The thing that I'm hoping to bring to the world is like, we can just go everywhere three times faster
and at the same price. You're not building a scramjet, you are building a
ramjet, but then second stage is just a rocket, basically. I
would never be allowed to fly fighter jets. I knew I would never be
allowed to do that, but I always knew I could be the one that makes the fighter jets.
Hey everybody, my name's Christian and this is First Principles. Today we're
talking to Ian Brook about the physics and economics of Astromechanica,
a startup that is building an electric adaptive jet engine. Basically,
this would be the most efficient way to launch anything into orbit. The
easiest way to think about this is it's either one of the fastest planes ever
built, or one of the most efficient rockets ever built, or actually
it's just both of those things combined. Basically the way that it works is
that you take off from a runway, you drop a payload about halfway
through, and then that payload launches itself at hypersonic speeds into
orbit. It's an incredibly ambitious idea, and it's actually something that
people have wanted to do for a long time. The recent advances that
we talk about in this episode have made this uniquely possible today.
And so I think you'll love hearing from Ian Brook from Astromechanica, here
on First Principles. Tell us who you are and what you're building. All right.
Yeah, yeah. I'm Ian Brook. I build speedy things here at my machine shop, where
I build motorcycles. When I was pretty young, I
started from model aircraft and moved into experimental airplanes. And
the goal, since the earliest days, was just to build increasingly cool flying
machines. And along the way, I think sort
of core to all flying machines is like engines and propulsion. That
is what defines powered flight. And, you know, we've really been
like stuck in sort of different eras of this. First, there's a piston engines, you
know, that was like up through World War Two. And, you know, after
that we got into the jet age, which is the one we're still in. And sort of neat
thing on this is like, we'd call this category like turbo machinery. And,
you know, it put like rockets in that category as well, these turbo pumps. And
the thing that I've sort of figured out is like, we've had a new a
new technology come about that's relevant in
a sort of a different way than you would expect, which is like electric motors. And
this is not for the purposes of like, you don't want batteries. Batteries
are not the technology here, but electric motors. And if you use those to
augment a turbine engine, you
can alter a lot of the characteristics of it, where previously we've had
to use different turbine engines for different speeds. So, you know, like turbo
fans for low speed, turbo jet, turbo
pump-fed rockets. If you instead
use a turbine engine coupled to an electric motor, you
can now make one thing behave like all of them. So this is sort of the
next era that we're going into. I'd call it the turbo electric era. you
know, if the previous one was turbine or the jet age. Everything in flight is
like, you know, based on this foundation. And so what
we end up with is a new era where any given
flying thing could just be adaptive to its airspeed. So, like,
a lot of compromises were needed previously. for something to work
at a given speed, but now you can make, because of the adaptive
engine, you can now have one airframe that can do something like, sort of
at the limit, if we really mature this technology, you
can end up with something of like, you could just fly to orbit, essentially, where
the engine is constantly changing. Again, it's always that same,
you know, just like a rocket, that turbo pump or whatever, it's like, that part isn't
changing, but all the propulsive components are adapting. And
so that was the thing that I realized
is like electric motors got good enough to be used to enable this
new thing. So it's not enough to just make an engine, like that's the foundation, but
we're actually going to be building the aircraft and everything around this. No, I love it. So
at the end of the day, you're building an ability to basically take off
from a runway and end up in orbit, end up
with a payload in orbit. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. It's
using the atmosphere as a ladder to space. That's an
awesome way of putting it. Yeah. And your oxygen
tanks and your oxidizer. You're also using it as an oxidizer. Yeah, exactly. It's
all of the things, right? If you imagine a rocket is effectively like, all
right, we have to make this thing jump in one leap really
high. It's like, well, with this, it's much more like, all
right, will the wings get to use the air to sort of climb its
way up? And then in terms of powering
the whole thing, it can use the oxidizer around it. So
I guess a rocket is a bit more like you're jumping into space while using a scuba tank.
You have to carry all your oxygen with you, exactly. Yeah. By
analogy, this was just like, imagine riding a marathon and the only air
you could use was in a tank that you had to carry with you. That
is rocketry. And you need that when you're in space. But sort of
the interesting thing is, if you look at Falcon 9 or any
of these rockets, that lower stage is isn't
really actually going that far, if at all, outside of
the atmosphere, nor that far beyond the limits of, like,
air-breathing engines, you know? In other words, they're typically around, like,
you know, so that lower stage, which is, like, 75% of the mass of a rocket and
roughly 75% of the cost, that stage
goes to between, like, anywhere from 50 to 70 kilometers
in altitude, and typically they're staging around Mach
6 to 7. And so you can just fly to
Mach 5 air-breathing. That's about
the limit of a ramjet. Then we can go to scramjets, which I am not
Team Scramjet, but yeah. No, so
let's talk about it. Let's talk about like, okay, what's the difference between, like
the fundamental difference between a jet and a turbo jet
and a rocket, like the basic categories. Like how do,
what separates those two, those three from each other and how
do they work? So at their core is this thing, you know, we'd call like the
turbo machinery, as I was mentioning earlier. And so what that is, is you have
spinning blades, you're burning something, I call it, it's like a pinwheel and a
blowtorch. and you've got your little pinwheel and you're sitting at the blowtorch and like that
part is the same between all of them. One difference
with rockets is the thing blowing on the blowtorch is you're reacting
liquids but still fluid on blowtorch
and on pinwheel so that part's the same but what changes for
all these different engines is how they're generating the
thrust. So at low speeds, actually at like
sort of the lowest end, you would actually go with even like a helicopter, interestingly. But
that maybe sounds a little too weird. So we'll say like a turboprop, you know, you
can use a turbine engine. You can spin, you go through a gearbox and
you're spinning a propeller. So you can go from that. Then if you want
to go a little faster, you'd go to a turbo fan. This is what all airliners use,
which is, you know, kind of like a propeller, but a little bit smaller. Air goes
a little faster through it. And then as we go up
sort of the next gear in this sort of speed chart, we
would get to, you know, the turbo jet cycle, where
now, you know, what you're doing is you're not using a fan to just push
air. You're instead compressing and expanding air. Which
is kind of like what the fan is already doing, but you're just doing it, you
squeeze it so much that as it expands out the nozzle, it goes supersonic. And
that's kind of the difference between a fan cycle and
a jet cycle. A fan is sort of like a paddle wheel of sorts, you're
just moving air, you're just pushing through, you're speeding it up a little bit, but you're just pushing
it through. With jet cycles, you're creating a jet of
air where you squeeze it, and an
interesting thing happens, which is we have a convergent-divergent nozzle,
just like rockets, where you squeeze it enough, and as it starts to expand
out the nozzle, the wider the nozzle gets,
if you compress it enough. As the
nozzle gets wider, the air goes faster and it
goes supersonic. So a jet cycle has, you know, supersonic exhaust
velocity. And this is, in principle, the same as
a rocket, but rockets, instead of, you know, taking air in
to do this, they're working with liquid air,
you know, liquid oxygen, and typically kerosene or methane,
to both, you know, both run the thermodynamic cycle of,
like, burning to spin the pinwheel, and
then as the reaction mass, they're pushing out. So you
can think of, like, jet engines, we get to have the infinite reaction
mass hack, so we're only really looking at, like, what
is the energy in the fuel, but rockets, you know, since, again, they're
sort of limited to this thing they can carry, Yeah,
they're limited on their reaction mass, which is like their version of efficiencies for
jet engines. All right, everybody, this is Christian. We're going to get right back to the episode. But
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today. That's perfect. Yeah. So basically like, okay, I'm going to, I'm
going to go out and let, let me, let me try to describe and you tell me where I go wrong. So basically,
um, in a normal, like a normal, like whatever
direct driving a propeller plane or something like you're just using a
motor to spin a blade that's pushing air. That's it. The
new thing that we sort of figured out was turbo fans, which allowed us to attach
basically a turbine to the back of the engine. So like behind the
main propeller, which uses some of the forward or
like the, you know, the propulsive movement, not just
to like push the plane forward, but instead to turn a turbine, which
then turns the fan faster. Like it's basically, you know, it's feeding back
onto itself and then being able to, you know, generate more thrust that
way. Is that a good way to describe a turbo fan? You
know, the turbofan is like, they have the fan part in the name, and
the turbo just refers to like the source of shaft power. So yeah,
it's like, you know, you could have pistons doing this. And
so yeah, yeah, this is this is like, we just instead of like,
you could run a jet cycle with like a piston engine at its core, it'd be
weird, but I think you could do that. Yeah, new
products, new product line for you guys. I am
not team reciprocating. I don't I don't like pistons flapping up
and down. Not a big fan of that. But you know, you could
build it. So yeah, let's Okay, so let's so
and then so turbo fans are that and then basically what a rocket is doing is
instead of having actual like It's not, it's obviously not pushing any
air out of its, you know, out of the end of the rocket. But
what that little propeller is doing is basically just like shoving as much fuel
as possible into the place where the combustion is happening. It's
like a normal tube wouldn't be enough.
