Hypersonia Makes
The right business models are key to the growth and health of an organisation. Making hypersonic aircrafts requires examining the different established and emerging business models. There are different players in the mix. And these can advance either individually or in collaboration. Either as pure-plays or partnerships.
The focus is the business models for making hypersonic civilian aircrafts and engines. Generally, makers are either horizontal, lateral, or vertical in orientation as regarding the relationships between the integrators and suppliers within their industrial ecosystem.
The core vision of Hypersonia remains routine and mass horizontal take-off and horizontal landing (HTHL) flights. It is of reason that these makers will create this a reality. Bearing in mind that the principles of Military-Civilian Fusion (MCF) and Space-Stratospheric Fusion (SSF) give the power, purpose, and performance to Hypersonia.
State of Play
The airline industry is undergoing transformation forced by the pandemic crisis. Notable civilian aircraft manufacturers having burned through their cash reserves, are struggling to maintain steady productivity and production. Orders from airline operators have dwindled, even as these are retiring old and large wide-body aircrafts.
The retirement is accelerated by the pandemic. Pre-COVID-19, operators had strategically been moving from points-to-hubs business model towards points-to-points one. Such transition renders planes such as Boeing 747 or Airbus A380 obsolete. And opens doors for ultramodern and sleek planes such as Boeing 787 or 777x and A350.
The need for spacing to prevent viral transmission and to accommodate more passengers, calls for keeping the wide-body planes, though. Pressured by contracted cashflow from suppressed flights, airliners, however, have no other choice than to stem by reducing unnecessary maintenance and operational costs. This fiduciary duty accelerated obsolescence and strategic implementation.
Business models are key to progress. The success of Hypersonia depends on such operational and strategic developments. Civilian hypersonic aircrafts must be big for various commercial and technical viability reasons.
Rocket, ramjet and scramjet engines and their composites and fuel tanks, must be optimally big to power high speed flights. The bigness calls for integration into the airframe of the craft, hence the need for large planes. Commercial viability also calls for carrying many goods and passengers.
Even as airlines are retiring big subsonic aircrafts, Hypersonia will bring such size back. Not least because, high speed mass points-to-points flights are its mainstay. Even now, such aircrafts are finding use as conversions into cargo planes.
The US Airforce, for instance, is considering buying 747s and converting them into fearsome gunships and missile-slingers. Launching hypersonic cruise arrows from such planes are a viable use-case. With the main Airforce One still a 747, and the oncoming replacements same, the plane carrying Presidents will remain the flag-carrier of America’s technological ingenuity.
The topsy-turvy in the aerospace-aviation industrial complex, is a spur for innovation. Making hypersonic technologies offers a creative avenue for transforming the industries and improving economies, lives, and societies.
Pure plays – Airframe
The individual established and emerging airframe and engine manufacturers have the facilities and know-how to pivot. They can be integrators or suppliers. And are mostly horizontallers. Boeing and Airbus are established integrators. The former has expertise in making rocket-powered spacecrafts, this can be combined with its civilian aircraft-making know-how, and its knowledge of making fast military jets comes handy.
As integrators, same door opens for Business jets makers such as Bombardier and Embraer, but as a subsidiary of large integrators, such move may be hampered. Embraer, still negotiating its subsidiarity with Boeing, is demonstrating creative independence by touting an innovative flying car design concept in partnership with Uber. A balance must be found between the scale afforded by integration with a bigger partner, and the independence suitable for innovation, for these smaller companies to successfully pivot.
Lockheed Martin (LM) and Northrop Grumman (NG) are established fast military aircrafts manufacturers. These also have the know-how in making rocket-powered spacecrafts and missiles and jet-powered supersonic bombers and missiles. These, as military Airbus EADS, can pivot. And Dynetics Inc, a military hypersonic missile contractor, can consider building engines or airframe.
Rumours, of LM building a Mach 6+ military aircraft with airbreathing engines, gives a foot in the door to creating civilian airliners. And its experience building the modern info-centric 5th Generation F35 jet fighter, equips it for designing and tooling complex technology systems. NG has similar competence and experience building heavy bombers such as the established B2 and the emerging futuristic B21.
A Defence contractor such as General Dynamics (GD) noted for making naval submarines and ships has the hidden know-how to pivot. Its past merger and acquisition (M&A), absorbed an innovative airframe maker – Convair, an early active purveyor of scramjet-powered hypersonic designs. Such pivoting opens doors for submarine manufacturers in Britain (i.e. Babcock), and in other countries with the right strategy to develop in-house or acquire hypersonic expertise.
