Zach Shore, President of Hermeus, and his team have demonstrated a turbine-based combined cycle engine in a wind tunnel for roughly $20 million. NASA and DARPA spent nine figures on the same architecture. The system uses proprietary modifications to an F100-229 to hit Mach 3, then routes airflow around the cocooned turbine directly into a ramjet to reach Mach 5. Reverse the process to decelerate. The result is reusable air-breathing flight from zero to Mach 5. No rockets required for acceleration or terminal glide on descent. They proved the complete architecture with a GE J85 engine. Now they're scaling to the F100-229 with the ramjet integration coming next.
Quarterhorse, their 30,000-pound Mach 2+ aircraft powered by the F100-229, flies from White Sands this year. It's not a test article; it's the first platform with actual utility. Think unmanned F-16 capability stack: electronic warfare, rails for weapons, red air, high-speed target. Darkhorse will hit low Mach 5 before decade's end. Zach walks through why they're building metal airframes with removable panels and modular inlets rather than exotic composites, how they're using proven components like the F-16 landing gear and MiG fuselage design to avoid reinventing solved problems, and why demonstrating incremental capability beats PowerPoint pitches when you're trying to crack into integrated heavy systems programs.
Topics discussed:
- Demonstrating turbine-based combined cycle engine architecture in wind tunnel for $20M versus NASA/DARPA's nine-figure development
- Routing airflow around cocooned F100-229 turbine into ramjet at Mach 3 to achieve reusable Mach 5 flight capability
- Building 10,000-pound unmanned aircraft from design to flight in 15 months to validate high-speed outer mold line
- Deploying Quarterhorse 30,000-pound Mach 2+ platform with F-16 capability stack including electronic warfare and weapons rails
- Designing metal airframes with removable panels and modular inlets rather than exotic composites for production scalability
- Using proven components like F-16 landing gear and MiG fuselage design to avoid reinventing solved engineering problems
- Navigating defense R&D contracting where labs compete with private innovators and prime contractors receive cost-plus incentives
- Building hardware-rich iterative development approach with smaller engines before scaling to full F100-229 and ramjet integration
Listen to more episodes:
Apple
Spotify
YouTube
Website