The Importance of Creative Freedom in Engineering Environments

Most engineers become pretty discontent when they're pigeonholed too much into a specific field, and that's absolutely correct. I think engineers are just mathematically inclined artists, so they like to be thrown into the thick of it. They need the freedom to explore and express their creativity, rather than being confined to a narrow scope.

Companies often structure their environment in ways that box in engineers, by boundary conditions, by constraints, by their environment. This can lead to a lack of innovation and stagnation. For example, some companies may have engineers work on a specific project for years, without exposing them to new challenges or opportunities. As a result, they become stuck in a rut and stop learning and evolving.

On the other hand, we encourage critical thinking across the entire team. We want our engineers to be able to make decisions based on their critical thinking skills, rather than just following established procedures. This is why we structure our processes around enabling the engineer and the machinist and the technician to work together to find solutions and then execute without any overly constrained or heavy oversight.

We believe that every ambitious engineer wants to work in a company like ours, where creativity is not only enabled but encouraged. Our team is experienced and knowledgeable, and we're always looking for ways to innovate and improve our processes. By working with us, engineers can learn new skills, take on new challenges, and grow professionally.

We're proud of the impact that our work can have on society, from developing new technologies to solving real-world problems. Our latest project, Propeller, is a hub where you can find the coolest jobs currently hiring in engineering. We've partnered with companies like Helion and Relativity to bring these opportunities to our audience.

Helion, for example, told us after our documentary with them last year that they actually hired a specialized nuclear engineer because of our video. We feel incredibly proud that our work can serve both our audience and help develop new technologies. And we think we can take it to the next level with Propeller.

We're launching Propeller as an engineering hub, where you can find job openings in various fields, including aerospace engineering, mechanical engineering, and more. Currently, Helion has 40 job roles open, including a Lead Manufacturing Engineer, a Principal Thermal Engineer, a Principal Structural Engineer, and many more. Relativity, on the other hand, currently has 171 roles to fill, with positions like Senior Director of Quality, Senior Aerothermal Engineer, Propulsion Test Engineer, and Senior Manager of Test Fluids Systems.

We invite you to visit StartPropeller.com and take a look at our job listings. If you don't see anything suitable right now, make sure to sign up to our newsletter. We will keep you posted on all the most exciting opportunities and news in engineering. And if you're a company interested in advertising your jobs with us, reach out to us through our contact page on StartPropeller.com.

By working together, we can create an environment where engineers are free to explore their creativity, innovate, and grow professionally. We believe that this is the key to developing new technologies and solving real-world problems, and we're excited to see what the future holds for engineering.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enSome day in the future, this plane could be the new Air Force One. Shuttling the  president of the United States around the earth at hypersonic speeds.If you’re anything like me, you’re probably skeptical of that statement. Back in 2021  I got a phone call from Hermeus, the company claiming they were going to make this a reality.A passenger plane capable of flying at Mach 5. 2.5 times faster than the concorde ever flew.To say I was skeptical would be an understatement, but then, they released this video.Hello, is that a working turbo ramjet engine? You have my attention.So I reached back out to Hermeus to take a behind the scenes look at what they’re building,  and honestly, I was blown away by a company that any aeronautical engineer would dream to work for.What I saw and heard changed me from a skeptic to an optimistic fan of the  company. A company that according to their CEO AJ Piplica started with humble beginnings.Can you tell me what those early days were like  when it was just the four of you in the basement of, I dunno if you wereWe were literally, yes, literally in my basement with our two dogs. It was really  exciting. So when we left our relatively good paying jobs and decided to jump off  a cliff and try to build an airplane together on the way down, we basically gave ourselves  and our family six months to figure it out. Essentially starting from nothing. Can this  idea that we've got become a thing, can we put together a plan that can get us to high  speed passenger travel in some reasonable period of time, reasonable 10 ish years?  Can we bring really strong people in to support that plan? Can we bring capital to support that  plan? Can we bring customers? All of those questions we had to answer within six months.Saying you are going to build a hypersonic passenger plane  is easy. Actually doing it is a completely different story.Software startups have a massive advantage in that they don’t actually need to build anything. It’s  possible to bootstrap a software start up in a garage with some passionate and talented founders.Hardware startups don’t have it as easy,  and it’s why I didn’t take Hermeus overly seriously until I saw they were actually  building. Pretty renders of futuristic planes are a dime a dozen. Here are some we created.Designing a hypersonic passenger plane on your computer is one thing,  but to actually start prototyping it requires money, a lot of money.Raw materials, manufacturing machinery and the factory space to house them are all costs that  software startups do not have