It's like it needs a little like thing just shooting as fast
as it can to get as much as possible propellant. Yeah, yeah,
that's sort of, that's a rock in a nutshell. It's like you're just squeezing things into
a combustion chamber and shooting it out the back. It's like
squeezing a hose, right? It's like, where's the pressure coming from? In this case, it's like
you put your finger on the tip of a hose, you get that jet coming out. And
so the higher the pressure, the more you can squeeze it, the faster it goes. So
I guess this kind of segues into maybe some of the points of
like, You can consider engine pressure
and exit velocity to be somewhat equivalent. Again,
using that hose analogy, if you have enough pressure behind it,
you can keep squeezing it more and more and you're going to get higher and higher velocity of
the jet shooting out. And so in
the case of rockets, since
they're limited in like how much stuff they can carry, thrust
is mass, it's like the amount of stuff you're throwing out the back times
the speed of the stuff being thrown. And so with
a rocket, since you're limited in like, well, we only have so much stuff, we
have this limited tank, so our best option for high
efficiency is we need it to go as fast as possible out
the back. And that's that's why rockets
like up the chamber pressure as much as possible and
You know like that gets very hard at a certain point. This is like SpaceX
did is like Raptor It's like the highest chamber pressure ever Yeah, I
don't know if it literally is but it's very high. It's really cool But
that doesn't really apply when you have infinite reaction
mass. That isn't the binding
constraint for an air-breathing engine, where instead, and
this is sort of my thesis on this, it's very antithetical to
rocket world of actually really low pressure. You only want
enough pressure To have the stuff
going out the back only needs to be going faster than you're going forward. And
nothing more. Anything more than that and you're actually wasting energy. So,
you know, again, in the reaction mass world, it's more about, it
needs to go just fast enough, but then you want to move as
much as possible. So then it's like, this is why airliners, we have these bigger and
bigger engines, because we're trying to move the biggest volume imaginable,
which is like literally a physical, it's like, if the thing is bigger, you can just move
more. So yeah, it's a
really different... And that's what a bypass ratio is, right? Like, that's the point
of having like, you know, kind of counterintuitively, the
more energy from the kind of main engine that
you can use to just turn a huge fan
blade and just move a lot of air relatively slowly compared
to the, you know, as opposed to just accelerating the air as fast as possible, it's
actually more efficient. It's more efficient to move a bigger chunk
of air just a little bit faster, as opposed to a small chunk of air
extremely fast. Exactly, yeah. This
is where we could probably show the specific impulse curve of like, that
thing you're seeing on that left bound is like, the reason it sort of
goes asymptotically there is like, you
just end up with like, yeah, if you had an infinitely large fan,
And you're moving it just barely faster. But you obviously
mechanically can't do that. So now we
start to go into the engineering of this. The
constraint that you have is our little pinwheel at the core of
this thing likes to spin pretty fast. I
mean, just necessarily so. You're
combusting and you need to extract energy out of it. It's going to spin at some speed. And
the problem is that if that's small and the fan it's attached to is
big, well, you end up with this problem
of the fan, the blade tips are
gonna start to go supersonic. So we have this mechanical
limit. We can't actually just make it infinitely large because it's,
well, for a variety of reasons, but it's driven by
this thing that needs to spin fast. And so one of the things is we've
made it bigger and bigger and bigger, but we've hit a point where like, okay, The
turbine can't spin any slower. The fan can't go any faster. We
are designing these things. It's like the really cool, beautiful turbo
fans we see with that cool swept geometry. That's all to deal with
the fact that we actually have the tips of those going transonic or
supersonic. So, you
know, along comes like Pratt Whitney, they make a lot of turbo props. So
they're used to putting gearboxes between turbine engines and
spinny things, other spinny parts. And they've
created what they call like the geared turbo fan. So this was their solution. It's like, okay,
well, the speed, the fan wants to, like, we want to make it bigger,
but we need to step down the speed. So they put a gearbox between these things. And
that, you know, now you have like, we've
got a gearbox in here, it's like a mechanically complex thing. It's
actually not the end of the world. The reason the gear turbo fan is tricky is they've
designed this to be a gearbox that's like a lifetime part. So
it's like, you don't change the oil in it, you don't, you know, it's
like, it lives as long as the rest of the engine and it's sitting there, this
like really lightweight, compact thing. So anyways, tough
engineering challenge on that. So that
was the limit on bypass ratio. It was like, okay, well, we need to slow it
down to have this bigger thing. Then
comes what I'm doing. So instead of
a gearbox to sit between these components, what if you
put electric motors? So instead of having, imagine shaft
power, spinning gearbox, going to fan, old paradigm was
direct drive. Now we're starting to see a bit more
on the, like the, you know, the gearbox end
of things. But if you can, instead of having
shaft power go to, which is like a kinetic energy
type thing, if you instead say, actually, well, we're
going to briefly go into sort of the universal currency that is electrons. So
we've got our shaft power and we go into an electric motor to make electrical
power. Electric motors are surprisingly efficient.
They're north of 98% efficient. So you're not actually losing that
much energy in this process. So, all right, we've got our turbine, it's making electrical
power. That electrical power then goes over to
the fan where the fan is also driven by an electric motor. So we've, instead
of this gearbox and these mechanical couplings, it's now electrical. You
can consider like, and like once you do that, you sort of
end up with like programmable energy. It's like, I don't
know, I think a neat way of saying it, but it's just, say
the electric motor is very flexible in the way that it uses the
electrical power you're giving to it. So you can say, hey, actually,
spin fast or slow, same amount of power. So
you can flow a lot of air through it at a low speed, but it's
a huge mass, or you can flow less
air through that fan, but you can have the motor spin up more, pressurize it
more. And so now we have this variability where
the electric motor, again, is just totally flexible in how it's
utilizing that power. So for this to work, though, this sounds neat
in theory, but the electric motor needs to be really lightweight, because
you're replacing what was just a steel shaft with,
you know, both, with like two electric motors, with all of the things those
need to run. And like, jet engines are very
lightweight and very powerful. And so, you know, like
the number I'll give this is like a fun one, which is like, we're using one
of our systems is sort of based around like the Blackhawk sized engine, which is
It's a two megawatt engine and it
weighs about 200 kilograms, so like 400 pounds for
roughly 27 horsepower. Pretty
good. It's pretty good. So an electric motor,
if you were to use a Tesla type electric motor, pull
it out of one of the cars and try and do this thing I'm talking about of have that
between the turbine and your propulsive component,
Those are around two kilowatts per kilogram continuous
power output. That's roughly the... So, all right, we've got 2000 kilowatts. So
we need a thousand kilograms. So we went from here's our little
200 kilogram jet engine and that was just fine, you know, you
know, like it was spitted up, you know, rotors, fan, whatever
you want. We say, actually, no, all right, we want it to spit a generator now.
So that generator weighs five times as much as the motor.
And then we need it again because we need to know the motor end. or
the propulsion, so we went from our 200-kilogram gas turbine,
it was at 400 pounds, to our 2,200-kilogram total
mass system. So like, you can't go from a 400-pound system
to like, you know, I don't know, a 4,500-pound system
and be like, oh yeah, this is good. Like no, that doesn't work. So,
because the other end of this equation is like the thing that you're really optimizing
for is total mass, which
is to say, it's like weight of the engine and the weight
of the fuel, the energy source for it, you know, fuel propellant. So like, if
you have a more efficient engine, so
you're going to use less fuel, but if the engine weighs more than
the fuel savings, well then this didn't help at all. And
this is like, it's like power plants are very efficient turbine engines, but
you wouldn't put that. It's like, oh, we'll just
use nuclear power. But like, you need so much water or
whatever to like actually make it useful. And like, that's extremely heavy.
You can't just account for like the pure efficiency of the fuel source
that you're using. You have to use the efficiency of like the system required to actually get
power out of it. And so, yeah, this is where we go with like power density. And
like, so it's not just enough to talk about, you know, like efficiency of these things. So that's
really what you're really optimizing for is like total weight of
the whole thing with the fuel tanks. And this is where like rockets, they're
pretty much like, they are as efficient as they're going to be. Like the
rocket people are tweaking in the margins of the stuff. But you know,
a rocket is, I always love to give this example of like, there
is, Almost the ratio in a rocket of
like propellant to a rocket is about that
of a soda can. You know, it's like 88 to
89 percent propellant, you know, fuel. And then,
you know, like a few percent payload. And so it's like imagine engineering
a soda can. You're like, I give you a soda can. I'm like, you cannot add
any extra atoms to this. and you need to engineer out
of the atoms that I gave you an engine in this thing
and all the control systems and all the stuff and you know and then
use the liquid in it to fly it to orbit and you know if you're SpaceX and
like and survive re-entry you know. Very
hard to do. And so they're really sensitive
to, like, the engine has to be super lightweight to work in the system, whereas
in sort of airplane world, it's like, well, our engines, in fact, are
so much more efficient that we
can get away with, it's like, okay, well, our fuel mass fraction is
a fraction of that, so now everything can get heavier. Rather than having, like, 8% rocket, you
can have, like, you know, 40 to 50% airplane. So
it's a lot more structure that you get to work with. Everything becomes a lot cheaper and easier.
