Venus Aerospace
houston spaceport— On a cloudy day in late March, Andrew Dagleby kept a safe distance from the rocket engine. His small engineering prototype designed and built by his team His engine isn’t that big, so he probably didn’t have to travel as far as 50 meters.
I waited a few minutes until steam started hissing from the engine. Then, for a few seconds, the engine made a distinctive whining noise. “There it is!” cried Dagleby.To that, he meant the sound of an exploding engine spinning after ignition. The sound indicated that the reaction had succeeded in rotating around the engine 20,000 times per second.
Dagleby is the Chief Technology Officer of a company he co-founded with his wife Sassy. Venus Aerospace aims to build a hypersonic aircraft capable of carrying perhaps a dozen passengers and traveling at a staggering speed of Mach 9, or over 11,000 kilometers per hour.
“If you could go anywhere in an hour, how much would the world change?” Sassy Dagleby asked me.
to go TRUE fast
Probably quite a lot. And so I came to Venus Aerospace’s facility in southeast Houston to see if the company had the potential to achieve this ambitious goal.
Sure, I have had my doubts. One problem is that Mach 9 is very fast. Never before has there been such a fast plane. The fastest plane ever built is Lockheed’s SR-71 “Blackbird” which flew at Mach 3.2. Above Mach 9, communication with the ground is lost and plasma begins to envelop the vehicle. It’s like a spacecraft returning to Earth through the upper atmosphere.
As for passenger travel comparisons, the Concorde supersonic airliner traveled at Mach 2, or about 2,100 km/h. Most of the new generation of supersonic aircraft currently in development are in about the same range, such as the booming Mach 1.7 cruising speed of his Supersonic.
Mr. and Mrs. Dagleby propose a radically different flight profile. They said the aircraft will take off and on the rocket engine he will perform a 10 minute boost. This allows the aircraft to reach an altitude of about 50 km, half the distance into space. Oh, and they’re aiming for an operational frequency like his four-daily airport.
To that end, the company recently decided on the engine’s fuel mix. Hydrogen peroxide at room temperature and Jet-A, the fuel used in the majority of jets already flying at airports. The company’s engineers also recently achieved liquid peroxide and jet A detonation, which are critical for using a stable fuel composition.
efficient engine
One of the keys to making all of this work is using a new type of engine based on ‘rotational explosions’. Governments around the world have been researching this technology for over a decade. This is because it has the potential to improve fuel efficiency in applications ranging from US Navy ships to rocket engines.
In a conventional rocket engine, high-pressure propellant and oxidizer are injected into the combustion chamber where they burn to produce a tremendously energetic exhaust plume. Newton’s second law of motion works. A rotary detonation engine differs in that the detonation wave travels around a circular channel. It is maintained by fuel and oxidant injections and creates a shock wave that travels outward at supersonic speeds.
This all sounds pretty complicated, but it is. However, they are more than just theoretical as there are a growing number of groups building and testing such engines in Japan, Europe, America and elsewhere. improved by about 10%.
This may not sound like much, but it’s the number that determines success or failure for Venus Aerospace. By mass, about 80% of a hypersonic vehicle is fuel and oxidizer. By increasing fuel efficiency, mass is really left for important things like landing gear, wings, and even some passengers. “This allows us to create a vehicle that is truly like an airplane,” said Andrew Dagleby.
send in a drone
While Venus Aerospace is working on rocket engines, it’s also starting to test drones to refine the shape of the plane. A 5-foot-long drone recently demonstrated fully autonomous flight in California. Venus aims to reach supersonic speed with his eight-foot drone by the end of this year, and reach Mach 3 with a rotating detonation engine by early 2024.
The company has about 80 full-time employees and 20 contractors, most of whom work out of its hangar at Houston Spaceport. Venus Aerospace has previously raised her $41 million, led by Prime Movers Lab, and Sassie Duggleby said it is working on a second round of funding.
She and her husband worked at Virgin Orbit before founding Venus Aerospace in the summer of 2020. We both feel that it is important to have a company that not only works hard, but also works moderate hours.
“We like to say ‘home for dinner,'” she said. “It is for both our employees and our customers who travel around the world.”
Venus Aerospace has a very long way to go. But it looks like you’re taking the right steps to start that journey.