to contend with. And not to mention there is a major  short supply of talented design engineers, with major competition between prestigious  hardware companies like SpaceX, NASA and Apple. Hardware startups are famously difficult to build.One of the first challenges is to demonstrate to investors that you have a clear path to revenue,  and for that you need customers. The path to selling planes in the commercial  aviation industry is extremely tightly regulated. Even established multi-billion  dollar companies like Boeing have tried to skirt around certification steps  when introducing new engines because it’s so time consuming and expensive.Even government backed ventures like the Concorde which had a max speed of  mach 2 are no longer around, even the military back planes like the  SR-71 and XB-70 with max speeds just over Mach 3 are no longer operational.Trying to go from nothing to a hypersonic commercial  passenger plane with a max speed of Mach 5, with no intermediate  revenue sources is going to require some extremely patient and wealthy investors.However, Hermeus’s founders, when they were conceiving the company in that basement,  were well aware of this treacherous path to revenue.We knew from the very beginning we couldn't just raise billions of dollars to go build  a really fast passenger airplane. We knew that just like SpaceX, all the steps of technology  de-risking and development along the way we needed to solve important problems for  customers. So it took us a while to sort out like, okay, those problems are in the national  security space and they're very, very important. And that was eventually the thing that I think  really got us to the first round of funding is kind of making that breakthrough of like, yes,  there's this long commercial roadmap to fly passengers across the Atlantic Ocean,  but the way you get there is by solving national security challenges.So, Hermeus plans to solve problems in the national security space and  generate revenue there first. So what are those national security challenges?One of Hermeus’ leading investors is the US Air Force, and hypersonic  technologies are a hot button topic in the defense industry right now.“ What were your most surprising findings  on the threat environment, in particular in regard to China”“They are moving SO fast. I think it surprised us all. There’s one  other thing we should bear in mind is that the things they are producing are very technical,  very high quality, they are ahead of us for example in some of the space issues,  and in regard to these very very fast hypersonic type weapons”The United States government is keenly aware that they need to catch up to maintain that  terrifying prospect of mutually assured destruction. As hypersonic weapons can  evade detection until it’s too late to react.Intercontinental ballistic missiles are designed to exit earth's atmosphere, travel extremely  quickly at speeds of up to 7.8 km/s through space and then suddenly dive on their targets.They move quickly, but their lofted trajectory gives their enemies more  time to detect and aim anti-missile defenses.Hypersonic missiles are designed to cruise within the earth's atmosphere  at about half the speed of an ICBM. The atmosphere slows them down,  but their low trajectory means they suddenly appear on the horizon, previously being hidden  by the earth’s curve, giving their targets minimal time to detect and intercept them.This is the national security challenge Hermeus can help address,  but not necessarily by building those weapons.One of the major challenges in developing hypersonic technologies is in testing. We  visited the hypersonic wind tunnel in UTSA last year to meet with Dr. Chris Combs to make a u-haul  go hypersonic for the laugh, and while we were there we asked about his perspective on Hermeus.“One of the things I found interesting that their CEO said was “it would be  cheaper to build an airframe and make a hole in the desert than to test this in  a hypersonic wind tunnel. How much truth is there to that?”There's, so there's a broad spectrum of test, right? On the hypersonic wind tunnel side,  even there's facilities like ours where the costs are relatively low, but the scale is  smaller and the flight temperatures are low. So there's certain types of facilities where you can  run in for, you know, relatively low cost where that statement about, you know, uh, wind tunnel  test being more expensive than a flight scale test, uh, that wouldn't necessarily be true.But on the other end, if you go into one of the large scale DOD production wind tunnels  where you could, or at a NASA facility where you could maybe start to approach something at scale,  um, yeah, that might be the case. You might be looking at hundreds of  thousands of dollars to million dollars a day or week to test. Which, um, you know,  it kind of depends on, on how you set things up, a cheap sounding rocket test  would probably be about 10 million. And so we're not talking about flight test,  we're still talking about scale. Uh, so it, it really, it depends on how big is the thing  you're trying to test. Are you trying to test the actual vehicle or not? Um, what type of wind  tunnel conditions do you need? There's a bunch of variables there, but at the end of the day,  if you wanted to do a full scale vehicle fully integrated, there's not a facility in the world  where you can actually do that on the ground. So a flight test does become your only option.And that’s the first market Hermeus is planning to attack. Real world flight testing. That’s what  Hermeus’ first aircraft, Quarterhorse, will provide. It will be a reusable hypersonic  test bed. Providing flight testing services for companies seeking to validate hypersonic designs.It will be an autonomous hypersonic aircraft that will not just provide Hermeus valuable  lessons in developing a hypersonic vehicle, but provide them their first revenue source.Competing with the likes of those 10 million dollar sounding rockets,  while being able to provide much more data as