But this is, this was the thing, and I sort of glanced over this earlier. Well,
electric motors are much better than the Tesla motors now. Like Tesla motors are
optimized for being used in automotive,
like they're affordable mass production things. You know, they're
not like, Like, no doubt Elon could make the most ridiculous
cool electric motors if he wanted to, and all the folks at Tesla, but we
instead, you know, it's like if you make an electric motor, like, you know, no
compromise, as good as we can get it, we can now get
those things not two kilowatt per kilogram, but
anywhere from sort of the lower bound on high performance ones are
like 12 to as much as 30 kilowatts per kilogram. So,
you know, we could just do a 10x on this, right? We could say 20 kilowatt per kilogram up
from the Tesla 2. And so now, you
know, going back to our Blackhawk turbo electric engine system, our,
you know, our 2200 kilogram total turbo gen
mass system would now go down to 600. And
so that's actually enough where it's like, okay, yeah, 2,200 kilograms,
too heavy. 200 kilograms, again, the base turbine is
great, but like 600, but it's way more efficient. That
system is where it's like, okay, this whole thing actually does
get lighter because it is using the fuel more efficiently. And
so just talk about that ISP curve for like, okay, where did turbo fans
sort of top out? And then what do you have to do once turbo fans
can't spin fast enough anymore? Yeah, so talking
over our ISP curve, so as
mentioned, turbofans are a strictly subsonic
thing because again, they're just pushing air. I
mean, they do a little bit of... compression, but they're
mostly just pushing air. And so the air coming out of them is not going
supersonic. And so the engines can't really go
supersonic. So while they're really efficient, they
have this like hard speed limit and we're not even getting the aerodynamics of
stuff. We're talking just to the engine. So yeah, they've got more or less a
hard stop. This is an act, you can do things,
but they're subsonic. Then
you can go. One thing I'll jump in to say is I
don't think people appreciate how close to supersonic they
actually are in commercial jets. Commercial jets are going, well
actually it's probably north of 80, it's probably north of 85% of
the speed of sound. Yes, we use Mach. Which is just Mach
1, is just the speed of sound. And so
yeah, for airliners, they've
actually gotten a little slower. Some of the good
ones are like, they're at around Mach 0.8 and
anywhere from 0.84 to like
0.86, maybe 0.88. I think the 727 is actually pretty fast plane, but
they didn't use turbo fans on those, they used turbo jets. So yeah,
anyways, they're all the Mach 0.8 range. So, yeah. So that's the
limit, and we're there. Yeah, that's about the limit. And you run into this
thing called transonic, which is, that's
actually even more the limit, there's like some of the Gulf streams that'll be like, around
Mach 0.92 to 0.93, you're really, life
is getting difficult because like, different parts of the airplane are
going, they're starting to develop shockwaves. So
it's like while the plane on average, well the whole plane is not going supersonic, airflow
over it at different points is. And so like a
fun thing on this is like if you're ever on a wide body airplane like a 767 and
you're sitting over the wing, you can actually see the shockwave. Like
you can, like you'll look at the leading edge if you're in just the right
spot and you'll see a little distortion of the wing. Like
you're just like, like the air is, there just looks like sort of a glitch. And
so yeah, like that's how close they are at that limit. So. Then
we go to, you know, so now we're talking the realm of lag, so we want to go faster
than that. Well, now we're going to the realm of supersonic. And
so you now need your engine to push air a lot faster. Because again,
you need to have, you know, so if the thing is going, you know, Mach 0.8, you
need the air coming out of it to be going Mach 0.9 something. Or
what's for the supersonic, if you're going Mach 1.2, that air has got
to be going, you know, 1.4, whatever, some fraction higher. So
now we go into that and now the whole airplane,
everything is dealing with shockwaves. So, you know, I have like
other analogies of this, of like, the challenge when you start to deal with shockwaves
is air can't get out of the way fast enough.
So you can imagine like, it's like, imagine like a submarine
going through water. Like, you know, you can see them like when they're just coming up
and you see like the water all flowing around it. Like that's, you know, That's
like subsonic world. Supersonic world is like the air can't
get out of the way fast enough. And so you
have these like, as you, you know, we have this like shape. So it's like,
as you go faster, you have this like shockwave that forms. It
like goes further and further back, the higher your Mach. And
the engine now has to deal with that. So, you know, we can go to the challenges
of like, for combustion purposes, this
is one of the things that makes it tricky, like, combustion inside of an engine always
has to happen at a subsonic speed. So even, you know,
we're going Mach 2 now. we're, so you know, air all
around you is going really fast, but the engine, you know, to like, to
have combustion occur, because we're not going to talk about detonation engines
yet, to have the combustion occur, we have to, you
know, we're like scooping air at Mach 2, shock waves
everywhere, where we need to slow it down now, we
need to trade that high velocity for, as
we slow it down, we can trade it for a bunch of pressure, which, kind
of on earlier themes of like, good for exhaust velocity, so we trade it for a bunch of
pressure, and we slow it down. So we slow it
down to like anywhere from, you know, on the high end, I don't know, maybe like
Mach 0.7, 0.8, to on the low end, like Mach
0.2. So we're really slowing it down a lot, but we really pressurized it. So
now, we scoop this air in, and we slow it down
a bunch, and then we heat it up. So now I have this high pressure, slow air. We
heat it up, and then we do that thing I mentioned of like, now we start to
expand it out the nozzle, and then it goes faster and faster and faster again. So
it's like, I don't know, I'm trying to think of like, it's like traffic coming up on the Bay Bridge or
something, of like, you have the toll booth there, it's like, and it's
like, finally, a release. Yeah, finally, you get a bunch of energy, and then like,
you get on the other side of this thing, you shoot out of there. So
that's, you know, that's like, what's going on for supersonic engines,
this is a really different process of like this compression, you know,
that expansion. So that works well for, so
you use that, and the high speed, the supersonic domain, And one
of the things is, like, in the old paradigm, in the world of Concorde and so on,
you were always using that supersonic, you know, jet
thrust-style engine, even when you're going slow. So,
like, this process for, like, moving air really fast, back
to what I was talking about earlier on, like, rockets with, you know, it's
more about energy efficiency, not, like, mass efficiency, as
a rocket is constrained by. So you
actually just want to move a large mass of air very slowly. and
if you're dealing with jet like a turbojet engine like again for Concorde that
air is going fast all the time that engine only has one speed and that one
speed is like it is a turbojet it's pushing air fast all the time so
when you're going slow which is a lot of your flight like when you're idling there
on the ground and you're climbing up that air is
you're just wasting energy so like what's interesting is like Concord burned you
know about 40 and it's like between 40 and 50 percent of
its fuel between engine start and beginning cruise which
is like wild and all of that energy loss is just because like you're
just squandering it pushing this air even though because the
plane isn't going Mach 2 yet right but you know it's going Mach
zero, it's all the ground. So it's just consuming huge
amounts of energy to do that. The neat
thing would be if you had an adaptive engine, like what I'm working on, it's like, well,
at low speeds, we can be the subsonic fan cycle
engine. And then as we go faster, it's always
adapting. The electric motor doesn't care, it just spins up more and more. We
compress more and more, and then we do have secondary combustion cycles
behind this once the pressure's high enough, and we need just more thrust.
And so, like, we get to have our cake and eat it too, where it's like, well, it's both
of the engines. So that, kind of back to that, is something
of, like, the engine efficiency, or
total mass efficiency. It's like, yeah, Concord It's clearly burning
a ton of fuel, it's squandering a bunch on this low-speed regime. Now,
it was really efficient once it's going fast. One of
the things that's a little tricky to explain to this is the adaptive
engine, its utility, you can't really examine it at any given point.
It's not necessarily better than just a
direct-drive engine at whatever that engine speed is. But
over like the whole spectrum, it's like, it's again, thinking of the
impulse curve, the adaptive engine is the entire curve. It's
not, you know, a point on the curve. So. Yeah.
Yeah. No, that's that's perfect. I mean, so
what is. Let's talk about RAM versus SCRAM. So
you mentioned that the point of RAM, or what's still happening in
a RAM jet is that you still have to basically slow
down the air. So even in a case where you'd be going whatever, Mach 2, Mach 3 or something, inside
it's still going slow. It's still going Mach 0.25 or
something, right? Yeah. And so the difference between a RAM jet
and a SCRAM jet is that, I don't actually know, I think the S in SCRAM stands
for supersonic, but basically it's supersonic while it's moving through the
engine. It's supersonic combustion. Yeah. So
yeah, if we go into how
combustion occurs, so everything we use
is what we call deflagration. So
it's like you're burning, you know, you've got
your oxygen and your fuel, your oxidizer fuel, and
there's like a wave going through. It's like, it's just all reacting and like they're fighting
each other and they're binding and they release heat as they do this. But
it's not happening with like a shockwave. So yeah, we need this, we need the air to
be going slow for that process to occur. And,
you know, part of this is like, so you say, we want to slow
it down and in slowing it down, we get the benefit of the
pressure goes up a lot with this. But something that happens is,
so we have this thing, adiabatic heating, which is like, the more
you're slowing that air down, the more you're pressurizing it, the hotter it gets. Like
in California, we have like, you actually get to live in emergencies, which is like, you
know, the Santa Ana winds, something like that, where if you have like, air
from up on top of like a mountain or something, and it goes, so
in other words, if we have wind coming from Nevada, it blows air
down slope, where it pressurizes more, and then everything gets really hot
and dry. So it's like, it's always the same thing of like,
are you have, you know, you're bouncing atoms, temperature being
a measurement of like average kinetic energy, you're squeezing it together, they're
bumping into each other a lot more, things are getting hotter. So
this process of slowing things down and increasing pressure, you
eventually hit a point, and that point's around Mach 5, where
the air is now so hot from this, you know,
deceleration compression process that it's
at the limit of, like, it's as hot as the air
would be if we burned fuel. So, you know,
it's sort of actually a material limit. But anyway, like, we make things out of nickel alloys.
