Aerospace firm Hermeus has won funding to develop supersonic commercial planes that will fly more than five times the speed of sound within 10 years.
The company was set up by alumni from Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos-backed aerospace company Blue Origin – which is planning to fly passengers to the moon.
Hermeus says its planes would travel at speeds of more than 3,000mph with a range of 4,600 miles, and will be powered mostly by existing technology.
They will be built using mostly titanium and Hermeus looks to have a functional demo version ready in the next five years.
The firm hopes the planes would be able to fly passengers from New York to London in less than two hours – quicker than the Concorde flight time of three hours and 15 minutes.
Hermeus co-founder and CEO AJ Piplica said: “We’ve set out on a journey to revolutionize the global transportation infrastructure, bringing it from the equivalent of dial-up into the broadband era, by radically increasing the speed of travel over long distances.” The company received funding from Khosla Ventures, although the exact amount has not yet been publicly disclosed. “Hermeus is developing an aircraft that not only improves the aviation experience with very reduced flight times, but also has the potential to have great societal and economic impact,” said Vinod Khosla, founder of Khosla Ventures.
All four Hermeus founders worked together at Generation Orbit, where AJ Piplica served as CEO and Glenn Case, Mike Smayda, and Skyler Shuford served as technical directors. While there, they led the development of the X-60A, a hypersonic rocket-plane and the Air Force’s newest X-Plane. The company also had an experienced Board of Advisors which includes Rob Meyerson – the former president of Blue Origin.