both the U.S. Air Force and the defense industrial base, said Lt. Col. Joshua Burger, the Vector Initiative Program Manager who is spearheading the effort. “We are very excited to see Hermeus translate their demonstrated successes in engine prototyping into flight systems.”

Hermeus was founded in 2018 to transform the global transportation network using lessons learned from its exec’s time at NewSpace companies. The technology set it chose positions it in the dual-use (civilian and military) space for hypersonic technology that Hermeus CEO and Co-founder, AJ Piplica, outlined in Defense One earlier this year.

In October of last year, the company announced it had closed a $16 million Series A funding round led by Canaan Partners, with Rich Boyle joining the company’s Board of Directors. In addition to Canaan, the round included continued support from Khosla Ventures, Bling Capital, and Revolution Ventures‘ Rise of the Rest Seed Fund.

Some in the industry are skeptical that the company can flight test a TBCC engine across the full envelope for less than $100 million. However, the company says it is taking a different approach than traditional high-speed flight-test programs.

It says it will be leveraging autonomous and reusable systems, “ruthlessly focused” requirements, and a hardware-rich program. The company believes that these three strategies will allow the team to incrementally push the envelope, sometimes strategically to the point of failure in flight testing, which accelerates learning while simultaneously improving the safety of flight test crew and the public. Pushing more risk to flight will allow it to move through the engineering lifecycle quickly, reducing programmatic costs.

“While this partnership with the U.S. Air Force underscores U.S. Department of Defense interest in hypersonic aircraft, when paired with Hermeus’ partnership with NASA announced in February 2021, it is clear that there are both commercial and defense applications for what we’re building,” said Piplica.

 

The hypersonic road map

In a video released with the latest news, Hermeus execs elaborated on the U.S. Air Force win and provided more details on its latest business and technical advances—and related those all back to the company’s mission. They believe that Mach 5 aircraft have the potential to create an additional $4 trillion of global economic growth per year, unlocking significant resources that can be used to solve the world’s greatest problems.

The venture-backed company has a long-term vision of transforming the global human transportation network with Mach 5 aircraft. Beyond supersonic, the hypersonic speeds of over 3000 mph (4800 km/h) mean flight times from New York to London can be 90 min rather than 7 h. Across the Pacific from Los Angeles to Tokyo could take just 2 h, 45 min vs. 11-13 h.

“Being face-to-face matters,” said Piplica. “In-person communication is such a big part of what it means to be human. At Hermeus, we’re speeding up the global human transportation network by building Mach 5 passenger aircraft.”

In addition to speeds over 3000 mph, the range would be about 4600 mi (7400 km). For the passenger aircraft coming in about 8 years’ time, the development and flight testing of the Quarterhorse is a major step in getting there.

“We’d be kind of naive to go try and build a 20-passenger Mach 5 aircraft right off the bat,” added Pilica. “The number of technical challenges you know between where we stand today and there are many. And we take a very iterative approach to development that’s focused on getting to hardware very quickly.”

The new government partnership will help Hermeus to incrementally de-risk the technology and solve problems for its customer on its road map towards commercial flight, said Mike Smayda, Hermeus Co-founder and CPO.

“It’s going to be expensive to build a passenger aircraft, but we also access very large markets before we even fly people,” he said. “We have the opportunity to pull in significant private dollars alongside government investment to solve pressing national security challenges.”

Hermeus commercial hypersonic roadmap includes a small autonomous aircraft for high-Mach flight testing in 2023, a mid-size autonomous aircraft for time-critical cargo and reconnaissance in 2025, and the passenger aircraft for commercial and private aviation in 2029.

“We started out with asking ourselves, what is the smallest vehicle we could go build and touch Mach 5, and then be reusable—and that is what Quarterhorse is,” said Glenn Case, Hermeus Co-founder and CTO. “Its job is to do a lot of flight testing up at the high-Mach ranges (of Mach 3 to Mach 5), [and] really prove that we can do the flight testing and get to those speed ranges that really enable our hypersonic future.”

The Quarterhorse multi-vehicle flight program has three objectives: validate the TBCC engine in-flight, touch hypersonic speeds, and demonstrate reusability. It will also be unmanned.

“It will be an unpiloted aircraft, which means we can push a lot more risk into the flight program,” said Skyler Shuford, Hermeus Co-founder & COO. “You can spend as much time as you want analyzing all the data, you can needle on all the uncertainties, but really you don’t understand what’s actually happening until you get into flight. So that’s something we’re pushing for extremely quickly. We’ll take a little bit more analysis risk to get into flight and learn where the actual problems of our system are.”

 

The race is on

The U.S. Air Force contract to flight-test Quarterhorse “is a huge step forward in our journey to Mach 5 commercial flight,” said Pilica.

“This is a $60 million partnership that fully funds us to flight and demonstrates that our customers want what we’re building,” added Smayda.

Things are happening quickly at Hermeus.

“In nine short months, we’ve designed, built, and tested our demonstrator engine, proving the possibilities,” said Case. “And now we’re developing Quarterhorse right here in America’s newest airplane factory.”

In May, the company secured a 110,000-ft² (10,200-m²) facility in Atlanta.

“Vertical integration is a core tenet at Hermeus,” added Case. “In addition to the flight-scale propulsion test capability at our Site 27 Test Facility, this factory will allow us to build our first aircraft—conducting structures, avionics, and other major subsystem testing all in-house.”

Hermeus is racing to build what it describes as the “world’s fastest aircraft.”

“Speed is everything at Hermeus, and we’re willing to bet on it,” said Shuford. “We will beat Boom to Mach 1.7 and Virgin Galactic to Mach 3.”

The commercial supersonic/hypersonic aircraft race is on.