rockets can only fly through  the desired flight regime for a very short time as they ascend through the atmosphere.This is a valuable market with deep pocketed clients like the US Air Force,  NASA and even SpaceX could use.Helping bridge that revenue gap to their final goal of a commercial  passenger aircraft and gaining the confidence of investors. In April 2021, Hermeus received  a 60 million dollar jointly funded contract from the US Air Force and in March 2022 they secured  100 million dollars of series B funding with OpenAI founder Sam Altman as the lead investor.With this money they have been busy working on the  next critical step in developing a hypersonic plane. The engine.Boom, the commercial supersonic aircraft start up, suffered a massive set back when Rolls Royce  decided that the commercial supersonic market was no longer a priority and pulled out as an engine  manufacturer, and have since had to scramble to develop their own engine, the Boom Symphony.Hermeus wisely skipped the step of relying on a third party to solve their engine needs. Their  first goal with that early seed money was to develop their own subscale turbo ramjet engine.  Skyler Shuford, Hermeus’ Chief Operating Officer, gave me a tour of their very first engine.So this was our humble beginnings. So the first engine, a subscale demonstrator that we made.  And so just to take a step back, our engine architecture is a jet engine at low speed,  just an off the shelf jet engine, which is this section here. And then we wrap the  high speed bits around it. So everything from here back is all custom, mostly 3D printed,  but could have been traditionally manufactured as well. So this is our shared afterburner,  ramjet combustor. And then up front we have our pre-cooler, obviously ground scale hardware,  pretty battleship rugged scale hardware. But the pre-cooler is  what allows the jet engine to get up to the point where the ramjet can then take over.Okay, let’s pause for a second because I want this video to be as accessible as  possible to people that aren’t experts in ramjets, or afterburners, or precoolers,  or whatever the hell battleship rugged scale hardware means.By that Skyler means the prototype engines, which aren’t intended to fly,  are not built with low weight in mind. They are rugged and reliable, they use cheaper off  the shelf components where possible. They are technology demonstrators. Intended for rapid  iteration. Spending a lot of time optimizing for weight and other characteristics doesn’t  make sense this early in the process. So if they can use a cheap actuator designed for  a battleship instead spending an extra few thousand dollars on a specialized actuator  intended for something like the SR-71, they will. Next, what ever are ramjets?To understand that we first need to understand  what causes normal jet engines to have a physical speed limit.Jet engines need to compress air before it enters the combustion chamber in order to extract as  much energy as possible from the fuel. A normal jet engine does this with a compressor section.  Where air enters the engine and is squeezed down into a smaller volume by the compressor blades.The compressor is driven by the turbines, which extract some of  the energy released in the combustion chamber to drive the compression stage.This type of engine has a speed limit because of all those moving rotating  parts. As the speed of the aircraft increases, the incoming air is compressed more and more  as it’s forced down the inlet of the engine, which results in ever increasing temperatures,  which can eventually exceed the material limits of the compressor and turbine blades.Ramjets get around this by using the forward motion of the plane to ram air directly into  the combustion chamber. So we don’t need any compressors or turbines at all. The forward motion  of the plane provides enough compression alone. However it’s not quite that easy.The plane needs to be traveling fast enough to achieve the necessary compression for combustion.  A pure ramjet needs some other method to get up to speed, like being dropped from another aircraft.However, we can create a hybrid engines. A  turbo ramjet engine. The same kind of engine the SR-71 used.It used a conventional jet engine with an afterburner, which is simply an additional  fuel injector at the outlet of the turbine to provide additional thrust. Basically an air  breathing rocket nozzle. It used this to get up to speed and then once going fast enough,  air was channeled around the compressor and turbine section and dumped directly  into the after burner and began operating as a ramjet. This is  what Hermeus has built and there have been plenty of problems to solve along the way.Making the transition between turbojet engine and  ramjet engine is not easy. It’s not an immediate switch.Several things need to happen as the engine transitions from turbojet to ram jet and in  that time the aircraft is going to be rapidly decelerating as drag acts on the supersonic  aircraft. If this transition isn’t fast enough the plane could end up not having enough speed  to light up the ramjet, or for a passenger plane the sudden deceleration could just be jarring.A lot of first time flyers find the sinking feeling of an airliner  decreasing thrust after takeoff a little disconcerting. Imagine that on steroids.To ease the transition we need to push the turbojet to its limit,  getting as fast as possible before mode switching.To help with this Hermeus have installed a precooler. Something the SR-71 did not  have. This cools the incoming air and allows the turbojet engine to operate at  much faster velocities before the blades reach their max operating temperature.An engine created in the Japanese Space and Astronautical Science institute used  a liquid hydrogen precooler placed in the inlet of the jet engine,  in front of the air intake spike. The liquid hydrogen then travels through the inlet nozzle  and combustion chamber where it absorbs heat and turns into high pressure gas. This high  pressure hydrogen is