And, all right, we've got this so hot, it's like, well, we, it's at, like, say,
it's around 1350 Kelvin is roughly the
temperature you'd be at after, you know, going to, like, Mach 5 and
slowing that down. So it's like, okay, the
air before we added fuel was at 1350 Kelvin. Our
combustion temp was going to be like, you know, 1350 Kelvin,
or maybe it's a little bit hotter. But still, we can't
add any energy to this equation. We just slowed it down, heated it
up. And that's sort of
a problem. It's like, OK, well, we can't go any faster then because, you know, if
we go, say, Mach 6, well, now the air through the inlet is going to
be at like 16 or 1,800 or whatever. It's going to be getting hotter
and hotter. And we just can't, like, the
engine will melt. We can't add any jets. Along comes
scramjets, which is, saying, oh, okay, all
right, well, the issue here is we're slowing the air down too
much, and it's, you know, causing too much pressure, and like, at first
that was great, we wanted that temperature and pressure, but now this is a
problem, the thing is getting too hot, and we can't add any energy. So
the thinking then goes, like, okay, well, what if we don't What
if we don't slow down to like, you know, Mach 0.9 or
0.7 for our combustion? What if we keep it at like, what if we try and like combust
this air and we like, let's keep it supersonic. Let's actually have
the combustion occur at that. And that's really
hard to do. And so, you know, you
can, you know, we've built them, you can do that. And so you
get the utility of like, okay, well, we still have the free reaction mass, we're still able
to like run this thing faster, but now your combustion
efficiency is just going to be much lower. Where when you
slowed all that air down to subsonic, it was really easy
to get like, not easy, but you know, it was very doable to
have all of your fuel and all your oxidizer react. And
so you used every bit of fuel, you know, it all translated into energy. Like, you
can pretty reasonably have like a high 90 something percent combustion
efficiency with a deflagration engine. Go
into scramjet world and now it's like, all
right, you know, we don't know if all the fuel, it's like the air is going so
fast now, we don't know if it's all going to react. And
so you have to start using other tricks, which is going into
detonation. So one of the ways to do this is, if you hear
about RDEs, rotating detonation engines, well, what
if instead of deflagration, we do this other thing like detonation, where shockwave,
if you ever see a you see a shockwave going up. What
if that's the way that we have all these things react? It's just
very hard to engineer such a thing. And my
other critique on this is no matter what, going back
to our impulse curve, We're quickly approaching the
point where the efficiency of the
scramjet isn't that much higher than just a regular rocket engine. And
when I say not that much higher, it's like, you know, still twice as
good as a rocket. But like a ramjet is like 10 times
as good. And then, you know, turbo fans are, you know, more
still. They're like 7,200 seconds of impulse, if not more. Versus
like rockets at like 360. If you're hydrogen, you're like 450. So
yeah, this is the trade-off. My thing is like, okay, well, at that point, just
be a rocket. They're much easier to engineer. And
if you're this high-speed air-breathing engine and you're trying to go to space, it's
like, well, you're very quickly going to be out of the atmosphere anyways. So
my thing is like, do the ramjet. It's really efficient, up to Mach 5, and
then be rockets from then on. But yeah, so
that's that's that's your solution to write you're not you're not building a scramjet
You are building a ramjet, but then second stage is just
a rocket basically Yeah, exactly like you know when
I was giving the earlier example of like SpaceX and others where they're
staging typically around you know They're Mach 6 or 7. So
it's like, okay, we're Mach 5. We're like still pretty close to that. But we did
need any, you know, we did need to carry any oxidizer to
get there. Then you're just rocket, right? You know, so the thing flies
right up the limits. It's like high as it's going as high and fast as it can with
like a pretty, you know, like ramjets have been around since
the 1940s. It's not like, it's simpler than it
is. There's no moving parts of the thing. It's,
you know, it's like a jet engine, but you didn't need a compressor or turbines or anything like
that. It's just, you're going really fast. You're scooping that air and you add fuel
and, you know, uh, so you go faster still. So yeah,
do that. And then use like all of the really
great rocket engines that have been developed to go the rest of the way to orbit. Hell
yeah. Strap a rocket to a plane. Ultimately,
would the plane need to be huge? Because
I know that there's straddle launch, for instance, and the
other kind of start with a jet, but then drop
the rocket and let it rip. Does your plane have to be massive in
order to carry that big of a rocket? No, so Stratolaunch, the
issue with that, like Virgin Orbit, all these things, is that they're staging,
they're just using that fan cycle engine. They're only going to Mach
0.7 or 0.8, back to their airline type of loss. And
so, the thing is, like, I think you've also said this as well, like, orbit
is a velocity, not an altitude. And so, it's
not really helping you that much to go Mach 0.7. You
know, I think Elon was, was earlier, like, talking about this, like, straddle launch of, like,
it saves you maybe 5% doing what they're doing. And, you
know, sort of, Elon, so there's just a lot of complexity, yeah. Yeah, for
all of this extra stuff, you're like, okay, just make the first stage
5% bigger, and you've accomplished the same thing. Now,
if you do an adaptive engine, you're
you're talking more the range of like uh somewhere
like 50 percent input not five percent but like any it could actually
be as much as like a hundred percent um because again you can
just fly the plane all the way there so uh
in our case though what we're actually doing is our carrier plane
so straddle launch is going to mach 0.7 we're with
our carrier plane the thing looks kind of like it'll be everything sort of looks like conquered you
know it's delta wing to And
that's gonna go to Mach 2.7, which is sort of like for,
that's like the practical limit of a lot of like turbo machine, the
airframe, things aren't getting so hot yet on the airframe that like
we don't need to worry about melting. And what you can do at Mach 2.7 is
you can air start a ramjet. So it's like, so SpaceX is,
you know, rocket on a rocket, ours is, airplane through
ramjet engines so we got a plane flying in ramjets and we're going to
lower a second stage rocket out of the
whole fuselage like all right lower lower the second stage and
then you can uh you can air start a ramjet so
like the rocket now gets so ramjets they are a jet
engine that again has like no moving parts But you have to
be going, you know, over Mach 2 to start these things. You
can actually start them at low speeds, but for them to run efficiently, you want to start them at Mach 2+. So,
our plane's flying along, it's going really fast, and we lower our
rocket stage out of this thing, and we airstart the ramjet engine
on the rocket. Now our second stage is running on...
So now we just have this thing run up from Mach 2.7 to Mach 5, because
we don't want to push the whole plane that fast. It's like, you could do it, but... It's
like what Herve said. Everything starts melting and you hit all the SR-71 Blackbird problems
of like... I love, so can we do
a divergence and just talk about the fastest plane that's ever flown? So that
was Mach 3-ish, right? The Blackbird, the
fastest it ever got. And can you just talk about
some of the crazy shit that happened with that plane? The
fuel leaking out of the wings and shit, the
different material problems. They had to use corrugated panels
because the thing would expand so much. So it's like, so yeah,
fun stories of that. Like there was like the first ever titanium airplane. And
I think, I don't know what it was, like 92% titanium or something ridiculous like that, which
we got from the Russians, you know, to spy on them. The CIA
set up like companies to like source, you know, source all this. So yeah,
we didn't really know how to work it at the time, but it was the only material
where it was like light enough to fly and could
survive these temperatures. So, you know, we had a few
other things, like your alternative is like stainless steel, which is much
heavier. You know, aluminum, in
terms of like material density, like aluminum is 2.7 grams per cc. Titanium
is, you know, it's like 4.5 or so. And
then, you know, steel is like six to seven, somewhere around there.
So much heavier for these other things, but like those other ones can survive higher temps. And
so titanium is this good in between, you're like, all right, well, it's light and strong and
it won't melt. But then everything else on the airplane
is just like, life just gets very difficult. The same way the engine
can't survive more than Mach 5, the whole airplane
also is not stoked on this. So that's why
you're staging before that. That's why you're getting the plane out of there. So
you just drop the rocket part of it, basically. The
rocket has a ramjet and then also just like a normal chemical rocket.
Yeah, and it's normal, a little comfortable. And then, okay, so
then the plane just gets out of there and then lets the rocket take
the rest of the way. Yeah, the plane is gonna take 10 minutes from
like, which is much slower than a rocket, but it's like, from you're on
the runway to that thing is at, you know, 65,000 feet and
dropping the ramjet, or the second stage, it's like 10 minutes. Now,
again, you watch like a SpaceX launch, that's like a minute or
two for it to get to that same point. They're really limited
in what they, it has to do that. So we can very efficiently, again,
my sort of ladder to space analogy of this, we can take our
sweet time, our 10 minutes getting there, and then
you light the ramjet on the second stage,
and that goes for another minute or two. Yeah, a
lot of trade studies are like, how much thrust do you wanna do? Do you wanna
go that much faster? But this goes into, so
there's a thermal limit as we go faster, And
part of this meeting, because if you're not out of the atmosphere, you're running into too much atmosphere and
you heat up too much. Yeah, you're heating up too much. And so if you're just
not doing it for that long, this is sort of my solution on this. This is
why this can work for space. I'm like, all right, well, you can do Mach 5 for
like a minute in the air, you know, like as
little time as possible. It's like, I don't know, walking across hot
coals or something like that. Like, you can do it, just don't stay there. And
this is the challenge of like, if you wanted to do sustained hypersonic flight
where like, you have to stay in the air all the time, that's a lot
harder than like, All right, you know, the carrier
plane was right at the limit of like aluminum, although we're going to do composite, but like 2.7, not
too hot. It can stay there all day long. The thing
that it drops is like going to do a quick sprint up to Mach 5. You're like, OK,
it's a little toasty. Then you light the rocket and the thing gets to
go into space. You're like, OK, no more air. We're not heating up anymore. Yeah.
