Mach 5 aircraft and deep tech contracting with Hermeus CEO AJ Piplica

Acquisition Talk

AJ Piplica joined me on the Acquisition Talk podcast to discuss transportation at hypersonic speeds. He is the founder and CEO of Hermeus, which is developing the Quarterhorse aircraft intended to fly at five times the speed of sound. It uses a turbine-based combined cycle engine which uses the off-the-shelf J-85 jet engine from GE. When the J-85 accelerates to supersonic speeds, a proprietary ram-jet kicks in that uses the aircraft's forward motion to compress air, combust it with fuel, and accelerate to even higher speeds. Hermeus has already shown that a lesser gas turbine engine designed to fly at Mach 0.8 at 26,000 feet can be outfitted to fly Mach 3.2 at 60,000 feet in a test facility. That's closing in on the top speed of the famed SR-71! The first Quarterhorse prototype using the J-85 is expected to fly a couple hundred nautical miles, but the eventual transport aircraft will fly at Mach 5 for 4,000 nautical miles at an altitude of 90,000-100,000 feet. One of the interesting technical breakthroughs at Hermeus is the pre-cooler. There's a "valley of death" of sorts between Mach 2 and Mach 3 which is beyond the limits of the turbine engine but before the ramjet fully kicks in. The air entering the gas turbine engine at Mach 3 is over 800 degrees which is too hot for the materials to handle. Hermeus' pre-cooler cools down that air by 675 degrees in one-tenth of a second so that the turbine engine can continue to provide thrust. Once the Quarterhorse accelerates past that regime the turbine engine will be bypassed and the ramjet does the rest up to Mach 5. "It's not a very efficient system," AJ noted, "so it's important that we accelerate through that regime relatively quickly and then transition to the ramjet." This capability isn't just about accelerating civilian transportation by reducing frictions to travel and trade. It has clear military applications. AJ points to survivable airborne ISR for the first use-case as the military environment shifts from permissive to denied. Even Iran knocked out an MQ-4C Triton back in 2019. A hypersonic reusable aircraft would be hard to see coming, and even harder to knock out. All of North Korea could be imaged in 30 minutes, for example. Since the 1970s, however, the US Air Force has focused almost entirely on stealth (low radar cross section) as the primary means of survivability. Speed, altitude, and maneuverability are other knobs that can be turned in that equation. These knobs become more important as radar catches up to stealth. The Air Force is hedging their bets. Hermeus was awarded the largest STRATFI award yet, with $30 million coming from the Air Force including $15 million from PEO executive airlift, and a matched $30 million from private sources. In the episode, AJ talks about what his company had to do to win the contract and provides advice for other companies trying to transition into defense programs. This podcast was produced by Eric Lofgren. You can follow us on Twitter @AcqTalk and find more information at https://AcquisitionTalk.com