then injected into the combustion chamber as a fuel source.The details of Hermeus’ precooler are secret,  but they are using a precooler to push their off the shelf jet engine to extremes.So that's what we did here. So we took an off the shelf jet engine designed to about Mach 0.8,  using our pre-cooler, we pushed it up to about Mach 3.3 conditions, so around where  the SR 71 flew in terms of temperatures. So it was about 800 F air coming in. We cooled  it down to about 150 F. The jet engine had no problem. And then all of this hardware,  our afterburner combustor was running during that whole operation. And then we pulled this out and  connected the Ramjet combustor directly to the facility and started it at about Mach 2.8 ish.What do you mean by the facility?So yeah, so to be able to test the temperatures and the flow rates  associated with HighSpeed flight, you could do it a couple of different ways. So there's full tip to tail free jet testing where all of the flow is coming in at high  mach conditions, but for us, because everything internally is all subsonic,  we can do direct connect so it's not flowing high speed around, it's just kind of flowing directly  into the engine. We did that testing up at Purdue University and they were able to provide the  high temperature air associated with high-speed flight so we could prove out all the different,Is it just high temperature? Is it high velocity as well?So like I said, everything after the normal shock is all subsonic,  so it doesn't have to be high speed. Now it does create a little bit of risk because  you're decoupling the supersonic inlet from the subsonic flow path, but that's how we were able  to do it. We did all of this with a team of eight people in nine months for 1,000,005.You heard that right. They developed a functional turbo-ramjet with just 1.5  million dollars. Now of course this is a subscale version not intended for flight,  it’s a proof of concept, but they haven’t stopped there.Once this concept was proven they moved onto developing Chimera,  the engine that will be used in Quarterhorse.We took a quick drive from Hermeus’ factory over to their test facility  at Dekalb-peachtree airport, where I witnessed a test of Chimera.Everyone Ready? Ready Ready ReadyThrottling to 50.  5070. 70 90. 90Light, LightNow if you can’t tell by the big stupid grin on my face,  I was having a great time. It felt like the entire test building was trying to take off.This was a test of the inhouse afterburner which will also be used as the ramjet after transition.  After the debrief Skylar gave me a tour of the modified General Electric J85 engine,  the same engine used in the Northrop F-5.But yeah, so as with talking down the other subscale engine, but we have the JD five core,  the turbo machinery core right here, and then everything from this spot back is all  of our custom hardware. So obviously these valves are battleship valves. They're not  going to be something that we fly. It's going to be a lot bigger, but really focusing on the  core pieces here that we need to test on the ground. And so that's what this configuration  is. So everything is currently, the designs are being flight weighted, but even this,  we're using it as a test bed and iterating a lot on, so the hardware that's inside of here  went in two weeks ago, and so that's what the team has been working on is expanding of some  design modifications for life for endurance or performance. And so we can use this as a  test bench to just rapidly turn through things, 3d print some stuff, traditionally manufacture  some stuff, and then get the performance and duration out of this set of hardware.With these valves, they're in the valves or what are they?Yeah, so these valves are to represent some of the pressure  differential blowoff that we're going to need when we do the two mode operation.Right, kinda like bypass?Exactly. So when we transition from turbojet to Ramjet, there's going  to be a set of valves that move some of the internal systems around via pressure,  and this is the ground representation of those.Is there a pump involved with that too? Obviously you're getting ram  air from normal bypass air. How do you simulate that with a static test?Yeah, so that's why some of this is blanked off and so we just get as close as we can.So you're just kind of relying on the air from this kind of dragging it in.Yeah. So you still have all the compressor powering,  doing all the work against the ear tunnel, pull it in,And you're testing the nozzle as well. Do you  think that's what your nozzle geometry will look like too?Oh, definitely not that big. It'll obviously have to be a lot smaller.Right, but just the two ramps,  are you just going to a two ramp or is it going to be more of a circular type thing?Yeah, so the flight vehicle, the high speed tail will have a two D inlet,  but when we're flying with the off the shelf turbo jet, the off the shelf 85, which is some  of the earlier flight vehicles, we'll just use the stock afterburner that has a axi symmetric nozzleBack in the factory I asked Skyler more about why they selected the J85 engine.So these are out of production, the J 85s. So we didn't work with GE at all. It was all just  us working with, we were really working with the maintenance, repair and overhaul shops for  them. That's really where the expertise and knowledge lies. These engines were,  I think originally designed in the fifties. There's not a lot of electronics on board.  There's no firmware we have to work through. And really, it's a pretty elegant but hydro mechanical  system for all the controls. So really it was about understanding the configuration of it and  you can kind of chase down all the different tubes and everything to understand how it works. And  then there's a suite of documentation out there. So it was really on us to learn how it worked.I would've assumed you were working pretty closely with the  engine manufacturer since I imagine it'd be pretty valuable for them too to have.We certainly will be with Pratt and Whitney on the F 100 scale engine that has digital  control. It's a much higher performing engine, so we'll need to understand the  details of that a lot better. So that one we certainly will be, but this one has been  around for a long time. There's a lot of people who understand this engine and the  performance needs out of it are a lot less than what we're going to need for the future vehicles.Uhm we'll talk about Quarterhorse and the kind of scale of that,  but this will power, and then over here is the F 100, the Pratt and Whitney F 100.  