Venus Aerospace is building a detonation ramjet engine. It's a unique design: one engine to go from Mach 0 to Mach 6, with a rotating-detonation rocket engine upstream and a ramjet downstream. The rocket starts the flight, and the ramjet brings the specific impulse you need for commercial air... travel. I invited Venus CTO Andrew Duggleby to the Astranis office to talk about how it works, what he's already demonstrated (a lot!), and what is left between Venus Aerospace and hypersonic flight. Timestamps: 0:00:00 — Introducing the detonation ramjet 0:04:27 — How rockets can be more efficient than turbofans 0:09:10 — Riding up the ISP curve with a ramjet 0:13:07 — What has Venus built so far? 0:22:40 — The driving constraint: heat 0:25:17 — Is this too hard to model with CFD tools? 0:30:52 — How did you prove to yourself this could work? 0:33:09 — How does this approach differ from other super/hypersonic jets? 0:38:30 — How is the government supporting hypersonic development? 0:40:36 — Was a Twitter commenter correct to roast my earlier video on ramjets? 0:45:20 — Why not just use normal rockets for point-to-point transportation? 0:47:50 — How does this engine work for takeoff and landing? 0:51:15 — "If I could add a new regulation..." 0:55:30 — "Hypersonics is the speed at which heat kicks your ass" 0:58:31 — What's the next big technical demo?show more

Ohhhh how the world turns. Now we both do hypersonics....

hahaha amazing! Did you take any classes with him?

If you believe detonative propulsion will magically gain you an extra 30% in specific impulse, I have a bridge in Brooklyn that might interest you.

We talk about it in the episode at length, don't worry — they're not blindly assuming 30% greater efficiency. Around 40m mark

How much of a % efficiency increase does an RDE combustor give over a, much easier but still difficult, conventional ram jet with subsolic combustion? (Since those also top out ~M=6 due to pressure losses) Feels like an excuse to try for flight testing an RDE bragging rights

If you're asking "why not regular rocket instead of RDRE" the answer is mixing, I think. We talk in the episode about how the shorter "tail" of an RDRE is a feature here. If you're asking "why not just a ramjet," we also talk about that, you have to accelerate to ram speed somehow and they think there's mass/efficiency gains from a rocket rather than a turbofan

yeah see unfortunately I was already sold by the words "detonation" and "ramjet" so the rest is unnecessary

Hahaha one hour of your life saved! But don't you want to know how it works?

I love to see this. I'm rooting for @VenusAerospace

RDE are amazing. @sduggleby and Andrew are building a game changing company. Go @VenusAerospace - can’t wait to see it fly!