And like, in each one of those pieces, like, again, nothing needs to be that exotic. I
mean, you look at, like, again, another thing I love is you look at the fairings coming back
from, you know, Falcon launches. Like, those things are coming back
anywhere from, like, Mach 12 to Mach 15. They don't really have any
sort of, like, special heat protection on them. But this is more a
testament to have such a low ballistic. It's just the engines. Yeah. The
engines are just taking the brunt of all of it. Yeah, yeah. But
still, like the whole thing is being exposed to like, you know, once you go this fast, you
start generating plasma around the whole thing. Have
you seen that video? The one of the fairing returning? It was actually from our
launch. So when our satellite launched, that fairing came down,
there's a camera they mounted inside of it. And you can basically just
see the like, cool like plasma curls like
over, it's so crazy. That was the highest velocity re-entry
they've ever done on one. For the fairings, yeah. It
was a really high-energy launch going to... To GTO. Yeah,
GTO. After the GTO transfer event. So, yeah,
high-velocity launch. And even that fairing survived
that re-entry. Now, part of this, again, is it's
kind of like... That thing is like Mary Poppins coming back from space. It's just a big umbrella. There's
not a lot of mass pushing behind it, so it can
dissipate it, not get too hot. Yeah,
this is like, so for these things we're building for going up
there, you can just minimize the time you're exposed
to them. So, yeah. That's awesome. What's
the overall ambition? So I know that you obviously want to build one
of the fastest engines that's ever flown. You want to build kind
of a new architecture, basically, of a space plane. Well, not
totally new. Nothing is new in the world where NASA has published these
papers from however long ago. It's like a novel implementation
of a two-stage architecture. But I think ultimately your
ambition is bigger than that. You were telling me you want to
build a Boeing, basically. Yeah, my goal is
build the next Boeing. If Boeing
was built on the Jet-H, they started out in
the old paradigm of B-29s and things like that. you
know, piston engines, but they're mostly like a jet era company. And they're
also just like an old company at this point. So yeah,
you know, what I really think of this is like, we were
stuck. It's such a capital intensive thing to make
airplanes, like to do all of this. It's so high risk,
again, the stakes are so high, like it's completely reasonable in a sense
to be conservative. Like, I love that, it's like really great
that you do not need to contemplate the safety of getting on an airliner. Look,
people are not stoked on the recent news. You do have to contemplate this. People
don't like that, right? Like, that is not, we don't want to exist in
that world. And so, it's
like, how do you balance innovation with safety? And
it's like, you know, you can go too far on the safety end, where like, the safest version
is like, it's, I guess, nuclear energy is sort of an example of this. It's like, well, the safest reactor
is no reactor. So, obviously, we don't want that. But
you don't want to go on the other extreme of like you,
you know, I don't know Everybody's like flying around like the most unproven terrified
like we're it's like ultralights and stuff like that where it's just like highly
lethal You know, I I personally love motorcycles. They are not
safe. Like people should not that's not a safe way to
get around the world And so, you know, what you need is
like a reasonable in-between on this. And that's, you
know, SpaceX has proven this as like, they've hit the sweet spot
of like, they are doing new things, but like, their engineering is
solid. Like, it's that sweet spot. And so, really, you
know, I guess, You know, the thing that I'm hoping
to bring to the world is like, all right, there's clearly this next paradigm where
we really can have a thing where like, we can just go everywhere three
times faster and at the same price. Like, for
the world to feel different, you know, I want to have this experience
of like, you know, you're like, a lot of my friends don't like
airplanes and things like that. Like, it's sort of convenient to be around. They're like, it's
about people getting places. Like, that's like all they really care about.
And so it's like, you wanna be here in San Francisco and be like, in four hours,
I want to be in Tokyo. I don't want it to be that expensive. Like,
I just wanna, you know, be like Paris, you know, for me, I love Paris. Like, I wanna get
to Paris in four hours and like, and not have spent all
my money to do it. This should just be like, like that would feel like the
future to be able to do that. And it's like, how do
you get to that place? And you know, all of
these things are like, it's many billions of dollars to get there. So
you have to have a long-term plan on this. Everybody's
experience with my company, 15 years, and I think that's about right.
I think in 15 years, everybody
will know us for, we are the one-stop-shop company
for air travel, across all distances. I
have plans for subsonic, short-range things
as well. like we're not just making airplanes like we
are not we're not an airliner and we're not boeing we're actually a thing beyond that which is
like we are aerospace uh we're
making the airplanes and we're operating them and again i
think this is it's about like aligning the right incentives where if
Again, the point of the plane is to carry people and carry stuff. If
our business is selling planes as opposed to operating them, well,
this encourages cutting corners on things, making it as cheap as
possible, and we're seeing a lot of the effects
of this as of late with Boeing. That's not the
right incentive. You don't want So it's like, if I was selling
airplanes, I would want to sell them for as much as possible and make
as much money as I could on fixing them. And the
only check on me would be other competition. And since the barrier to entry is
so high, we see this like it's the duopoly of
Boeing and Airbus. So we don't want that. That is a bad model,
a bad world to exist in. And instead,
what if the end value of all of
this is people paying for flights? Well, that's the thing that,
you know, that's where we make our money then. Like, we should make our money at
the most sort of relevant points for
everybody. So start with that. And then the
way that we engineer everything is like, so we're paying costs to the airplanes.
Like, yeah, we have a slightly higher upfront investment. So
this goes into some of the market risk dynamics of like, well, you
could just sell that airplane for $200 million and not
have to worry about making your money back on
the operations or whatever. So near term, yeah, this could
work better, but if we take the
long game of this of like, We're operating the planes, we're paying
cost to them, so we don't make money on the plane itself. We're
instead optimized to like, we want the thing to be as reliable and safe as possible.
We want to get the lowest per mile cost. The
best way to do that is to vertically integrate. This
allows us to do some other things. to
illustrate how another way of the experience flying with us is going to be so different, we
aren't going to be flying airliners. It's not going
to be the airline experience thing. Everything is going to be private jet sized. And
so the better model here is like, if you can
have, say, you know, if our cost is
roughly a quarter existing, you know, like what it costs Boeing, for
the same investment as United into their
fleet, we could have four times as many aircraft. So when
you have a surplus of vehicles like that or airframes, we
can afford to have them sit idle. If that
asset was really expensive, it's like you need high utilization. And we
should strive towards high utilization just to be an efficient company. We
can just have four times as many airplanes, so now we're
not going to have this thing of like, a plane is only
going to fly if people want to fly in it, which is not the
current model. Like the flaw of the airline model is this really dated thing
of like, you know, back to the 50s and 60s and so on of the All
right. You know, like we've got this plane. We don't have the Internet yet.
We don't know what like we don't necessarily know everybody that wants to fly between these places,
but we're just letting everyone know we're going to go between San Francisco and New York
at like two o'clock at this time and every
day, no matter what. Yeah, no matter what. And so you're,
you're going to spend that money to fly the airplane, no matter what. And it's really expensive. And
so your whole reality is like, okay, we need to do
whatever we can to fill this plane up, to not lose money on the flight that we're
committed to doing. The model I'm going with instead is
actually we'll have a bunch of like smaller airplanes and
it's only flying. It's like, you say, when you want to go somewhere and
they're like, great, we have a plane for that. It'll go there
at the time that you want, when you want. You know, where you want, what do you want. And
we're only flying it if we're making money. So we would
say the optimization around like, yeah, if we have more people taking more flights,
we're just making more money. But if people aren't flying all of them, like, all
right, no sweat. The plane is sitting idle for a little bit. We're
paying cost on the plane. That's a much better
way to exist. It's just going to seem like, you know, Planes
are just always around to go where you want, when you want. You can imagine being
in a city, if you just had tons of Waymos everywhere. You just step out like, oh
sweet, driverless car, we go where we wanna go. We're
gonna have a flying version of that. And it's gonna be supersonic
and getting there super quick and so on. So how
do you do the, basically how do you get
there? There's so many different paths. And I'm not
saying it's so far off or whatever, but what I really mean is, Okay.
What you're building is the ability to go super fast and
how you can monetize going super fast is a lot of different things. You could, you
know, fly people places. You could fly rocket or you could fly satellites into
space. You could whatever, make like, you could do
hypersonic testing for the military, like whatever. There's like so
many different things you can do with a really fast thing. So how did you decide how
you wanted to do it? Yeah, so yeah, I
should almost make another version of our impulse curve. So
the thing that you want to go with is, so we're starting with space launch because
the technology is all the same, but like a fun way to think about this is what
is the dollar per flight? There is no higher dollar per flight
thing than sending stuff to space. You
know, this is like, roughly speaking, it's like our initial
things, you know, say it's like, Say we end up going
for like a $5 million revenue per flight
starting application, like one flight, $5 million. If
you were like a Gulfstream for context, if you charter a Gulfstream, you
know, from like San Francisco, like bi-coastal San Francisco, New
York, that's about $50,000 each way. So
you would have to do, you know, a hundred flights of
that Gulfstream back and forth to make as much money as like one flight
of a space launch system. It's like, that's, that's actually, that's why
we're starting there. It's like, all right, we have this new technology. It has this like huge
advantage for launching things to space. Well, let's do the thing that
just makes the most money per flight. And so, and then you look at
other things after that, like there's definitely, there are like defense applications and so on.