GD has another in-house asset. Its successful acquisition of Gulfstream the business jet company. Combining all these active and dormant competences together, gives GD a very firm ground to build on. Looking good for a company co-founded by, a genius – John Phillip Holland, the inventor of the first practical submarine boat and, an investor.
North America (NA) was a key part-builder of the spacecraft that first took humans to the moon. Convair and Rockwell International (RI), were leading contenders to build the DARPA-designed and NASA-sponsored experimental scramjet-powered hypersonic X-30 spaceplane/airliner. Both NA and RI are now part of Boeing.
Textron is an aerospace conglomerate – a verticaller with in-house expertise in airframe and engine developments. Combined expertise in making military jets, business jets, spacecrafts, and missiles, gives it competence for building civilian hypersonic airliners. Foregrounding reinvention as key to attaining Hypersonia, is pointing out that Textron transformed itself from weaving textiles into making planes. Its in-house engine maker – Lycoming Engines noted for its air-cooled motors started as a sewing machine making company founded by a woman. Air-cooling expertise comes useful in creating airbreathing hypersonic engines.
An emerging aircraft builder such as Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, still piloting Japan’s first mass civilian aircraft, can consider. This can tally with Japan’s investments into hypersonic (hypervelocity) missiles being made by its likes. Bearing in mind that HondaJet by Honda is a 7-8 – seater short flight business jet designed in Japan, but built in the US.
Established airframe manufacturers are integrators and horizontallers at the centre of the industrial ecosystem combining different components and parts into a whole. Such systems engineering expertise is vital to the emergence of other pure players.
Pure plays- Emergent
The emergent are either a lateraller or a verticaller and are not often integrators. The former making entry from an adjacent or a separate industry. The latter an organic entrant. Both making airframe and engines in-house. The mastery of digital technologies has enabled this sprouting.
Spacecraft makers – Sierra Nevada, Space X and Stratolaunch are verticallers; and Virgin Galactic is a lateraller, as its parent company an airline operator is pivoting into an adjacent space. All except one, are already strategizing for rocket powered Hypersonia. Sierra Nevada with its in-house rocketry expertise has yet to come out with a public statement in this regard. Notwithstanding, its know-how in making complex airframes and rocketry are assets, which can be leveraged in-house or in partnership to develop civilian hypersonic aircrafts.
Supersonic flight is different aerodynamically, system-wise, and technically from its hypersonic counterpart. However, opportunity abounds for emerging verticallers – US-based supersonic start-ups such Boom, Aerion Supersonic or Spike Aerospace to pivot. Such requires massive re-tooling and new investments into talents and technologies for success, though. And in the face of pandemic-induced financial challenges, such re-strategizing may be discouraged.
In some technical areas, hypersonic is easier than supersonic. For example, no need to deep-design for preventing sonic-boom, as a hypersonic craft powers directly into the stratosphere with limited lingering in the troposphere, except for landing and take-off. Also, expertise in designing and making rockets are now more extensive than for supersonic jet engines. Moreover, technically, a ramjet or scramjet is easier to design and develop than a jet engine. Because of having fewer parts. Even though, getting the right configuration and dimension of the air inlets of scramjets is always a problem waiting for the right solution.
The development of Hypersonia does not need a stepwise approach as in supersonic first, then hypersonic latter. They are both different. Companies are successfully making rocket-powered supersonic spacecrafts (ala Virgin Galactic), even when supersonic flight is still limited to occasional bursts of jet bombers or fighters. Ignorance or timidity must not delay action and progress.
The advances of supersonic makers, notwithstanding, are a learning canvas and curve. Boom, for instance, is demonstrating that using computational fluid dynamics, 3D printing, virtual simulations, Silicon Valley-style rapid prototyping enabled by big data analytics and artificial intelligence, quick progress can be made.
In the same way, digital tools are enabling Space X blossom, Boom is showing that the established and emergent can leverage existing hypersonic science and research to create prototypes. In under five years, Boom is having a subscale demonstrator XB-1, ready for test-flying in late 2020.
Emerging rocket-powered hypersonic start-ups are using such digital tools for making airframes and engines for spacecrafts. These can consider making hypersonic aeroplanes. Either the pure play or partnership model works for these emerging players either as an individual or a partner – as engines or airframe makers.
Pure play – Engines
The making of optimal and suitable hypersonic engines and their integration into airframe or wings, is the most complicated part of Hypersonia. Unlike airframers, engine manufacturers are verticallers – fabricating components and parts and making the wholesome in-house.