And that will power darkhorse. So the vehicle that comes after quarterhorseHow many, is it just one engine?Two engines? Two engines. Two engines on darkhorse. And it'll be various engines  on Quarterhorse depending on the test that we're doing.Uhm, but yeah. So it gives you a  sense of scale. So this puts out about 5,000 pounds. This puts out about 30,000 pounds.So it seems Hermeus are well on their way with the development of their ramjet  engines with both the J85 and much larger F100 versions being actively worked on.So, what’s next for Hermeus?Well, they just tested Quarterhorse Mk 0. The ground vehicle we saw being constructed in the  factory. This vehicle was intended to help Hermeus develop their in-house manufacturing techniques. A  lot has changed since the days of the SR-71 and this has unlocked may manufacturing techniques  that the engineers in the 1960s could have only dreamed of, like large format 3D printing.So we're also investigating large format additive. So that was very fine,  very precise. But with large format additive, you can deposit a lot more material and so  you can build larger structures a lot faster. So you can see the resolution's  a bit worse, but you can put down a lot of material and build large structure soThere's no real grain on the end. Has that been processed toPolish? So it's like a weld processed, so you have pretty consistent material  properties throughout and so that's what we're looking to quantify and get very,What material isThat? This is Inconel as well.It's so much heavier than I expect. It is. Just steel.Yeah, it's steel. Yeah, it's high nickel steel.It's just one of those things that you read about it constantly, but I've never actually held it and  in my head I was thinking it would be closer to a titanium, but yeah, no, it's just heavy.It's heavy. Its kind of less exciting too when you're actually looking at it. It's like, yeah,I mean I'm just nerdy about this sort of stuff. This is where I get properly just  excited. Material science. I just think it's so cool. There's some voids in there.So this is a very large weld process. So wire comes in big laser and you can deposit a lot of,  yeah. And so that's actually in here. You can kind of see the robot arm that prints  it. I'll take that. So it's not active right now, but you can kind of see the laser arm.At this point in the tour extremely loud high pitched grinding started, which is a common  theme on these documentary shoots, so I am going to save your ears and explain the rest in VO here.Hermeus have been manufacturing much of the Quarterhorse Mk 0 inhouse using a mixture  of small and large format 3D printing and an absolutely massive CNC machine.However, one of the most exciting manufacturing techniques that Hermeus  mentioned was with Machina Labs new AI driven robots. A robotic panel forming process that  could form the outer skin panels of the planes. This technology could drastically  decrease the cost of development. Body panels in both automotive and aviation industries are  frequently manufactured by huge hydraulic presses that force sheet metal into a mold.  Those molds are expensive to make and making small adjustments to a design often require  making an entirely new mold. This is also even more difficult with high temperature  alloys like titanium and inconel, something the engineers of the SR-71 seriously struggled with. The US didn’t even have hydraulic presses with enough pressure to form the panelsThe best forge in the United States at that time could only produce 20% of the pressure  needed to form these titanium parts. Clarence L. Johnson, the manager of Skunk Works at the  time pleaded for the development of an adequate forging press, which he stated would need to be  a 250,000 ton metal forming press.Because of these inadequacies in forming capabilities,  the final forging dimensions were nowhere near the design dimensions and much of the  forming process had to be completed through machining. Meaning, most of the material was  cut away to form the part, resulting in 90% of the material going to waste. When your raw  material is extremely difficult to refine titanium, this kind of waste really hurts.This also makes design iteration extremely difficult, but machina labs are already forming  titanium and inconel parts. This to me is a key enabling technology, but of course even with the  most advanced manufacturing techniques don’t solve all of Hermeus technological challenges, which is  why Hermeus have limited themselves to mach 5, the lower end of the hypersonic flight regime. And you'd mentioned earlier that like Mach five, there was a specific reason why you're  aiming for Mach five. What is the advantageThere? So we do get the hypersonic bump because  most people say Mach five is where hypersonic takes over, but it's not really about the  buzzword, although that does help sometimes get people excited or make them very skeptical  sometimes too. But it's really about that is where the technology cliff is. So on the engine side,  it's where you can use RAM jets rather than scram jets. About mach five and a half is  where you have to go to SCRAM because your performance losses caused by the normal shock  become too much to have net thrust going forward. And then on the material side,  the temperatures that the gross acreage sit at are in a place where metallics can still close. WhatDoes that mean gross? The acreage?Yeah, the primary structure. So the primary structure of about mach five sits at eight  or 900 