| When the final Concorde supersonic flight touched ground in the fall of 2003, humanity seemed to collectively decide that an average of 500-600 miles per hour was “good enough” for commercial air travel. But some people still aren’t satisfied. A new generation of aerospace companies, frequently in collaboration with the Department of Defense, are trying to leapfrog supersonic flight altogether — experimenting with hypersonic technology that could one day power commercial aircraft at up to Mach 9 speeds. As digital technology seems to make massive new leaps each week, month, or year, the stagnation of plane travel is a reminder that the world of things has remained stubbornly mired in the 20th century — just ask Elon Musk, whose futuristic tunnel schemes haves faced innumerable roadblocks and delays, or anyone at the Federal Aviation Admnistration recently. “The speed of commercial aviation hasn't changed much outside of the blip of the Concorde more than four decades ago,” Clayton Swope, deputy director of the Aerospace Security Project and a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told me today. Now, he says, that’s changing: “As companies are trying to develop this technology, it helps that there’s a national security need for that speed.” Swope was referring to the use of hypersonic weapons traveling anywhere between five and 25 times the speed of sound, which pose a potentially massive national security threat that has duly commanded the attention of the world’s military powers. Similar to the dawn of the jet age in the aftermath of World War II, the U.S., China, Russia and other nations are now racing to develop missiles and aircraft that can outrun each other at outrageous speeds high in the Earth’s atmosphere. That’s created an incentive for private aerospace companies to raise millions of dollars to develop the core technologies that might power those weapons — but which they also pitch as someday taking passengers across the globe in a fraction of the time of today’s commercial flights. As with spaceflight, the consumer market is still a long way off for hypersonic travel. So long, in fact, that government has a crucial role in keeping it alive by partnering with the companies trying to build tomorrow’s high-powered rocket engines. One of those companies is the Houston-based Venus Aerospace, which conducted its first powered flight last month with a drone that ran below Mach 1 due to local regulations, but demonstrated a new form of propulsion called a “rotating detonation engine.” Andrew Duggleby, the company’s co-founder, told Ars Technica he was “convinced that this is going to be the engine that unlocks the hypersonic economy." Venus’ experiments with that engine, which unlike a traditional rocket propels itself via a shockwave propelled out the rear of the craft, were done in conjunction with the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). “DARPA makes a lot of sense in this case because this is a very early stage technology,” Swope said. “This is something where we’re probably in the development stage, where we can even prove that we can do hypersonic engines that do both super- and hypersonic.” Swope pointed to the recent experiments by Seattle-based Stratolaunch, which earlier this month launched its first rocket-powered flight. The company launched its Talon-A1 hypersonic prototype from what just happens to be the largest aircraft in existence, reaching speeds of nearly Mach 5. Hermeus, an Atlanta-based company with investment from Sam Altman as well as Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, announced a recent partnership with the Defense Innovation Unit to develop “a pathway for dual-use, reusable hypersonic flight aircraft.” (Europe is in, too: Switzerland-based Destinus tested a hypersonic prototype last summer, and is a major supplier of drones to Ukraine to boot.) Despite all the hype, it’s worth noting that this is still a technology in its very early stages. It’s comparable to quantum computing, where a familiar concept with a robust, longstanding research ecosystem is inspiring a new wave of experiments meant to prove, or improve, the tech’s basic viability. The comparison is borne out by both technologies’ defense applications, as well, as world powers scramble to outrun their opponents’ cryptographic or ballistic prowess. While the entanglement of scientific development and military application is nothing new, the race for hypersonic does come at a time when governments are more comfortable than ever outsourcing key aerospace and defense functions to new market entrants like SpaceX, Anduril and the new crop of hypersonic competitors. And on the other side of the coin, future-tech entrepreneurs are rediscovering a very mid-20th-century interest in Washington and the federal contracting system, renewing an unlikely partnership between Silicon Valley and the Pentagon. Swope was optimistic that the incentive for hypersonic startups to justify their funding rounds would create a sort of virtuous cycle for all involved, much like with the current wave of space launches. “Look at the Moon mission. We've been there before, we just had to re-learn how to do it in a different way,” Swope said. “It does have to do with cost-effectiveness, but also how it can build a commercial infrastructure… this isn’t a foundationally new approach, we’re just trying to do it better.”
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