Closing Bell - Manifest Space: Hypersonic Heat with Hermeus CEO AJ Piplica & CRO Zach Shore 1/16/25

Episode Date: January 16, 2025

Hermeus is developing hypersonic aircraft – five times the speed of sound and across the Atlantic Ocean in roughly 90 minutes. The startup officially inaugurated its new facility in Florida with a series of successful engine tests, wrapping 2024 by ground testing its first aircraft. Now, the startup is nearing the Quarterhorse engine’s first flight. Co-founder & CEO AJ Piplica alongside Chief Revenue Officer Zach Shore join Morgan Brennan from the Reagan National Defense Forum to discuss the promise of hypersonic flight and the path to making it mainstream

Hermia's is developing hypersonic aircraft. Five times the speed of sound across the Atlantic Ocean in about 90 minutes and fast enough to keep yourself from getting shot down in some very highly high-end environments. The startup officially inaugurated its new heat facility in Florida with a series of successful Pratt & Whitney F-100 engine tests. It also recently wrapped the ground testing for its first aircraft, the jet-powered Quarter Horse at Edwards Air Force Base. Up next, the Quarter Horse's first flight. Ahead of it all, from the Reagan National Defense Forum last month, I sat down with co-founder and CEO A.J. Piplica and Chief Revenue Officer Zach

Shore. So it's very iter and Chief Revenue Officer Zach Shore. So it's a very iterative design process, very SpaceX-inspired. That's where our technical team is from. Highly iterative, hardware-rich, and one airplane a year. So as you unlock capability, you advance the vehicle, advance the business, unleash products into the market space. All these platforms are also unmanned, which is a really important part of the strategy. One, for the Department of Defense, it decreases their risk posture as they employ these type of capabilities in theaters, but also it decreases the burden of manufacturing and certification on us as the creators of the technology

because you don't have to worry about the life support systems for a human being. Hermia has plans to roll out commercial service in the 2030s. But to get there, it's working with the Defense Department, developing autonomous high speed aircraft to generate revenue and to establish the technology before any humans climb aboard. We also discussed the policy picture with President-elect Trump just days away from inauguration. Usually it is a conflict or a threat that drives our government to move quickly. And I'm personally very, very encouraged by what I've seen, particular appointments in a lot of different places,

coming in where folks have a very clear vision for not just how to drive efficiency into what we're doing, but how to accelerate delivery of whatever it is, whether it's on the military side, accelerating fielding of capability and expanding our deterrent capability quickly, especially in the second half of this decade when it's most critical. On the NASA side, a guy like Jared Isaacman coming in and leading that organization, he is an explorer. And I've never been excited about an appointment before. That one was really one that hit. somebody like that leading the cutting edge of where we're going is not just this country, but as a species, is really encouraging. Isaac Min is the founder of payments processor Shift4,

a two-time private astronaut via SpaceX, and a repeat guest of this podcast. On this episode, Hermes' Piplica and Shore break down the promise of hypersonic flight and the path to make it mainstream. I'm Morgan Brennan, and this is Manifest Space. Joining me now from the Reagan National Defense Forum is A.J. Piplica and Zach Shor of Hermes. Gentlemen, it's so good to be speaking with you today. Likewise, thanks for having us. So I just want to sort of start at the beginning, and that is just quickly, briefly,

what Hermeus is doing, where you're focused. Sure, so based in Atlanta, Georgia, our long-term vision is to radically accelerate air travel with Mach 5 passenger aircraft, and along the way leverage all those capabilities to radically accelerate air power with autonomous high-speed aircraft for the Department of Defense. And so when we talk about Mach 5 we're talking about hypersonic. That's right.

That's right. Five times the speed of sound across the Atlantic Ocean in about 90 minutes and fast enough to keep yourself from getting shot down in some very highly high-end environments. And you have a key test flight that's coming up. Before I get to that though, I do want to just...have humans ever traveled that quickly? Have we seen this type of technology deployed? I mean, I know we always talk about supersonic flight, but hypersonic flight? Not in aircraft. So the X-15 was an experimental rocket plane back in the 1950s and we had Neil Armstrong

flew it. So the top speed there was about Mach 6, but not in an aircraft. So yeah, of course, like when we go to space, you definitely pass Mach 5. Yeah, true. So how do we get there? And I ask that knowing that you do have this key test flight coming up. Yeah, I mean, the first step is fly the first vehicle, right? So it's a very iterative design process, very SpaceX-inspired. That's where our technical team is from. Highly iterative, hardware-rich, and one airplane a year. So as you unlock capability, you advance the vehicle, advance the business, unleash products into the market space.

All these platforms are also unmanned, which is a really important part of the strategy. One, for the Department of Defense, it decreases their risk posture as they employ these type of capabilities in theaters, but also it decreases the burden of manufacturing and certification on us as the creators of the technology because you don't have to worry about the life support systems for a human being. So it's almost like a public-private partnership, I think, about what SpaceX does with NASA, for example. That's right. That's a good point. That's right. Yeah. From a defense perspective, we have a technical roadmap that buys down all the technical risks to that long-term vision. And you can kind of imagine it's iterative.