degrees versus the 1900 degree leading edge. Right? Okay. And so that means that we  can use metallics for the primary structure versus ceramics that are still kind of in  the development phase or the early researchy phase. So we want stuff that can be produced  at scale and is relatively available. And so that is kind of the cliff. And so we're  really at just the very, very low end of hypersonic. When people see hypersonic,  they're like, oh, it could be up to Mach 25. It's like, no, we're barely hypersonic. Right?Yeah, that was overwhelmed by the amount of questions to actually ask here, but so you're just  going bare metal for the actual skinOf the brain. There is going to be some judicious use of ceramics that we'll probably use right? In  places that you might imagine. But for most of it we can stick with off the shelf metallics.What's the reusability like there in canals fine for going through those thermal cycles?I mean, it's definitely going to be a challenge. And so that's part of the work is to be very  incremental about that. And our first vehicles are not going to have much life at all. And really  it's about accessing these flight conditions and starting to test at these conditions and then the  later vehicles will start to solve it. But really you almost have to reeducate people around the  life of the vehicles because most airliners or even aircraft, the way that they think about life  is time under wing hours of engine operation, hours of flight. That is a horrible metric for  us because you're not in the air that long. It's really about cycles. It's thermo cycles that are  going to drive the life of these vehicles. And to be honest, we just need more data to be able  to really anchor the long-term maintenance, repair and overhaul models for these things.Could you see yourself using, would ablatives even work at Mach five if needed it?I mean it's definitely possible. It definitely works. But for the  long-term vision that we have of being aircraft flight operations, because they are aircraft,  you have to use things that don't ablate or else you're having to replace 'em every time. The X 15 had a lot of issues with the ablate of just sticking to windows and Things like that. So that was when they started really pushing the flight condition up to mock  like six and a half towards seven for the first vehicles. They just had straight raw in cannel  on the outside and that thing, I think they flew 199 times with half a dozen or so vehicles. So  that was highly reusable for the first time they were even starting to get to these conditions with  a human rated craft rocket base. So a little bit different, but yeah. Just kind of an interestingPoint for this power speed. What's the biggest problems you've solved there so far? Have you had  the opportunity to test the actual airframe and see what sort of issues you're going to have withThat? Not yet. So I mean, that's part of the work to be done, but there's a slew  of other risks and problems that we have to solve. So the engine one was where we  wanted to focus. You can't find aircraft without an engine. So that was where we  started and has spent basically all of the time in the company up until this point,  and now we're at a place where the major technical risk has happened or has been  de-risked in terms of the mode transition. And now we're onto the airframe side. So even just  high speed takeoff and landing of a remote piloted vehicle is a challenge. Both of those are solved  simultaneously. What's the challenge with, so the challenge is for a hypersonic vehicle, you  want to have very short stubby wings because you don't want to take all that drag into high speed.That's really, really bad for takeoff and landing. So you're having to thread three needles to be  able to have a vehicle that can traverse all of these flight conditions. Takeoff and landing is  one where you want really big wings and you want to go very slow for us not able to do  that. And so by adding the speed component, now the control system has to be tighter,  all solvable, but not something that we have done as an organization. So that's what we're kind of  focusing mark one on. So our first variant of quarterhorse mark two will be around pushing  the jet engine up in flight to the mode transition point. So making sure the right flow is being fed  to the engine, making sure our pre-cool works in the actual environment. And then the third  mark will be the mode transition capable high speed break and airspeed record vehicle. And  so being incremental about that. So we're not going to really start to understand the thermal  considerations in flight until mark two, but we're going to be doing ground testing along  the way to be able to understand that where we're heating up sections of the airframe, making sure  that the joints and everything move the way we expect them to under load and under temperature,Assuming each mark of the quarterhorse is a success,  Hermeus will be moving on to build their second vehicle. The Darkhorse,  which will be a fully reusable uncrewed vehicle designed for defense and national security  missions. It will be Hermeus’ primary defense product, likely serving a similar role that  the SR-71 did before it. Avoiding interception with incredible speed and high altitude flight.Then finally we have Halcyon. The hypersonic passenger plane.  