You know, it gets a little tricky with a lot of that, like I wish it were a free market
on those things, like space is interestingly, like commercial space launch,
there's at least like clear path, like yes, you get these
permits, you do these things, and you get to launch. D.O.D. is
a little more like, you have to hope, you have to meet the right
person, hope they like the thing. But theoretically,
that could also be a pretty good one. But again,
on dollar per flight, you're still not going to beat Space Launch. So we start there. And
say, you know, the market we're looking at, you know, the payloads we can
launch with, like, relatively simple-to-build hardware. Like, I think our total
development cost, you know, put
big error bars on this. Like, you could double it or triple it, but theoretically,
it could be around $50 million using off-the-shelf
airplane parts and, like, rocket engines and, like, the parts have been
special, but with our neat adaptive cycle stuff sort of stitching
everything together. Call it $50 million to develop
our initial launch system, and you're
talking about, I won't go into how
low our cost of this would be, but it's much lower than a rocket. So
say it's in the range of, it would probably be around 12 flights,
12 launches to pay back our entire development cost.
I like that, those are good economics, I'm a big fan
of that. Now, we have a saying in aviation of like, what
makes airplanes fly? Money, money is what makes them fly. So
if you want to make these cool flying machines, you have to solve the,
you need to make money. And that's a really hard
thing to do. So let's start with this one, really high margin,
make a bunch of money, then we can supply it more and more,
and then we can start to sink the money into, You
know, be it drones, maybe go look at some things like, you know, cargo
drones, something like that. But I actually think we'd probably just go direct space
launch applications, maybe around, you know,
maybe we could do like half a billion a year or so on that, depending on the size of
the airframes we're making and how much payload we're launching. If
you're doing half a billion a year in revenue, and genuinely, you're
a real business, you're really making money. I mean, for
one, kudos, we did it, this is great. But
now, the cost to develop an initial private jet size
thing, we want to do this V1 of a thing that you get to take
around, we want to go for that Gulfstream market. That's... People
would have, we could debate, I guess, where the cost, but let's say it's like five
billion. For context, it's like,
most private jet programs are somewhere in that range. Anywhere from
like lower bound, three billion. You
could be upwards of like seven billion for like Gulfstreams, things
like that. And then airliners, like 787 program, those
are like 20 to 30 billion. So, So
let's start with like the small, you know, it's supersonic though, and this is
sort of the unknown components. Like, can we say, if the technology is
simple enough, can we say this is going to cost the same as
like a Gulfstream to develop? I actually think it's,
I mean, for one, I think we have a whole bunch of manufacturing, like we're coming from
a place of we've been making and operating space, like space launch vehicles.
Right. So we learned a lot of expensive lessons. That's part of why
I think this five billion number is plausible. We sort
of subsidized it in a way of we learned a bunch of the expensive lessons already in
this cheap to learn space. So start there.
And then that thing is like, okay, we have the sort of Gulfstream, like we're
going much like the Tesla Roadster, we're going for like the wealthiest, you
know, those people that are paying 50 grand on the Gulfstream, like, hey, we can
get you there. You know, that six hour flight's two hours now. And
instead of like 50 grand, hey, it's 80 grand for this flight. But
again, that much faster. And there's only
probably a couple hundred people that are willing to
do a thing like that, but much like with rockets, you're making so much per flight,
that's all you need. So now you've got this,
okay, we've got a large charter fleet for
private jet type stuff, and we've
consumed everybody that's willing to pay those crazy prices. now
you're in the position of like, so it's like, step one, rocket company, highest
revenue per flight, then we go for like, the wealthiest and like, private
jet in the world, you know, I don't know, like maybe it's like flying CIA
agents around and stuff like that too, you know? Really mission critical
expensive stuff there. Then you can go the next step of like, okay,
let's go for the 30 passenger regional
airliner size thing. There's a reason also, I say 30, it's the
same part 380 of the FAA, there's a company JetSuiteX that
uses this particular, it's not a loophole, but you are not
an airliner if you're under 30 passengers. You're
a charter. So JSX is not an airliner? No, there's two
things. So, they're part 130, it's two
entities. There is a, you
have a travel agency, and
then you have a charter operator. So, one is, the
company that operates the aircraft is part 135 charter, and
the other one is, you know, the one that does the bookings
and so on. We would be going for a similar, you
know, if you're small enough, you don't need to have these two entities. I think
it's more like 19 passengers. And then this is another thing. This is
also moot if you're doing unscheduled. This is what allows JetSuiteX to
do scheduled flights. But kind of my whole point is
like, I don't know, I think we can get away with not doing that. Cool. So
anyways, yes, so we do that. It's like, do, you know, I don't know, somewhere
between like four to eight passenger small thing, loosely based
on our initial space launch vehicle. Those things are like similarly sized. We
learned a lot of the lessons on, you know, data on engine reliability and
so on, pushing to a more extreme environment. Then we make
our bigger version. So the first one's
catering to private jet class people. Then
we go for business class travelers, that's sort of the 30 passenger version. And
then finally after that, then you would go for the full, then
eventually we will have to just make, at some point it
does make sense to have the airline style model for the really
common city pairs, again, of San Francisco, Tokyo, or
whatever. And then that would be like a 100-person Concorde-ish
thing. But we'd still be paying costs, and then we'd still aim for having a bunch
of them. And then that's the one
where you're now down to, like, that thing can be cheaper per passenger
mile than even subsonic airliners. And
a thing I sort of glanced over in all this is the fuel that we're using is not jet fuel. All
rockets are switching to methalox. You know, methane in
LNG, same thing, more or less. So,
that's about a tenth the price of jet fuel. It's the simplest hydrocarbon, and
if you're worried about environmental things, it's also the easiest hydrocarbon to
synthesize. So, you can do, you know, like
we both know, like Casey Anmer, Terraform industry. Yeah, exactly. Big fan. You
can do direct electrical into chemical energy, like
the CO2 that is being held in the hydrocarbon fuel you
pulled out of the atmosphere electrically. And so even with that,
you're still, you know, an electrically
derived methane fuel is still around
a fifth the cost of jet fuel
out of the ground. So carbon
neutral, everybody gets to go fast. You know, this is very much
like the accelerationist, like, let's just use more energy. So
long as that energy isn't coming with, like, an environmental impact. If
you eliminate that component, you could just use more. So, yeah. That's
the long arc of this, space launch to bougie private jet to
business class traveler to everybody. And we are
fully vertically integrated as a company. We are
the manufacturer and the airline and all the things, you just go to us. And
then we have other solutions. Our expertise
with this hybrid architecture enables us to make something like a
V-22 Osprey considerably safer. The gearbox is
the sketchy part of a V-22 Osprey. So,
if you can make an Osprey that doesn't have a gearbox, like, you don't need to do the silly
flying car shenanigans. Just do Osprey, no,
you know, no gearbox, and, you know, use turbine engine, and you can just have a thing
now where, this is, like, the final piece, sort of, of everything, of,
like, if you want to do SFLA, well, have a barge in
the bay, or, like, or an airport, whatever, but, like, most population
centers are on the water, so I actually kind of like this idea of, like, own your own little, It's
like barge aircraft carrier type thing. And so
you just tell us where you want to go. All right, well if it's a short haul like that, we use the
thing where you don't need to go to the airport. You just go to
the nearest one of these pad areas. And that
goes 300 knots, so that's gonna do LA in an hour. So
start with those. That's your smallest, shortest range unit.
And those things, a requirement of anything that's going to carry
people to be safe. This is also where I diverge from the flying car people. If
you are not at least 25,000 feet,
you wanna be going 250 knots and 25,000 feet at
minimum, and ideally you're more like 30,000 feet, 300 knots. That's
the threshold for safe, reliable passenger transport. If you
don't hit those criteria, you're not safe. For
the reasons of. Meaning you're too low and you're not,
you don't have enough time if something goes wrong. Yeah,
you, your terrain is too much, like the
weather and terrain will impact your flight too much.
Where like, the simplest solution, like this is how airlines function, is like, yeah,
just go up and over it, and it doesn't matter. So
that requires a certain base level of energy and performance. So
design around that. You can make the thing that does that, and it is affordable to
everybody, back to the sort of, you can make the V-22, the efficient V-22.
So that's our final, and at this point, we, you
can see how I eventually get to the point of, we are just aerospace, right? We've
got space launch all the way through. That's
how you build the next Boeing. You're just going very incrementally. Any
one of these steps, it's like, okay, we're doing the $50 million space launch
program, You
know, that makes our half billion a year. Then we
can go to our $5 billion program for doing the first private jet. Then
you can go into, all right, you know, maybe it's like 10 to 15 to
do that 30 passenger program. You know, or maybe not. We'll
learn lessons, we'll see how affordable we can be on this. I think, like, for
context, Starship, SpaceX has spent $5 billion,
and I think it'll be probably around, like, total is the expected spend on Starship. For
Falcon 1, it was about a $90 million
development cost. So this is part, when I say it's like $50 million for us. That's amazing. This
is partly, they are an incredible organization, like, that
is a level of confidence. Like, you need to be really sharp to do that. But
I would argue our stuff is actually simpler. That was really hard to do. I'm
using off-the-shelf jet engines. We're going a little more easy mode. And
it was also inflation. That was early 2000s when
that was happening. But still, Falcon 9 total development was around $300 million-ish.
