The jet engine powering 3x faster air travel | Hard Reset

This is a new kind of jet engine, and it could unlock affordable supersonic flight for everyone, and a tasty treat for me. Imagine like all the perks of air travel and you're going three times faster, everywhere accessible affordably on earth. We came to see how electric motors and traditional jets come together to smash the sound barrier, and if they can toast marshmallows. Why do this? It's been 20 years since the Concorde has last flown, and there really hasn't been a new supersonic travel service for passengers. This is a system that really will enable the sub-thousand dollar ticket from San Francisco to Tokyo in three and a half hours. This hybrid electric jet engine could change everything about the way that we travel, and do it all with carbon neutral fuel. Our planes are going to be the only ones in the world, because of this decision, to be able to just directly swap to carbon neutral synthesized methane. So will this new jet engine mean we're just a few hours away from everywhere on earth? We don't get to have time travel, but you go fast enough, this is like somewhat analogous. This is Hard Reset. This episode of Hard Reset is sponsored by Neurable. They're putting their neurotechnology into everyday devices, starting with these headphones made in partnership with Now we have health wearables for our bodies, like your watch or your ring. This is one for our most important organ, our brain, and it's a high quality pair of headphones as well. The EEG sensors that are built into this device allow you to monitor your brain activity in real time. Those insights let you optimize your focus, boost productivity, and reduce burnout. If you've ever wondered how your brain would perform if you had one less cup of coffee, or if you took a walk after lunch, now you can see that happening in real time. In fact, it uses AI to tell you when you need to take a break so you can achieve better focus. In short, your brain is your most vital organ, so you should take good care of it. And by telling you when to take a break and rest your brain, these headphones will help you beat the burnout cycle, find flow states more easily, and boost your mental performance. I also love that the Neurable headset is also just a really well-designed set of headphones. You can wear these at work, on a plane, really anywhere. And that means that you can get data about your brain all day. Now, you might be wondering, Nick, how do you know if it's something you can wear anywhere? You work and basically live in a garage. Well, you'd be surprised. Sometimes I do go outside. And I tested these headphones on my walk, at a cafe, at my local comic book store, and in all of those places I was able to get great data about my brain health. So, if you want to support our show, check out the Neurable MW75 NeuroSmart headphones at bit.ly slash freethink underscore Neurable. Or just click on the link in the description and try them out. Okay, back to the episode. Behind this nondescript door in San Francisco, these folks are inventing a new way to fly. This is Ian. He's the guy behind Astra Mechanica. He's been obsessed with flying since he was a kid. Like, it was a problem. I was a terrible student because I was busy doing the actual cool work of building airplanes and drones and the like. And that was infinitely more important than schoolwork. And this was, like, very technical work. But they're not teaching you advanced engineering in middle school or high school. So I just had to go out and do that myself. While most kids were out collecting Pokemon, Ian was flying, fixing, and building airplanes. He was an early drone enthusiast and has made his own ultralight planes. In fact, making better planes he could fly is really just his whole life's purpose. In my world, the point of money, the point of everything is just airplanes, right? So, you know, ideally, travel the world in a fighter jet is, like, ideal Ian lifestyle. Ian's previous business, which made motorcycle parts, was really just a way for him to finance the hardware he'd need to manufacture airplane parts. Are you seeing a theme here? Well, I want to make airplanes, and so I have to just grow a business progressively larger until I have an airplane factory. Right. And then as a side perk, you have, like, a billion motorcycles, like, spread around. There are quite a few motorcycles here. Ian's background in making drones and experimental hobby aircraft had given him the idea of making an affordable plane with electric motors. A lot of technologies that I saw early on, sort of in the electric world, where electric things are super reliable, they do not break. It's, like, sort of the platonic ideal of machines tends to just be electrical things. Very few parts involved. If you want to make something cheap, make it with a few moving parts. Like, this is just good engineering, and this is really alien to aerospace people because flying is high energy. That doesn't play nice with batteries. So instead of using batteries, Ian's initial idea for his plane was to use a gas turbine to generate electricity, and that electricity would turn motors that provide thrust. This is similar to what many modern helicopters do. They use a turbine attached to a gearbox. Those gears turn the rotor that lift the helicopter up. Ian is just swapping out the gearbox for a generator. That is classic, reliable, safe aerospace, but combine it with modern electric motors so you can quickly get out of the old paradigm of mechanical shaft power and go into the new paradigm of electrons and electric everything. This by itself would be a totally revolutionary way to build a plane. Cheaper, lower maintenance, and safe. All great things. But Ian started to realize it would unlock something even better. Low-cost, supersonic flight. And so I want to go faster, and I'm burning fuel in the generator running this thing, so why not burn some fuel behind it to get even more thrust? Right. I had abandoned my initial, more practical, subsonic interests. Still totally viable, but why not go supersonic? So, it's fair. This is the idea behind the Turboelectric Adaptive Engine. Basically, it's a hybrid of electric and combustion technologies to make a super-fast, super-efficient jet. This electrical-meets-old-mechanical-thermodynamic world actually unlocks supersonic flight in this totally