It bears some similarities to the XB-70 with its folding wing tips,  which could actuate downward for supersonic flight. This in combination with the triangular  wedge air inlet increased the amount of compression lift the plane could generate.Compression lift occurs as a result of the extremely high pressure air can be created  underneath an aircraft as a result of shockwave formation. Shockwaves are basically just areas of  extreme high pressure after all. The triangular lip of the air intake creates shockwaves that  travel underneath the wings. The folding wing tips were positioned to reflect this shockwave back  underneath the wings to increase compression lift further. This increase in lift helped increase  the range of the XB-70 which was designed as a deep penetration nuclear strategic bomber.The lowering of the wing tips also shifts the center of pressure forward,  which helps counteract a phenomenon where the center of pressure moves  backwards in supersonic flight that can create flight instabilities.No crewed aircraft has used compression lift since the XB-70,  so it’s quite cool to see the Halcyon taking advantage of this phenomenon.It could potentially fly passengers from New York to Paris in just an hour and a  half. Practically commuting distance for whoever can afford it, which Hermeus claims  could unlock 4 trillion dollars of GDP for economies with access to the the technology.Yeah, so looking back in history when we've seen accelerations of transportation networks,  like when Rome built out the roads, we switched from sail power to steam power and marine shipping  or in China built out high-speed rail in the 20th century. All of those were accompanied  by multiple single digit point G D P growth of the affected region. And the kind of reasoning  behind it is when you reduce the barriers to goods moving around and people moving around,  you increase trade and that increases G D P. So there's plenty of math and stuff behind it,  but it's happened in the past and we have kind of normalized to the speed at which the world  moves around. So that's what I mean by this untapped resource that we have. And I think  the pandemic taught us quite a bit about how much face-to-face really matters, especially when in  the early days of bringing complex goods into fruition and getting them into a marketplace.  If you're selling a commodity, do you need to be in person to sell coffee or a refrigerator? No,  a nuclear reactor or a hypersonic airplane, something like that. Yeah, probably.How important do you think accessibility to the technology is in order to achieve that goal and  how accessible do you see very far down the line of how a normal person flying on something likeThis? Yeah, so the kind of math that we've done and the markets that we've looked at is focused on  business class and first class travel only because I think that's the realistic entry point to the  market now. I mean, we've had seven or eight generations of subsonic passenger aircraft now,  and we're incredibly efficient at them and still continuing to get more efficient prices  coming down, safety improving, of course. Is the first generation of high-speed airplanes  going to do that? No, it's going to take time to get through that, but I do think it will be very,  very difficult to operate a service like this at a price point where an economy and a premium  economy ticket makes sense with the technology set that we're pursuing today. I do think there  are additional technology sets that are less mature, either broadly or in an aviation context  specifically that can really kind of rewrite the rules of the test there and take that step.But it's not something that I want to sign up to do in the first generation or two. So  I think the approach here is very much a kind of Tesla master plan, focus on the premium product,  if you want to call it that, get that right and then drive either efficiency  into the system or as a decade's worth of technology development has happened in  either energy storage or energy production. I think that that's the key technology area  that actually enables that flip to operating cost points that make this widely accessible.AJ mentioned energy production and energy storage  being two key technologies that could make the technology more accessible,  and that’s because one of the largest costs associated with a flight is the cost of fuel.Ignoring profit margins on a 100 dollar ticket we can break down  where your money goes to cover the costs of an airline. On average,  about 19 to 21 dollars goes to fuel, fluctuating with fuel prices.For a hypersonic plane that fuel cost is going to be much higher, as drag increases  with the square of the velocity, although that will be mitigated somewhat by the much  lower air densities at a cruising altitude 3 times higher than a typical airliner.Regardless, these aren’t going to be cheap tickets and that’s going to be  compounded by halcyon's relatively small internal volume and the increased cost of  maintenance for a plane dealing with extreme aerodynamic heating each and every flight.  The reality is Hermeus won’t be selling these planes to commercial airlines any time soon.Perhaps one day we will see a hypersonic air force one, allowing the president of the United  States to appear first on the scene when it matters most. A powerful diplomatic tool.I often judge companies by the people working within them,  and it’s hard not to get invested in the vision of these companies when people like  Tonio Martinez at leading it, Hermeus’ VP of Production. Tonio is among the most  experienced engineers in the world in this field. Having worked on the X-51 waverider,  the SpaceX Crew Dragon, and Divergent’s 3D printed supercar. Experience he is bringing  to developing the machine that builds the machine, where he is focusing much of his  efforts on ensuring everyone in the company is communicating and learning from each other.Not a lot of engineers get the opportunity to work with both the engineering process  and the actual manufacturing process. What is that like developing that?That's a good question because a lot of companies are much more siloed where  engineering and manufacturing oftentimes aren't even in the same building. And so that was a very  important part of establishing this company was having engineering and manufacturing in  the same building. And what that allows for is the engineers, as they're designing their parts,  they can come out and work with the technicians who will be putting things together and say,  what about this? What about that? Make sure that the things can actually be assembled. And the same  thing with the machine shop design engineer has to get a part made. They can go