And then you go to Dragon and so on. There's a neat report that NASA
corroborated a bunch of these numbers. Yeah, that was about the cost of these things. This
is how I actually feel okay on our initial starting costs. Again, we need to be diligent
on this. Then we'll see, again,
all these bigger programs. I actually think that if
we can bring that sort of efficiency to these bigger programs,
they don't have to be expensive. It is important. Let's
step into that though. So I think, no, I think that's a perfect segue into
talking about the sort of organizational piece of it, because I know this is something you really care
about. I know this is something you've thought a lot about. Basically, how do
you make an engineering organization that doesn't become slow
and too safety, or too risk-averse,
and actually delivers cheap products? Because you can't
just will cheap products into existence, you have to have an organization
that, you know, has the right DNA to actually go do it. Yeah,
you know, I think this is my particular, my
declaration and methodology on this is it's
definitely not It's
like buy once, buy right. I'm pretty big on this. Again,
different schools of thought. Some just go for just make the thing so
cheap. I'm much more inclined towards build
something that you never have to worry about. Airplanes, they
fly so much that they're far more dominated by
initial acquisition cost is much less relevant. than
total operating costs. If you just engineer something
where it just doesn't break, all of our favorite things, there's a
reason everybody loves Toyotas. I guess this
is sort of an example of this, I love German things, but
German cars, you look at their philosophy, they will
push, they get a lot more out of what they have. But
this comes at a cost of they're a little more finicky. where like Toyota,
you know, famously there's like the Toyota Supra is like an example of this, like everyone
always talked about like the engine that was in that car, you didn't have to
do anything to it and that engine could deal with like 600 horsepower.
You didn't have to like, so in other words, they were just like hugely, like
they do this with all their stuff. Toyota Tacomas, same thing. that
engine it gets like they don't push thermal efficiency that high they
don't like push any sort of limit but like it does not break so
this is getting at this thing of like and everybody loves
them and the value stays really high on them because like you don't need you
do not need to question if this thing is going to keep working or not There's this
quote that you add, I think it was the last time we talked basically, but
you said, I won't forget this, you said, quote, I'm
a college dropout and I just build stuff. I think
you have a really good pragmatism to you where you basically just
like, you'd like to build things that work and you like to see them
built and it's less about, you know, let's sit in
a dark room and come up with the perfect blueprint over, you
know, and then hand that off to the, like, manufacturing team that needs to go put
it in that machine behind you. It's like, no, we're, it's
more of like, you're gonna build things if you're here. Yeah, yeah. So
this is definitely, I mean, this is what informed it, you know, informs it in my life,
is like, I just, like, I run that machine. Like, I
am the one building the things, and like, in my case,
like, I have built, like, it's, this is, I
design and engineer through intuition, and maybe people
won't like this sort of concept, but most engineering is
very detached. It's strictly like, this
is what the numbers say, but there's not really a great intuition of
how does that translate into the actual thing. And
this is not across the organization, this is like how I function currently is,
you know, I could see some just some parameters that like quickly sort of map
of like, okay, what this amount of like mass flow, all
right, well, the air is like roughly the size, like you just have an instant sort of intuition of
like, the thing would probably be like this. In
my case, imagine handling the thing like that. What's a flip? If
it's going to be this way, that's going to be too flimsy. And
it is these little things of the whole vehicle is a culmination of
all these little parts like that. And so just having that constant
gut check. is, I think, how
you get there. And so, yeah, this is where, you know, maybe this, like,
I didn't go through the classic engineering
path that, like, I just went straight to building airplanes. I had a phenomenal mentor who
really instilled this notion of, like, really build things well. But,
like, the more common method is, like, all right, you go through, like, mechanical engineering, you get
your mechanical engineering degree, you're barely spending any time in, like, CAD, you
know, you're learning how to do FEA and all this stuff. But
you're not spending enough time making things. Ultimately, the
thing needs to translate to the physical world. And
yeah, it's going to be really different. So I'm coming with a place of, I
used to pull engines out of cars. And again, I built airplanes as a
kid. Knowing if you put this thing there, this is going to
be miserable to assemble this thing. And now it's going
to be expensive and annoying to fix. And now that translates
into the whole organization of like, now you can just imagine the mechanics sitting there trying
to fix this thing. You're like, oh, what a nightmare. Oh,
this engine is especially expensive to fix now because of
like, the people made it weren't really thinking about how
they're going to interact. And that also ties in with more
of my philosophy, which is, this is like what industrial design is as well. Industrial
design is, it is sort of,
it's the engineering, it's human interaction stuff, like physical things.
Yeah, that's why, again, Apple products are so nice. It's like, they have
just thought through like every level of the human interacting with
the thing. It's really taking this into account. And
that's also how I think, you know, across an organization, when you're making this, really
think about, like, you're a human, there's other humans, they are
working with this thing. Yeah, that's
like, it's actually a kind of human-centric approach on
that. And that's like, that's what
translates into the thing being, you know, like, you just imagine like,
all right, you have a bunch of these planes out there. What is the mechanic? You
know, like when the plane is going in for maintenance, like, you
know, are they just like, loving the fact that there's just this one
like piece, and they just like slot the thing in there like, oh, perfect. Like, we
started to have this like, we have like modern airplanes have FADAC, where
we're like electrical control systems, like sweet. there is a magical
box that we plug into this thing and we replaced billions of
like little actuators and valves and mechanical old analog stuff like
yeah here is like magical computer box and it's
just like elegant simple now you need to make magical computer box super
reliable like for it to be implemented like yeah it needs
to be better than it's what it's replacing but
you just end up like that is an incredible experience to work with that thing
like This always being top of mind, everything
that's being made, I think is very important. Yeah. And
you're also a person who builds really fast prototypes. I
think that was one of the things that I thought was coolest was when I went in and checked
out your factory or whatever. You set the scene.
You're in San Francisco. You turn down an
alley. It sort of looks normal. It looks
residential. There's houses. There's a person hanging their
laundry up in the window. And then you turn the corner and there's a
supersonic engine sitting on the ground. It's
amazing. You guys built that so fast and you did
it just in the middle of San Francisco. That's
part of your DNA too, is prototyping, right? This ties into, again, I
find it quite hard to break the engineering mindset and the stuff of focusing
on the right things when you're making something. It's like,
what are we trying to prove with this particular thing? And
it's like, all right, the high level, so like the prototype we made, it was like
a month and a half from like,
team was here for like sort of first draft on parts to the
thing was, you know, running and then two weeks after that. So two months total time
from like idea to like, sweet, the thing is fully running
and demonstrating exactly what we were, you know, like it was exactly what
I had predicted for performance. Yeah, there was like two
months time. And it was because we weren't spending, like, this
thing isn't, all right, it did its job, like, we'll iterate another one. You
know, we didn't need to focus on, like, what is the bearing life
going to be? Like, do we need to do all these optimizations? Like, no, actually, you
know, we can just say, like, the bearings on this one, like, are,
it's going to run a total of, like, a few minutes, you know, its whole life or
something like that, or, you know, maybe a few hours, whatever. We don't
need to do a whole like, you know, analysis of the bearings, where
in more like, if you're if you're sort of typical
aerospace thing it's like, oh no we check all of the boxes on
this. And it's, it's the art of knowing what does it
does not matter on a particular thing like will that is critical for
the flight one like yes we need to know. when we
need to eventually work on this sort of reliability. But in the meantime, it's like,
all right, well, key components of this is compressor efficiency.
All right, we're squeezing air electrically. This is
sort of a new way of doing this. We're running combustion. We want to see how much thrust
we're getting out of it. All right, what are those pieces? I did
a little bit of a part spin special on this. I'm like, okay, we didn't need to develop a
clean sheet electric motor. I use a race electric motor for
a thing. You're like, sweet, that was like 13 grand for the motor and the inverter.
uh it's definitely not flight weight but like driving this component
the compressor it's like all right we didn't need to make our own compressor on this one because i found a
top fuel dragster you know uh supercharger that was
like pretty comparable it's like really lossy it was like a terrible it's
like 50 efficient compressor but we can account for that like all
right this we're not we're not developed like this isn't
the flight engine we don't really care about the compressor efficiency there we can account for
this in other places It's like, all right, and then we have to
make the combustor and all the control components around it. But like, sweet,
we had very little time and money to prove the core thesis. Now,
the system that I'm making right now is like, now I'm making my beautiful, elegant,
like this machine is going to be put to work of making our
custom compressors, where now we can go into that next step of optimization. And
yeah, so that's, and still, it's not going to take that long, because
we know exactly what things do and do not matter now. So
yeah, engineering through intuition is sort of an odd, you know, it's not too difficult,
but like really focusing on going for the things that matter in this stuff. So
I love it. So what, I
think like my kind of like final thread of questions is basically just, you
know, you have been at this for how long now? When did you guys
start working on this? I
guess formally, this long- It's
been percolating for longer, yeah. Yeah, this all
came out of a hybrid. The
initial program was I was making a private jet that could be a cost parity, like
regular private, like subsonic private jet, that could be a cost parity
with airliners. I started, you
know, I had the insight on that around 2019, 2020? I
think 2019. And
I had the supersonic, like, this fundamentally new adaptive
engine was possible because, like, you know, because I
was spending all my time on this prior work. That
was, you know, late 2021. Did
I realize that? It just came from me thinking of the hybrid stuff
as being like, what if I made a fighter jet? How could I use the
thing? Nice. All of this is happening
in a sense because I was never a good
enough student. I would never be allowed to fly a fighter jet. At
a very young age, truly since I was a teenager, I knew I would
never be allowed to do that. But I always knew I
could be the one that makes the fighter jets. I could definitely fly
it then if I'm the guy. That's awesome. So like, it's
always just been this sort of goal of like, all right, figure out the thing. Like at the end
of the day for me, it's just like, I love flying and like cool machines and going fast and
stuff like that. Like I am, I'm doing all of this work to
build like a whole new Boeing just cause I want to putt around. And
like, and like I'm not their fighter jets. I don't like their fighter jets. Those aren't
good enough. Like I want it to be the cool thing that I know we could make.
