Startup Venus Aerospace wants to take that to another level entirely by creating a passenger aircraft that can go not Mach 1, Mach 2… but Mach 9 — or over 6,900 miles per hour.
The fastest manned airplane in history remains the Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird, with a top speed of over Mach 3 — and that was only designed to carry two pilots. Venus Aerospace wants its plane to ferry a dozen passengers, plus crew.
To circumvent that, Venus is making use of an experimental form of propulsion driven by what’s known as a rotating detonation rocket engine (RDRE), a design that NASA has also been flirting with.
In a conventional rocket engine, thrust is generated through the combustion of propellant and an oxidizer that’s burned inside a chamber.
An RDRE, on the other hand, creates a continuing series of controlled detonations around a circular, or annular, channel. Designing such an engine isn’t easy, but the payoff is worth it, producing more thrust with less fuel.
Ars notes that tests have generally found RDEs to be about ten percent more fuel efficient than conventional rockets — an increase that’s small percentage-wise, but big in terms of practical impact.
“It allows us to truly build a vehicle that is like an airplane,” Andrew Duggleby told Ars.