The usual business model is for engines creators to supply airframe manufacturers to integrate and create a plane. Industrial specialisation brought such delineation, but the same design and engineering skills can be used for making both engines and airframes. Pratt & Whitney was once a subsidiary of Boeing, for instance.
As will be discussed below, engine makers can enter various creating partnerships. Being pure play engine creator gives them a unique position in the ecosystem, however. Emerging British Reaction Engines – a verticaller is leading with its hydrogen-fuelled air-cooled airbreathing rocket engines. A case has been made in this series for it to be bold enough to build and integrate its airframe with its engines.
Established Pratt & Whitney (P&W), AerojetRocketdyne (AR), GE, Garrett AiResearch, Rolls Royce and Safran (France) as verticallers, have the expertise and experiences to create hypersonic engines. The former three – US-based companies have participated in various NASA, Airforce or DARPA sponsored hypersonic programmes in the past. These hidden skills can be revived as the markets are warming up to high speed flights.
P&W has working expertise in high speed jet engines and in making scramjet engines. AR has a working expertise in making throttleable rockets for powering missiles and spacecrafts. But has not reactivated its hidden skills in making ramjet and scramjet acquired from buying Marquardt Corporation.
GE with hypersonic Rotating Detonation Engines (RDE) scramjet variant, is a leading maker of jet engines for powering civilian aircrafts. Both GE and P&W have pole positions for making hypersonic engines. Roll Royce making do well its partnership with Reaction Engines, will join the fray.
Honeywell Aerospace with Garrett AiResearch a long-running jet engine creator, partly consists of the turboprop business of Textron’s Lycoming engines is in the fray. Garrett has experience developing scramjet demonstrators as part of the NASA-funded Hypersonic Research Engine (HRE) programme. This left it with a thriving hypersonic test facility, which other experimenters and creators can test their design at.
Safran has experience via its subsidiary SNECMA jointly with Rolls Royce, building the engines that powered the Concorde. Whilst, supersonic is different from hypersonic, such exposure comes handy. Especially when Safran is making the engines to power France’s proposed boost glide hypersonic missile. Most likely a scramjet variant on the glide vehicle.
The opportunity opens for other established aerospace or defence makers. Now, the best performing scramjet engine is made by a partnership between Northrop Grumman (NG) and Raytheon. The latter is a military avionics & electronics manufacturer, whose origin lies in making radars. NG’s acquisition of ATK Orbital gives it the scramjetry developed by GASL.
Raytheon’s pivot must enthuse the British BAE Systems, a global leader in military electronics and intelligence technologies, which can consider awakening its dormant hypersonic expertise. It is emerging that the Tempest – Britain 6th Generation jet fighter, will be powered by hypersonic engines developed in a partnership between Rolls Royce & Reaction Engines.
The pan-European alliance making Tempest, foregrounds a suitable partnership for pivoting to Hypersonia. Brexit does not preclude such transnational cooperation. The Anglo-Franco Concorde alliance was started before Britain joined the European Union. If such path is taken, this time around must be private sector led.
QinetiQ gives Britain another hypersonic sprout. It has a scramjet variant developed in partnership with the University of Queensland, Australian Centre for Hypersonics. Successfully tested under the HyShot programme. This Anglo-Aussie transnational alliance spawned other hypersonic Austral-American alliance programmes.
The university demonstrates the role academia play in high speed technology development. And it gives Australia the opportunity of creating spin-offs from the experiments and research programmes.
A good candidate for making hypersonic engines is Nammo, the joint Finnish-Norwegian military contractor, whose ramjets are being incorporated into American and NATO missiles. As verticallers, other state-owned companies are making rockets, ramjets, and scramjets. But none seems closer to the market than the aforementioned.
Startupship opens doors for new entrants – verticallers. These bring in novel thinking into the ecosystem. There are now a crew of these making rocket engines for powering space-bound crafts from Australia, UK, and US. These can consider making hypersonic aeroplanes. Blue Origin with its unique LNG-powered rockets can consider, but has yet to come out with a public statement as pivoting to civilian hypersonic flights.
There is an emerging handful of start-ups eyeing the civilian hypersonic market. The two I am tracking, started with making and test-firing engines. One is an integrator – horizontaller, acquiring components from suppliers and making a whole. The other – a verticaller is making from scratch using moulding and 3D printing. It is still early days for the handful. As it is unclear whether the engines will power airframes, made in-house, subcontracted to a partner, or made in a joint venture. As emerging engine makers, though, these will join the established ones.
Startupship flourishes in Hypersonia. The entry into the fray as either a pure play engine or airframer is not that steep. A designer or fabricator making a bit or part of the either, can climb up the ladder.