new way. Almost by accident, Ian had come up with a totally new kind of jet engine. I was trying to find reasons why this wouldn't work. Did my math on this, and I even brought in an outside thermodynamic system, like, am I missing something with this? The way traditional jet engines work is by spinning fans to suck air in. They compress it and shoot it out the back. They use some of that air to burn jet fuel. Which spins a turbine and provides the power they need to spin the fans at the front. That's Patrick, the Director of Propulsion at Astromechanica, and he's in charge of making sure this engine toasts some very fine marshmallows. And flies. That is also important. A traditional jet engine is usually self-sustaining. As long as the engine has started and you're providing it fuel, you have a turbine that's driving the compressor in the front, and it's producing thrust. You know, we have this thing, suck, squeeze, bang, blow, are like the different steps of combustion. Existing jet engines, since they're doing all these things in a single go, they can't vary them separately. So this becomes a really big problem when you're at different speeds. That's how we run planes. They're effectively full power all the time. Right. Jet engines idling on the ground burn nearly as much as they do at cruise. Wow. Concorde famously burned two tons of fuel just taxing out from the gate to the runway. It's a car worth of fuel just like idling in a few minutes. But as electric motors have gotten lighter, more efficient, and more powerful, it's allowed the folks at Astra Mechanica to decouple these two processes. Now the fans at the front and the explody part in the back are controlled independently of each other. We're able to drive the compressor without a turbine, so we're mechanically driving the compressor with an electric motor. What that means is the engine has essentially three different modes. Mode one, it's just a spinny thing pushing air. As fast as the thing is spinning and pushing, that's the exhaust velocity you get. Then you add a little bit of combustion for mode two. This gets you past the speed of sound. This is like a jet cycle. Now you're doing a little bit of spinning, but now you're also throwing fuel there and you're heating it up and you're throwing it out the back faster. And then there's a really fun mode, mode three. So as you're going faster, this is the ram effect. And then eventually this thing, this whole compressor stage is like doing nothing because all the work is being done. Because these blades literally couldn't spin fast enough to create the same amount of pressure you're getting from just flowing through the air. They quickly get dwarfed by what the inlet is giving you. So you can just go straight from the inlet giving you that high pressure, straight to the combustor, and now it's no moving parts. You just add fuel and go. Yeah, like Mach 3 or even faster. Jet engines, we like tweaked them. They got a little bit better over time, but we very quickly, like by the 1960s, got to the limits of metals melt at the temperatures they do. We got computers where you could like optimize more, but the fundamentals didn't actually change. The electric motor used the right way, sort of just unlocks this new capability. And that's why, you know, now after so many decades of unchanging, you know, sort of aircraft reality, we get to look at this now. This isn't just possible because new technologies became available. It's also about seeing things in a different way. So I was really lucky in that I had both of these sort of dueling, say like parental or like guide models of like my dad was, you know, Berkeley guy moved up to the Redwoods. You get to make up your own rules, just figure things out. You just get to do stuff. And then on the other end, it's one person in particular, Mike Singari. I learned what quality was. You need a lot of precision. You need a lot of discipline. I think that's what's enabled me to do everything I'm doing. I think when you have a technology that's been around for 50 or 70 years and it's gone relatively unchanged, it's hard to approach it with fresh eyes and then question the fundamentals of this has always been done this way. Therefore, that's the only way to address the problem. It's a chaos and order kind of thing. And it's important to bring them both. You can't just tear down the way things are done. You have to put something better together out of the pieces, especially when you're building something as complex and powerful as a jet engine. This is the first version of the turbo electric adaptive engine in action. It's loud. That's a big part of why they're moving to a new spot to test the larger versions. More on that later. But for now, the important part is that this baby jet engine worked. This is our gen one nozzle. This is basically the business end of the jet. This is the out. Right. So you have up front, you have all this compressed air that's flowing into here. Inside, you've got these essentially baffles that sort of like, yeah, we're set here to mix in with the fuel that you're injecting. Yep. You ignite that. And because there's such high pressure coming in, it sort of forces it out that way and creates this thrust. So, yeah, we do all that and this thing. So this nozzle, like as we ran it, was pushing air up to about Mach three. Okay. 900 meter per second exhaust velocity out of this, which is very fast. It's really fast. Yes. Yeah. So we're able to show you can drive an electric motor and produce some measurable exhaust gas that can produce thrust. What we've been focusing a lot of the last 12 months on is designing an axial compressor and driving that with an electric motor and then developing our own combustor and nozzle in-house as well. This is the front part of the engine that Patrick has been helping to design and build. The compressor. The electric motors will drive these fans to pull in the air and compress it. Typically for one of these, it's around 60 hours of machining to make one of these. We call them blisks. It's a blade, bladed disc. So yeah, the process on this is like raw metal. Then we turn it. Then we mill it, all the blade geometry into it. Then we send it out to get balanced. And then we have a jet engine blisk. The thrust of an engine is like effectively how large is the diameter? Right. Which then ends up being this funny constraint of like, this