My fighter jets. My fighter jets. Way better. And
so start all of this so that I could just have my fighter jets. So. I
love it. And so that was, whatever, so that's like four-ish years ago,
you know, and you're like, so at that point, and well, maybe it
was even, like, sooner, maybe it was 2021 that you really started, like, really
thinking about the electric-adaptive thing, like, how, but even
if those dates are wrong, even, yeah, but like, anyways. October 2022 was
when I raised the round from lower carbon, and I think I had started on
the engine six months, I started building the adaptive engine, like,
around three to six months before that. Okay. So
let's say that you really started in earnest on this thing sometime in 2022. Honestly, March
of 2023 is really when it- Wow. Okay. I've been one man banding this thing for a
long time. I
finally had like an actual team of other aerospace engineers. They
started March 12th, 15th, somewhere around
there. And I like, cool. So you're talking to them in November, December.
So yeah. Okay. So yeah. I mean, it hasn't been long
at all. Not at all. And my question is,
since you started, like basically since you started working on this, I imagine that you
had this intuitive idea in your head of like how this could end up. Like,
what do you think, like, what is the main progress that has happened from that original idea?
Like, what are the main things that you feel like, okay, we've really nailed this, like,
I really validated this part of the hypothesis, I've validated that
part of the hypothesis, but like, there's these other parts that I still have to
do a lot more testing on to really, like, know it's gonna work for sure.
Like, how far along that journey do you think you are? I mean, the big one
is, it is not just me now, like, you know, it's just me here, it's a Saturday in the shop, but
like, the, it's the team, I
have like, I had a test, I have like people now, so
there's, we're gonna be nine of us soon, everybody
far smarter than me at any one of these given like things, so that was the big change of
like, I laid the groundwork on this, and now we
have instilled the design-build-test-repeat.
Those are literal people in the team now. It
had to be just me running this loop. We have
these functions built in. We can get
all the way to our flight engine on the propulsion side of things. And
we don't need more than nine people. Like, that's, you know, and
it's really just like six, like, it's having, you
know, the fewer brain, you have like many, many fewer
losses when you have sort of fewer brains to like go between all this stuff. So it's like, if
you have a really great person, that was the thing that we've like fundamentally built
there. Next steps is like, so
I went through the whole process, like our, the engine that I had,
like, you know, that was my sort of brainchild for the prototype one,
but now, I can only go
so far with this stuff where now we have the real team, we're making our
first, this is like the team's baby now. And it
is just gonna be a sight to behold. It's a work of
art. And now I've seen the cycle, we've
gotten it through, now I'm gonna be repeating this again on the airframe end. So
this is sort of the next, I sort of call this, ultimately
the pillars of our company are engines, airframes, and operations. So
we started with the engine, you know, and we've, like,
gotten firsthand, like, okay, you know, this is, and I had run small
businesses before, again, motorcycle stuff, but nothing like this. So, like,
learning how to run a team like this, you know, this has been, like, a lot
of the, this is, like, really what my time is spent is, like, learning
how to run this sort of organization. So, all right,
you know, engine, we figured it out. I feel like I lucked out in a
sense of just having such incredible people. Then we go, like,
now I have a good model of, like, I'm replicating this again for the airframe organization. This
is our next step. Like, okay, you know, we're aiming for roughly March. We're
going to have our flight engine and, like,
it will run, like, we know how this, this is the thing that we're going to bolt on
the airplane. And so
I'm just now in the repeating cycle of getting my, you know,
got an aerodynamicist who's just starting out in some of this
work, and we're going to go through the process again now, like, okay, what is
the airframe that goes this going to be? I can do my first-order math,
like, again, I'm pretty, sort of, like, my utility in this is,
like, I can stitch it all together. So yeah,
that's now happening, and I think that's probably going to be around like 12 people, if
I had to bet. I had to guess 12 total for
the airframe team. And at that point, like, okay, we have
our engine, we have our airframe, we have a thing that like... should
be able to fly now uh and this is
the final piece so this is going to be like it's a operations is like
really critical it's like you know getting you
know i working with nasa or do you
like who a fa like getting approval on these things, dealing
with it out in the field, that's the last piece. And each one of
these, we're laying the groundwork, and each one of these verticals will
then be the foundation for, what do you imagine this
future airline thing I described? The seeds of all of that
were planted now. with the team
that's learning how to run this thing out in the field. We're
learning how to support the aircraft and stuff like that. That was all work
that was done now that'll translate to years down the road where an
airline or charter or something like that. Yeah, we at least got a few reps in
early on, so it's the last peak. So yeah, I've
established the pattern, completed the pattern, and now
replicating this a few times in different components. Very
cool. Very cool. And so, okay, final, last
question. So your engineering intuition
that you built up, you said was basically not something that they
really teach in a class. There's not one course,
one degree program that you could take and then acquire the
knowledge that's in your head. So how would people go get it? Like if a person wanted
to do something similar to what you're doing, what would you recommend? How would they
do it? You just, you have to be doing it a lot. Like for,
you know, I think it just comes from like, certainly it's easiest. I think
like there's such an inclination. I was sort of lucky in the sense of like, I
loved this as a kid and I was allowed to just forever build things as
a kid. And You
know, be it like having, you know, for other people I can imagine, like, you know,
I don't know, have a go-kart or something like that. But you need to do it,
you need to be the one that's like physically building this intuition of
like, you're turning the wrenches and doing all this stuff. Again,
I lucked out in the sense of like, I was already doing that, but I had
this mentor that I mentioned I met through like Model Aircraft. He was American Airlines captain.
So I think actually RC aircraft, and I actually have another founder
friend with the same thing, good mechanical engineer. RC
airplanes are like a pretty good way to do that. Actually, helicopters, but
you know, that sort of like, it's all of the same pieces. And
you can sort of like, it's like in an attainable way at a young age. So
yeah, I would say starting with that, you know, similarly like, it's good if you're
in high school and you alone pulled an engine out of a car, like I do
like, you know, I wanted big turbos in my car. It's
like, pulled the engine out of it and like, this is the other way
I was able to get away with having nice German things. It's like, well, I was
the mechanic. There was no like, I still to this day am
like cringe at the concept of going to the dealership to fix things. No.
I fix these things, like, I care more. And actually,
you know, I guess I'll just use that word. I think the other really critical component
in this is, above all, and the thing that I
look for is like, you really care about it. That is
one where it's like, we see this in a
lot of ways, like there's a certain earnestness that
you're just allowed to be, you know, like, Like,
being cool, in a sense, is like, oh, you don't care too much, right? Like, it's like, oh,
you're sort of detached, and like, interestingly, I think that even plays out
in building stuff, of like, no,
like, caring to an irrational degree about, like, how nice this
thing is. Like, just being okay with,
like, having that, of like, it's like, no, but I want this to be this way.
Like, you know, even, like, I get that, like, maybe these things are all, you
know, the engineering minds be like, no, no, this is,
what are you talking about? Like, this piece of metal is the same as this other one, but like, yeah, but this one's
ugly. I don't know, it's got like, it's got a little bit of corrosion on it, I
don't like it. Just that kind of care, like
having that extra bit of care, I think is really, that's the
trait that I look for of like, which,
you know, you can, there's many flavors of it, you can say like obsession and things
like that, but like, again, just really caring. I think cultivating
that is critical. And it's
also just spending a lot of time doing it, right? That's
how my version of this, the way that I sort of
built the intuition, is that I have, you
eventually experience this, I have mapped all
of the corners of wrong things you can do. This is the best way to
do it, is make sure that you did
all of it and saw all the failure modes. You know, this is going to take you
like a solid decade to experience all the failure modes. But
when you do that, you at least get to this point of like, okay, I've seen
this before. And so you need to make sure that you also learned from those. It's
not enough just like, oh, I'm just, I'm out there failing. Like, no, you want
to fail in a productive way of like, you know, God,
I wish I didn't do that again. Like really knowing why. So, Yeah,
other ways to sort of build that up. Awesome,
man. Well, thank you so much. This was awesome. This conversation rocked. I
guess, where should we send people? Should they apply
to Astromecha? Yeah, yeah, we do. I think
great people is the core of all of this stuff, so finding more like-minds
is gonna be critical. There's nothing right now, but Astromechanica
is the company. Maybe by the time this is up,
I'll have on the website for, you
know, I'll have like, probably hiring at Astro, yeah, hiring at Astro
Mecca. We'll make it happen. It started here.
Yeah, yeah, we'll do that. Maybe I'll make a LinkedIn or other things like that
for the stuff. But yeah, you know, if this resonates, definitely would
love to find some sharp minds on this stuff. So, yeah. Alrighty.