#1: Ian Brooke – Electric Adaptive Jet Engines (Astro Mechanica)

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.