out and talk to  the machinist who's going to make their part and get pointers on, use this cutter and make it that  radius and these cut types of things that the engineer may not just intuitively know, but they  can get that information from the technicians to make their designs that much better to begin with.And then when the parts get made and they're actually integrating the parts onto the vehicle,  you'll see the engineers and the technicians working side by side to integrate those parts  and put them in. And so the engineer gets the opportunity to go through that process of,  I designed this thing and this is what I was thinking when I designed it in  terms of how this thing could go together and ease of installation and those kinds  of things. And then when they actually see that process or participate in that process,  then they get to, oh, you know what, if I had done this a little bit different,  it would've been a little bit easier. And so you get to go through those iterations at a company  like this where a lot of other companies, you just don't get that kind of opportunityFeel like that's the most, I've had a little bit of experience with that with,  I worked in a biomedical device startup and very humbling experience going to the  machine shop for the first time. They're like How this radius is not possible. But  it was the most fun part of it of seeing even to like you learn about tolerant,  but you never fully understand it until you see two parts not going together properly.Precisely. And that's been I think a lot of the, that's been part of what's enjoyable to  me is seeing the look on the engineer's face and the technician's faces and the machinist  faces as they're collaborating and working together and they're actually putting the  parts on and either it's like frustration or yeah, we did it joy, but to see that happening,  especially with some of the newer engineers that are just starting to go through this process,  it's pretty awesome because you can feel the level of intensity and energy increasing within  the team and the cohesion and just we need this fast pace of iteration within the team  and within all the processes that we build in order to reach our super challenging objectives.It's funny, I think most engineers actually crave that environment as well. Most engineers  become pretty discontent when they're pigeonholed too much into it's ultimately  a creative field. I think engineers are just mathematically inclined artists,  so they like to be thrown into the thick of it.Yes, and that is absolutely correct. I think some companies have so structured their environment  that the engineer really gets pretty boxed in by boundary conditions, by constraints, by their  environment to where sometimes you can go up to an engineer and a big company and say what vehicle is  at for? And they may not even know because it's just so pigeonholed into a specific thing here.  We really encourage critical thinking across the entire team. So if a machinist is making a part,  they should have a good idea of what this thing is for and what it's going to do. If the technicians  are installing stuff on the aircraft and working with the engineers, we should see the interaction  between these two different disciplines doing the critical thinking thing because they get,  because you actually get to do that critical thinking and you get to make decisions based  on that critical thinking because again, we are pushing the decision-making to the extreme. And  by doing that, we eliminate a lot of bottlenecks for decision-making as well as really making sure  that the decisions are being made in the hands of those who are actually most qualified to make  those decisions, which is usually at the front lines. And so all of our processes are structured  around enabling the engineer and the machinist and the technician to work together to find  solutions and then just execute without any overly constrained or heavy oversight on that process.I know for a fact that any engineer listening  to that conversation has their heart pumping a little faster.So many companies pigeon hole their engineers into every increase specializing to the  point it’s hard to see the forest for the trees, and you kind of just stop learning  and evolving. Every ambitious engineer wants to work in a company like this,  where your creativity is not only enabled, but encouraged. And in a  company with people as experienced as Tonio Martinez, you are going to learn a lot.I realized the opportunity I had with this channel to connect enthusiastic engineers  with companies like this last year. Helion told us after our documentary with them  last year that they actually hired a specialized nuclear engineer because  of our video. I feel incredibly proud that my work can serve both my audience  and help develop new technologies, and I think we can take it to the next level.So, to help even more, I’m launching our latest project. Propeller.Propeller is our new engineering hub,  where you can find the coolest jobs currently hiring in engineering.Hermeus currently has 40 job roles open. And they are looking for a Lead Manufacturing Engineer,  a Principal Thermal Engineer, a Principal Structural Engineer,  a Senior Mechanisms Engineer and many more.Relativity, who are a rocket company that launched their Terran 1 3D printed rocket last year,  currently have 171 roles to fill. With roles like Senior Director of Quality, Senior Aerothermal  Engineer, Propulsion Test Engineer, Senior Manager of Test Fluids Systems and many more.Go to StartPropeller.com and take a look. If you don’t see anything suitable right now,  make sure to sign up to our newsletter. This is just the start of Propeller and we will  adding many more new features and jobs to the site over time. If you sign up to the  newsletter we will keep you posted on all the most exciting opportunities and news in engineering.If you are a company that’s interested in advertising your jobs with us,  reach out to us with the contact page on StartPropeller.com\n"