is this size because this is how big our CNC is. So as soon as you can afford a larger CNC machine, you're going to have a bigger stator. An even bigger one. Yeah. Okay. They've built this larger version in a part of town more amenable to loud jet noises. And they're building a very nice bulletproof chamber to test it in. Once completed, this engine will theoretically be able to generate supersonic thrust. It's not just that we're doing supersonics. We're doing it at the same cost as existing aircraft. It's like, it's not interesting if it's not affordable. When you go on a Southwest 737 or Airbus A320 or A321, the engines on that plane costs about 12 million each. Astromechanica has not made their prices publicly available yet, but they expect these will be much more affordable than existing jet engines. It'll be cheaper to make, but with fewer moving parts, they'll also hopefully be cheaper to maintain. It's also more fuel efficient and designed to use a much more affordable and sustainable fuel. Methane. Yep. The same stuff you use to cook on a gas stove. And a really fun fact about LNG is that it's about a tenth the price of jet fuel. It has more energy per unit weight. And also on the climate front, LNG is 30% less CO2 than burning jet fuel. One of the major headaches of the aviation industry and airlines in general is you have volatility at fuel prices and things like that. But like the sun is always shining. You can capture sunlight, solar energy. You get electrical energy from that. You then use that electrical energy, capture the CO2 out of the atmosphere, split water apart and recombine it into a hydrocarbon. And we can make methane and then I can liquefy and put it in my planes. You know, once you kind of get this infrastructure built out, you can always have fuel at the same price. See our upcoming episode with Terraform Industries to get more details on that part of the process. It's pretty incredible. This is to say you can't just swap that into existing airplanes. You have to make that decision sort of at day one when you first start designing it. So what's it like to fire up a next-gen supersonic engine designed for the fuels of tomorrow? Let's find out. So this is what we call our Gen 3 engine. This is the first demonstrator that has both the high subsonic and supersonic efficiency in a single system. This unit is capable of generating supersonic thrust, maybe even hypersonic thrust eventually, at the kind of scale that could push an aircraft across the Pacific. The team has been working for months to assemble this test unit. It has a fully functioning compressor up front, powered by electric motors. And in the back, it has a combustion chamber that they've designed and built in-house. This will be one of the first hot-fire tests with all these systems working together. I gotta say, it's a little nerve-wracking to stand in front of an experimental jet engine with just a half inch of plexiglass between it and me. Will that glass stop the rotor blade? Please don't explode. God, why didn't I wear my brown pants today? Nice. That, yeah, that was, that was a lot better. That was a lot, like, yeah. How was that? Good. Yeah, that was good. Uh, much less sketchy than the first one I did. So. Okay, it's loud and it's fast. Unfortunately, the engine did not hit supersonic speeds that day. They actually haven't pushed the system past 30% yet. But they are ramping up to it. While they went over their charts and graphs, we had a bigger question to answer. How well does it toast marshmallows? We're going to see if jet-puffed marshmallows can also be jet-toasted. You never get a chance to have a jet-toasted marshmallow because jets are incredibly expensive and dangerous. But as a person who has access to these sorts of things, and is also kind of an idiot, I figure I owe it to America whether or not you can jet-toast a jet-puffed marshmallow. I mean, it did toast. You want to try some? The front is, like, super, super dry. The rest is, like, untouched. So it was, like, exposed to intense heat really quickly and then nothing. And it tastes fine. There you go. Jet-toasted marshmallows. This early engine is just one step in a long process. It will take years of work and billions of dollars to complete that process. But once it's complete, if it's complete, the world will be a very different place. Picture a scenario where traveling around the world is cheap and easy. This is an engine designed to make that into a reality. But this engine isn't designed for the planes of today. It's not even designed for the airlines of today. This is very much a hard reset on how air travel works. The solution is not a better airline. The solution is replace the airlines completely. The concept of airlines, gone. Right now, large airplanes are the only affordable way to move people around the world. But this new technology could make smaller planes just as cost-efficient and much easier to schedule and coordinate. Airlines were optimized around a very, like, pre-internet, difficult-to-coordinate reality. The new reality is small, dynamic planes dispatched as needed. And there's actually responding to when do people want to go where they want to go to, as opposed to the old model where the plane is flying no matter what and hope you fill it up. This is one of the ways where, like, we can drop the effort required so much where now exotic, faraway, interesting places becomes accessible to everyone. We think of places as far away because they take a long time to get to. But this technology could make Iceland or Central Asia or even Patagonia accessible in a few short hours. The world didn't get smaller, but it did get closer. The feeling of otherness, I think that leads to poor decision-making at a societal level. The more you travel, like, things actually just feel that much less other. The key patterns and themes of humanity are, like, very apparent. Like, oh, people are people is what you ultimately realize. And so there's something really useful when you start to get exposed to new environments where it doesn't have to be exactly this way. It's just one of the best ways to, like, shake things up. Traveling the world can really change the way you see things. It exposes you to more perspectives, more ways of life. And if you're really lucky, it can leave you willing to question the way things are and excited to build a better tomorrow.