Hermeus Wins Air Force Investment After Demonstrating Mach 5 Engine
ATLANTA (Hermeus Corporation PR) — Hermeus Corporation, the aerospace company developing Mach 5 commercial aircraft, has partnered with the U.S. Air Force and the Presidential and Executive Airlift Directorate to work toward hypersonic travel for the Department of Defense. This award comes under an Other Transaction For Prototype Agreement Direct to Phase II contract through AFWERX after Hermeus successfully tested a Mach 5 engine prototype in February 2020.
The effort is focused on rapidly assessing modifications to Hermeus Mach 5 aircraft to support the Presidential and Executive Airlift fleet. Early integration of unique Air Force requirements for high-speed mobility and evaluation of interfaces between high-speed aircraft and existing communications, airport, and air traffic control infrastructure lays the groundwork for a seamless transition to service. Additionally, Hermeus will prepare test plans to reduce technical risk associated with these modifications to support Air Force requirements.
Brigadier General Ryan Britton, Program Executive Officer for Presidential and Executive Airlift commented on the program: “Leaps in capability are vital as we work to complicate the calculus of our adversaries. By leveraging commercial investment to drive new technologies into the Air Force, we are able to maximize our payback on Department of Defense investments. The Presidential and Executive Airlift Directorate is proud to support Hermeus in making this game-changing capability a reality as we look to recapitalize the fleet in the future.”
Preceding the award, the Hermeus team designed from scratch, built, and successfully tested a Mach 5 engine prototype, in only 9 months. The test campaign both served as risk reduction for Hermeus’ turbine-based combined cycle engine architecture and illustrates the team’s ability to execute with schedule and funding efficiency. “Using our pre-cooler technology, we’ve taken an off-the-shelf gas turbine engine and operated it at flight speed conditions faster than the famed SR-71. In addition, we’ve pushed the ramjet mode to Mach 4-5 conditions, demonstrating full-range hypersonic air-breathing propulsion capability,” said Glenn Case, Hermeus’ CTO.
About Hermeus
Hermeus is a venture-backed company with the long-term vision of transforming the global human transportation network with Mach 5 aircraft. At Mach 5 – over 3000 miles per hour – flight times from New York to London will be 90 minutes rather than 7 hours. High-speed aircraft offer disruptive differentiation where the main metric is speed, rather than plush seats, which has historically resulted in economic expansion. Mach 5 aircraft have the potential to create an additional two trillion dollars of global economic growth per year, unlocking significant resources that can be utilized to solve the world’s great problems.
8 responses to “Hermeus Wins Air Force Investment After Demonstrating Mach 5 Engine”
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It should be a booming business
Funny
Precooler technology. I thought Reaction Engines Limited had that stuff patented for the SABRE engine..? Unless Hermeus has something to do with REL?
It could be mass-injection-pre-cooling. MIPC has been around a while. Liquid oxygen sprayed in the intake cools and densifies the air quite well.
REL has a patent on one particular type of pre-cooler. But it needs a large tank of LH2 into which to dump the heat.
Hermeus seems to have something else in mind – perhaps what redneck speculated about. The Hermeus website, unfortunately, has no technical information about either its engine tech or its notional aircraft.
Given that its the Presidential and Executive Airlift command that Hermeus seems to be tied up with on the USAF side, it looks as though the intent of this project may be, among other things, to produce the first supersonic Air Force One.
By my count there are now four companies developing supersonic or hypersonic airbreathing passenger aircraft: Reaction Engines Limited, Boom Aerospace, Virgin Galactic and Hermeus. Three are U.S. companies and at least two of those are recent startups that have ex-SpaceX-ers on their technical teams. I think we have a trend here.
I’d bet it’s just a funding source that you can bet will be covered by Congress. Shunting executives about at ultra high speed has little value. What you want for an executive is the ability to eat, sleep, and wash en-route, and the extended transit helps with the jet lag. Also during a war, you want something that can stay airborne for days and hide in the sky. 400 MPH is plenty fast enough to outrun a nuclear bomb. A mach 5 aircraft can’t loiter, probably can’t even turn back, and needs very special infrastructure at both ends. If this is real, it likely not even going to be a transport for generals. This kind of speed is useful for interceptors and recon. It’s like dreaming up the MiG-25 in the early 60’s. That plane looked for a real job the rest of its life.
The illustration gives zero sense of scale. But even if no bigger than a G-V, this droop-winged arrowhead should certainly be able to provide at least comparable creature comforts and amenities. If on-board, I don’t think POTUS would have to pee into an empty drink bottle.
Anent wartime ops: An all-out conflict with a peer or near-peer power won’t allow staying airborne for days. That needs continuous access to refueling tankers. Those are unlikely to be very available if nukes are flying and bases are getting smeared.
In scenarios short of that, though, it could still prove possible. The SR-71 was vastly faster, on the top end, than its refueling tankers, but it could still slow down enough to drink.
Hiding in the sky is also problematic. Big aircraft are pretty easy to spot via radar or even heat signature from orbit. Even stealth aircraft usually aren’t nearly as stealthy from above as they are from below or at comparable altitude.
But that will depend upon how much space surveillance stuff your opponent has vs. your own and which of you is the first to blind the other. Kill the enemy’s eyes in the sky and he’s pretty much playing by WW2 rules again. The main job of the Space Force will be to see that the U.S. isn’t that blind man if the balloon ever goes up.
I’ll confess to visceral affection for the idea of a Mach 5 military plane just for the post-SR-71 bragging rights. But my prefrontal cortex also wants to see the proposed use cases. You might be right that there really aren’t any, even if not for the exact reasons you laid out.
That said, it’s still very interesting how much private-sector interest in supersonics and hypersonics has cropped up recently. With extant makers of big aircraft seemingly succumbing to infirmity and senility, it’s nice to see that there are some eager youngsters waiting in the wings, so to speak.
Yeah, the sudden interest across nations and sectors is indicative of a new capability. That combined engine cycle test last month might be it.
The SR-71 which was already mostly fuel with the crew having to pee in bottles still needed a tanker visit to make Mach 3. And had to make repeated deceleration, descents and re-tanking to pull of any long transits, or photography missions. A mach 5 cruiser is almost doubling the KE, so the fuel draw is darn near X4 what a SR=71 was. A Gulf Stream V sized craft just can’t carry the fuel for that sort of thing. It would have to possess a orbital rocket like ratio between wet mass to try mass. Esp to support a long cruise. Something is up, and someone’s assumptions are a bit askew. I’m always ready for it to be me. But we’ll see.
Airborne command posts thousands of miles from the combat zone, still have a real future. Consider that even ground based ATC radar is totally dependent on transponders to resolve traffic. Without transponders ATC cannot resolve altitude. Aircraft totally repeat that information back. Mode C baby. Any space based radar is going to suffer from massive power deficiencies as well as aperture requirements needed to resolve air traffic looking down without the aid of a transponder. Let alone punch thru ECM. Looking down from space to to do anti air AWACS is not in the cards any time soon. Consider that the Soviet RORSAT’s had over 5kw of emission on its radar to find big ships without the aid of transponders. You want to do all the work of an ATC system on much smaller targets AND obtain a weapons solution on it. …. 30 years + of space development ahead of that and probably a breakthru or two in the base concepts. Hiding in your home airspace is going to be the safest option for a long time.
BOOM! is doing legit work. Using advanced materials and production techniques to make an small Concorde makes sense. I can even see a market for it.