For aerospace and defense technology start-up Hermeus, everything comes down to speed.
First, there’s the obvious: The Atlanta-based company, with facilities in Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., and Jacksonville, Florida, is on a mission to develop a hypersonic commercial passenger aircraft. Those high-tech planes could hurtle from New York to London in 90 minutes, compared to the standard seven hours.
Hypersonic speeds are more than five times the speed of sound, known as Mach 5, or around 3,500 miles per hour. That’s twice the speed of the fastest jets in the U.S. Air Force, which has enlisted Hermeus to help develop its own hypersonic technology. In the next decade, the company hopes to offer regular hypersonic flights to all travelers, for just the price of a business-class ticket.
“There are still frontiers in aviation that we haven’t touched,” says A.J. Piplica, a cofounder of Hermeus, “and speed is one of those.” Before forming their start-up, cofounders kyler Shuford, Glenn Case, Mike Smayda, and Piplica earned their stripes at the likes of air and space heavyweights SpaceX, NASA, Blue Origin, and Generation Orbit.
Second, there’s the rate at which Hermeus is accomplishing its goal, a lightning pace for the air and space industry, which is famously bogged down in red tape and astronomic costs. Founded in 2018, Hermeus employs around 240 people and has already developed and tested a new engine to accommodate Mach 5 aircraft, called Chimera. The Chimera engine shifts from a standard turbojet to ramjet, which uses a different mechanism for propulsion at high speeds. Typical time and cost expectations for such innovation might take a large defense contractor a decade and $100 million, but the small and nimble Hermeus built and rolled out the prototype engine in 21 months from start to finish for $18 million at its manufacturing facility in northeast Atlanta. At the time of publication, the test flight of its first uncrewed aircraft, Quarterhorse, was imminent. Eventually, the goal is to cruise at more than 80,000 feet and upward of 3,000 miles per hour.
This might all sound like science fiction if it wasn’t for the expertise involved, with a board of advisors that includes Rob Meyerson, the former president of Jeff Bezos-founded aerospace manufacturer Blue Origin, and Rob Weiss, who headed up Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works, which has rolled out some of the most advanced aircraft in history. Adding to its credibility, Hermeus has also landed funding from famed investors Vinod Khosla, whose firm Khosla Venturesis known for incubating experimental technology (as well as unicorns like Impossible Foods and Instacart), and Sam Altman, a cofounder of OpenAI.
“The speed at which they’re moving is eye-watering,” says Hermeus advisor and investor Keith Masback, a geospatial intelligence and national security expert who spent decades as a U.S. Army officer before serving as CEO of the U.S. Geospatial Intelligence Foundation. “It doesn’t align with anything I’ve experienced in my career. They keep doing things that probably most considered impossible, at timelines considered not possible.”
The dream of hypersonic passenger flight is revolutionary, but Hermeus’s approach is incremental. “We’re not starting by building a passenger aircraft right off the bat—that’s almost like financial suicide,” says Piplica, a Georgia Tech grad who has long been enamored with the speedy heroes of science fiction. “We’ve figured out where there are really important customer problems that can be solved with technology and products that we’re building along the way.”
The “customer” Piplica refers to is the Department of Defense, which has enlisted Hermeus to build products for the U.S. Air Force that “de-risk” the technology for hypersonic flight. That might mean creating new engines, thermal management systems, power generation systems, and materials that can withstand the scorching heat at Mach 5, none of which exist yet. Building those products for the Air Force finances the long-term goal.
It’s also why mere supersonic speeds (anything faster than the speed of sound, or around 761 miles per hour) won’t cut it for Hermeus. That’s not what the current customer needs.
Of course, supersonic commercial flight has already been demonstrated: Recall the famed Concorde, in commercial operation by British Airways and Air France from the mid-1970s until the early 2000s, when it was grounded by economic woes. Concorde flew at around twice the speed of sound, or Mach 2—less than half the speed Hermeus proposes. But Piplica believes the market is primed this time, with increases passenger demand and advances in technology. One limitation the Concorde faced that Hermeus must tackle is the sonic boom: an explosive noise that rattles eardrums and structures when crossing the sound barrier. Federal regulations prohibit supersonic speeds over land, and the Concorde flew mostly transatlantic routes. Piplica says there are some proposals in place to mitigate this; still, Hermeus is basing its business model chiefly on flying only over water—routes that it maintains can still have an enormous impact.
“The whole world has become normalized to moving around at Mach .8,” says Piplica of the standard speed of commercial aircraft. “And that leaves a pretty large amount of social and economic growth on the table.” Hermeus contends their model would increase global trade by 5 percent, generating an additional $4 trillion in global GDP annually.
In fact, many of the tools and components for hypersonic flight have been around for decades, but they haven’t been assembled into a system that could make it a reality. “We really try to stay out of the realm of science and focus on the engineering,” says Piplica. “We’re taking things that are well understood and working within the architecture, focusing all the problem-solving energy on the system.”
It’s the West Coast that’s typically associated with aircraft and aerospace companies, but in fact, aerospace products are Georgia’s number one export. The industry is Georgia’s second largest manufacturing industry, home to powerhouses such as Lockheed Martin, Gulfstream Aerospace, and Delta Air Lines, which Hermeus looks to as a long-term customer.
So, what will it feel like to fly in a hypersonic aircraft?
“It should be pretty similar to what you experience now. You’ll feel a pushback in your seat for a longer period of time, but the acceleration you feel is about the same strength,” says Piplica. At more than 80,000 feet, there are more benign atmospheric conditions, and of course, less traffic. The ramjet produces less vibration than a turbojet engine. “The ride will be pretty smooth, and it will be one hell of a view.”
This article appears in the Winter 2024 issue of GaBiz.