And as you step through and you build your first aircraft, you build your first supersonic aircraft, you build an aircraft that can fly faster than the SR-71, you build a Mach 5 aircraft, you extend the range, extend the payload. Each of these steps have products that can solve important problems along the way. And when you do that with untrued aircraft, the space in which you can do that is pretty expensive, and they can be highly impactful for, I think, solving some of the pressing national security challenges we have, especially in the Pacific. And so when we talk about some of those national security challenges,

what does this bring to the equation that doesn't currently exist? Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of things. So I think, you know, to AJ's point, when you talk about that roadmap, let's just start with supersonic, unmanned high, supersonic, high supersonic vehicles. Those platforms don't exist anywhere as it is today, period. What that's going to get you is altitude and standoff. So think of like how Falcon 9 works as a reusable booster. You can start imagining capabilities where that vehicle can be a boost stage for weapons and other type of sensors that you could deploy. Big part of the challenge you have in the Pacific that's been spoken widely about in public is the access denial that you have in like the

South China Sea in particular. And so as systems and service members get pushed further and further away, your ability to bring vehicles and capability in closer is the challenge and the constraint. So a high Mach vehicle that is unmanned that can get up high and throw something really far helps to break that paradigm. As you go further down that roadmap and you get into like a Mach 5 vehicle, you're gonna see some payloads on board that vehicle that would be really interesting.

And now you're operating inside that contested space. And the reason is your speed becomes your survivability. If you're at 100,000 feet going Mach 5 and you change your direction by one degree, the physics are really going to be challenging on the adversary to launch an intercepting rocket or missile against it. And so you see a level of survivability that allows you to get back inside that denied environment. Typically, to date, we've done that with low observable systems, stealth,

right, B-21, B-2, some of the secretive platforms we have that are unmanned. The pivot here is to say that low observability, while still very important and very valuable, is very expensive. And so if you can also start embracing speed in that paradigm, you can unlock some of the same capabilities at a lower cost point. So when do we start to see this deployed, this capability deployed for the U.S. military? I think you'll start to see the first kind of operational flight tests and commercially provided flight test services probably in 2026. And then, you know, downstream

of that later part of the decade, you know, each year we're adding a new batch of capabilities to these things. Yeah, I would add too, I mean, we've seen some of the commentary from Doge and others in the sort of Silicon Valley sphere talking about the changes going on. I mean, the other question, frankly, is back to the department a little bit of how do they want to invest in these capabilities. To date, other than Andrew with the CCA work, there hasn't been a significant amount of investment in new entrants or in unmanned vehicles. And so I do think that, to your point earlier, the public-private partnership, the question

I think is still out there of if we deliver on our capabilities on the roadmap, on the technical, where does the department want to take that capability, right? We can unlock the capacity to build and to manufacture, but if the customer is not interested in taking the solution set in that direction, then the question is still up in the air. The fact that we do see this administration that's coming together, we have this Doge panel that's coming together. It is a lot of folks from Silicon Valley. It's a lot of venture investors. It's a lot of defense tech folks and entrepreneurs too. What does that signal to you about policy in this incoming administration? I think we are teed up for the most acceleration we've seen across what government can do that we've seen in a very very long time. Usually it is a conflict or a threat

that drives our government to move quickly and I'm personally very very encouraged by what I've seen in particular appointments in a lot of different places coming in where folks have a very clear vision for not just how to drive efficiency into what we're doing, but how to accelerate delivery of whatever it is, whether it's on the military side, accelerating fielding of capability and expanding our deterrent capability quickly, especially in the second half of this decade when it's most critical.

On the NASA side, a guy like Jared Isaacman coming in and leading that organization, he is an explorer. And I've never been excited about an appointment before. That one was really one that hit. Because somebody like that leading the cutting edge of where we're going is not just this country, but as a species, is really encouraging. So I think that theme of moving the blockers out of the way and moving forward and delivering the things that we want to deliver.

The next four years, I think, are the best time that we've seen to do that outside of wartime. So we're talking about national security. We're talking about unmanned aircraft right now, which I have questions about that as well, which is, you know, the technology, how you're developing that autonomy in of itself.

But then going from there to the commercial piece of this and actually putting passengers on board, how do we get there? When does that happen? Yeah, so the passenger stuff, we have to be successful with, obviously, the technology. But, frankly, we also have to be successful on the business front. If we're building products that people don't want, we're not gonna be around as a business. So that is really key, I think, to really enabling that high-speed future from a commercial perspective

that we started the company to do and everything that we're doing is driving toward. But it's very much a 2030s type thing. So I mean, certification for a new aircraft, even one that's kind of within the realm of what's been done before can take two to five years in and of itself. So I expect from a kind of technology development perspective, we will have de-risked all of the core technology necessary roughly by the end of the 2020s. And then stepping into productization of passenger aircraft into the 2030s.

So next, Kim, we have to wrap this up. of passenger aircraft into the 2030s. So next key milestone, and we have to wrap this up. Last question for you, next milestone that we should be watching. Flying. Okay. Yep, so we've got our first aircraft, the company's built, quarter horse Mark I,

up at Edwards Air Force Base, getting ready to fly in the next, hopefully, a couple weeks. So we'll finally become an aircraft company. Okay. AJ, Zach, thank you so much. I appreciate it. Thanks, Morgan. That does it for this episode of Manifest Space. Make sure you never miss a launch by following us wherever you get your podcasts

and by watching our coverage on Closing Bell Overtime. I'm Morgan Brennan.