Jack Northrop, the founder of Northrop now part of Northrop Grumman (NG), entry into the aerospace industry was designing innovative flying wings incorporated into making jet fighters and bombers. From there, the company grew and became an established industry player. This, the present-day company is doing either in pure play or in partnership.
Partnerships
The imperative of having an integrated airframe-engine hypersonic design bolsters the need for partnerships. This is core to the business models.
This sort of partnership will happen between the established and emergent; horizontallers and verticallers or laterallers; and between start-ups and big companies. And even within each group. As jet engine makers, GE and Safran have a Franco-American alliance in place. Rolls Royce is in partnership with Reaction Engines. Boeing in partnership with the latter.
The partnership between NG and Raytheon in making the best performing scramjet engine in the world is totemic of the benefits of collaboration. Both bringing in different and various expertise which are being integrated. It is not far-reaching that their partnership will result in creating a hypersonic aircraft. Combining their airframe and engine making knowledge together.
NG is in an interesting position as both a horizontaller and a verticaller with in-house airframe and hypersonic engines expertise. Individually or in partnership with Raytheon or others, puts it at a pole position making Hypersonia.
The current economic environment, conditions M&A activities. So, expect the possible joining up of the different entities as alliances, corporations, subsidiaries, or joint ventures. These happen within national and global ecosystems.
The telling partnerships are the ones led by outsiders – laterallers. The Digital Corporations such as Apple, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, and others with their massive in-house digital expertise and to some extent hardware making skills can pivot. Not far-fetched. All have massive financial capability to transform a struggling aerospace-aviation industrial complex.
Apple once touted making electric cars and launching its own communication satellites. As a lodestar systems and technology integrator, making its smartphones and tablets gives the expertise in enacting DigiMech. Combining its software coding with its hardware making for creating Hypersonia.
Google is a niche maker of smartphones, and in the past has acquired robotic and satellite companies, which it has since been demerged, out of markets pressure to boost its stock price. Such subclinical impatience with technology incubation, may prevent experimentation with hypersonics. Notwithstanding its emerging success with Google Loon – stratospheric internet-beaming balloons and Waymo – the driverless car subsidiary.
Google, nonetheless, with the desire to make a huge difference in an emerging field, can enable its innovative labs such as Google X and hardware-centric Advanced Technology & Projects, to have a go. Their innovative concepts or designs made with contractors as Google’s Smartphones. Or made in partnership with aerospace emergent or established.
Microsoft has a rich history of making hardware bundling its software with partners’ devices. Its laptops, PCs, tablets, and X-Boxes making, demonstrates a successful expertise in DigiMech. Skills working with Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) such as Dell and HP, come handy in pivoting to Hypersonia. As an integrated OEM, Samsung, a South Korean conglomerate, if finances permit, stands a good stead of making an entry.
Facebook has not built a sound track record with hardware making. Its foray into smartphone making was not successful, but a video-conferencing device is in the pipeline, though. Moreover, its continued efforts in launching satellites and perfecting Oculus virtual reality headsets, is adventuresome. Such trait is an asset for pivoting. Its in-house labs can design concepts and build in the way its headsets are being made. Or acquire a hypersonic company, in the way it did with its unsuccessful acquisition of Ascenta, the British drone company. Better still, partner with an emergent or established.
Amazon is the one with the best reason to pivot. Its global logistics arm pilots planes and vehicles for distributing its merchandise. It recently invested in Rivian an emerging electric truck manufacturer, and has successfully demonstrated expertise in hardware development with the viral Kindle readers and Echo smart speakers. Moreover, it has built a world-leading robotic-warehousing system and technologies for its massive barns. This expertise buoys its credentials for Hypersonia.
The need for Amazon as an aspiring global courier, to deliver goods on time around the world, conditions it to emerge as a maker of hypersonic cargo freighters. It already has the templates of doing such. Either in-house, by acquisition or in partnership. Or by its founder.
Founders
The founders of Digital Corporations have pet projects. This opens another avenue for supporting Hypersonia. Blue Origin, the rocket-powered spacecraft company is a personal project of Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon. As a separate company or in combination with Amazon, Jeff has a seed in building hypersonic aircrafts for couriering or for ferrying passengers around the world.
Larry Page of Google has amassed a motley crew of flying car projects under his company Kitty Hawk. And with Wisk, a joint-venture with Boeing, marketable aero-car services and technologies are being developed.
Sergei Brin, the co-founder of Google has indulged in gadgetry. Making a giant blimp at a Google owned hangar. Building the biggest airship in the world costing about $US 150 million, is an adventurism suitable for making Hypersonia.
The founders, as Paul Allen did with launching Stratolaunch, stand to contribute to kickstarting a transformative business and industry. Petry is not enough to launch an industry, but the efforts of adventurous founders and entrepreneurs can in partnerships snowball into an emergent. Even making investments into hypersonic start-ups is catalytic. So will be the industry or investment of many Digital Corporations.
This is a DigiMech transition and transformation. Blake Scholl, the co-founder of Boom, for instance, pivoted from making mobile apps into making supersonic aircrafts. Bringing his acquired digital skills to bear.
DigiMech
The affordability and utility of digital technologies, open doors for adjacent or orthogonal designs and engineering skills. Especially by automobile, drone, flying cars and train builders, as either laterallers, verticallers or horizontallers, with experience designing and fabricating materials and matter.
Automobile companies are the proximate adjacent to pivot. A reverse reinvention can be learned from how Bristol Motors arose by transforming from being an aircraft company into an automobile one. Making iconic Grand Tourers named after its defunct fighters and bombers. Honda, an automobile company created a novel single piloted business jet.
Ball Corporation is noted for making glass jars and its cans carry Coke and Pepsi Cola around the world. Its strategic pivot resulted in creating Ball Aerospace & Technologies, a company founded after it won a subcontract to develop a controller for an early spacecraft. This led to building whole spacecrafts, and has since become a maker and supplier to the vast American aerospace ecosystem.
Partnership is key to making Hypersonia happen. Coming from amongst, between and within industries and sectors, such collaborations will drive progress and bring success. 3D companies, contract manufacturers, metallurgists, fabricators, and others are players in such partnerships.
Banks, investment firms, venture capitalists, lease operators are also partners. And in collaboration with the emergent and established stand to create Hypersonia. Looming large in all partnerships is airline operators, especially those with global operation and reach. Sensibly, this seems not the time to ask operators to partner in making radical aircrafts. Making the future rather than maintaining the present is, however, the right way forward.
Matter and Metaphor
The making of routine HTHL flights as the mainstay of future global travel is the matter of Hypersonia. It is also a metaphor for creativity, growth, innovation, radicalism, productivity, and reinvention. The emergent and established business models will deliver the matter and metaphor.
Hypersonia is a radical innovation. Innovation occurs in bursts and steps. Writing this piece is an example. I started jotting down my thoughts about the different nature of the possible business models for making hypersonic aircrafts over the last two months. These came in bursts of inspiration and revelation. The writing itself is in steps – sketching out the outline and then add the contents and fine-tune the flow and structure to ensure clarity comprehension. Progress takes similar dynamics and trajectory.
My journey with Hypersonia started in 2013. I listened to a wonderful presentation by an executive of Reaction Engines about its then conceptual SABRE (the airbreathing engine) at the Institute of Mechanical Engineers in London. Prior to that moment, the engine was an idea. Afterwards, funding came from various private and public sources, and the idea has since turned into an invention with the creation of the pivotal heat exchanger. Waiting to become a commercial product flying people around the world. Showing progress in bursts and steps.
The current aerospace-aviation complex is made up of established companies driven by efficiency. Hence, the staidness in terms of lack of new platforms of flights. Incremental tinkering of multi-decadal platforms predominates pre-pandemic. Crisis in the complex calls for a radical reinvention and rethink.
Radicalism brings multiplicity and variance. Hypersonia will produce new entrants offering different configurations and solutions. The old will reinvent either by in-house sprouting or by acquiring or partnering. The new and the old will combine to further multiplicity and variance.
Startupship is the bearer of radicalism. Sprouting enables different solutions catering for various markets and needs. Multiplicity and variance in scramjet engine developments, are exciting.
London-based HyperTech via its subsidiary – SonicBlue is promising to develop a hypersonic scramjet engine variant – the mouthful Hypersonic Superconducting Combustion Ram Accelerated Magnetohydrodynamic Drive, capable of a Mach 6+flight. Which is slated to power the intentionally limited Mach 3.5 business jet – SonicStar. Even though there has been no news on its progress since 2016, it is a sign of sprouting.
Old companies can start-up. The story of QinetiQ by transforming from a government owned laboratory to a modern high-tech company is illustrative. Reading The QinetiQ Question: A Public Scandal or a National Triumph by John Chisholm helped in appreciating such transformation. Which indeed is a British success story. With its in-house scramjet engine variant, it stands to further such narrative.
Growth and productivity the outcomes of radicalism will undergird socio-economic renewal.
God Bless. Jesus Cares.
