Y-Combinator Backed Startup Making BREAKTHROUGH Super-Efficient Mach 6 Jet Engine

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Electric motors are finally getting good enough in performance to capture efficiency gains from having a second turbine drive an adaptive cycle jet engine. This new jet engine will enable commercial flights anywhere in the world 3x faster than anything today for the same price.

16 thoughts on “Y-Combinator Backed Startup Making BREAKTHROUGH Super-Efficient Mach 6 Jet Engine”

  3. Sabre engine tried to be a rocket as well as everything else. This is just a jet that still needs a rocket to get to space. The main claim is max efficiency at all jet speeds.

    • Last April, their CEO said the vision for Sabre is now 2 stages to orbit, rather than the original SSTO. So the Sabre engine will only fly up to the upper atmosphere, launch a non-reusable rocket, then fly back down and land.

      So it sounds like they are no longer thinking about a single engine that is both air breathing and a rocket.

      You can google the article named “On the record with Mark Thomas, CEO, Reaction Engines”.

  4. Have you bought airline tickets lately? We don’t need three times faster at the same cost.

    We need three times cheaper at the same speed.

    • What you say is the voice of practical reason (OMG!) But practical reason is just not as sexy as “faster, faster’… Your right, of course (IMO). I just wonder if anyone will listen.

    • It is easy to make at least national flights two or three times faster — eliminate the “arrive 4 hours before departure” insanity, and suddenly your two-hour flight becomes a two-hour flight, not a six-hour flight. Basically, make it the way it was 50 years ago, they way it was meant to be by the people who created Boeing-747 and the entire civil aviation for the masses, by undoing “the work” of their children. Still, a Mach 6 jet is more likely to show up in the local airport, than that.

  5. The electric turbofan is not a thruster, it is a modulator of air flow. Do not refer to it as an “electric jet.” The engine is the total package, operating in three modes. The electric turbofan is one component of the engine, like a transmission is one part of a race car engine.

    Electricity is a small part of the energy equation here.

    Thrust and electricity come from burning chemical fuel. Always follow the first principles.

    Generating electricity from a rotating turbine is child’s play.

  6. If it works at all, it’ll be a decade or two before systems are approved for civilian passenger operations.

    Where’s the military contract?

  7. those tweets talk about orbits.

    Can´t you skip them all together? You don´t need to achieve orbits to go from point to point.

    Mach 6 is good enough. Do several suborbital hops on your way around the world to take advantage of the lower drag… like go to mach 6 and then as high as possible, turn off engines… travel 500km in low drag ultra high altitude until you lose altitude enough to turn on engines again. Repeat

    • “The Gotcha…” is altitude. While there is very little (technically) involved with going “higher, faster, faster, higher” so to say, there is a whole lot (technically) involved with making a commercial aircraft fail-worthy.

      Little failures like cabin depressurization (which really isn’t a “little” failure if you’re up at 40,000 feet, but is at least survivable when the pilots dive to under 20,000 feet right quick and the oxygen doohickeys drop down and are used) become unavoidably lethal at 70,000 to 100,000 feet.

      Sure, you can “dive like crazy”, flipping upside down in a downward roll under full power, screaming earthward at Mach 4. All of it automatic, by computer control. And then pull out equally ridiculously at 30,000 feet or so, all in a matter of some seconds.

      In the meantime though, ¾ of the passengers will go unconscious. Those flimsy yellow oxygen cups won’t be attached right, all hêll will be breaking loose in the cabin, and the handful of woozy attendants won’t be helpful getting the passengers back into good working order.

      For the supersonic industry, this is a shît-show. No one would ever fly again. The Von Hindenburg moment. Ooooops … those Boeing door engineers did it again. It just flew off! Wasn’t our fault!

      See … at least with the Science Fiction prospect afforded by one of Lord Musk’s great Roman Candle rockets, herding a hundred passengers, each safely enclosed in a personal low-bulk “safety” space suit, that would be OK… The depressurization event would have everyone suddenly puffed up like the proverbial Pillsbury Dough Boy (https:\\cereal.fandom.com\wiki\Pillsbury_Doughboy) (repl \ with slash) and even laughing the whole time.

      But an open cabin airplane, in the lethalsphere?

      I don’t think so. No matter how much glib rhetoric is pasted over the whole thing. Doesn’t pass the most basic sniff test. Death … stinks, as a marketing problem.

      • Not to mention the fact that the air used by the passengers in a normal plane is not stored on board but is coming from OUTSIDE, as it is compressed by the airplane engine’s upper stage and sent to the cabin.
        If you fly in space, you need oxygen supply and life support for hundreds of passengers

  8. This is Next Big Future, where — almost by definition — all sorts of stuff, some good, some not, some ridiculous, some solid-as-a-rock comes across Mr. Brian’s article mix, every day. May the gods bless him, for it sure is interesting reading.

    The magic beans jet engine motor seems to be pretty far-fetched. My Bûllshít Meter™ was wiggling higher and higher as I leafed through the panels … and left me wondering why it wiggled so. Then — here at 3:30 AM — I ‘got it’.

    Frankenjet Graphics.

    Literally, much of the above graphics is cut out of magazine articles I read back in the 1970s and 1980s. For instance, the graph of various jet-engine propulsive efficiencies versus airframe Mach number, is straight from 1975 or thereabouts. Maybe even earlier. The ACTUAL graphic seems cut-and-pasted directly, barely (if at all) modified from the original. Xerox’ed …

    The same can be said of the colored infographic showing turbofan, turbojet, ramjet performance curves. Lifted straight out of an article WAY back. At least 25 years old. A quick inspection just of the superficial graphic shows strange whited-out segments of the otherwise continuous curve, with obvious text-on-white overlays. Frankengraphics.

    Then there’s the infographic about various kinds of motors, efficiencies, magnetic energies. And what pray are we to take of it? There hardly seems to be a criterion-of-magic limit (strangely missing) upon the graph. Just more, better, evolution over time. What criteria were previously limiting, and now are not?

    Amongst the triggers that push my Bûllshít Meter™ needle higher are also the grand-bland handwaving statements — that not unlike the grandiloquence of The King’s massive Cod Piece — promising marvelous achievement and uncanny prowess. Its money in the bank, according to the court jester. Invest early, and realize princely gains!!!
    ________________________________________

    However, the characteristic that totally pegs my Bûllshít Meter™ is endless repeating of Enormous Promise, Overcoming Everything that Held Us Back, Revolutionizing Air Travel and Finally Taking On The Big Aeroplane Companies … by (and my meter has smoke coming out), by generating prodigious Free Cash (hey, their graphic) and heavily re-investing it, as its free, right? into building ever greater generations of magic bean thrusters.

    Sigh… its so predictable.

    Magic beans.

    Rossi had a great steaming heap of ’em.
    The Machs Thruster people, a tidy pile.
    Quantum Supremacy, bags o’ beans.
    Cold Fusion, a whole magic bean industry makin’ em.
    Hot fusion, beans, beans, beans.

    I’m tired of magic beans.

    At least with Jack and his bag o’ beans, there was an enormous beanstalk to climb. There doesn’t seem to be much of a beanstalk in these beany prospects. Oh, the potential is there. The BILLIONS (and soon to be TRILLIONS) of potential, for sure. But a real revolution? Beans. Only beans. And recycled graphics. And lots of words, and very enthusiastic acolytes. Drinking the bean juice, baby. Lapping it up.
    ________________________________________

    None-the-less, who knows?

    The protagonists have enough Chutzpah to convince the slavering armies of medium-level investors to pony up more millions to develop the thing. And, should it turn out that reinventing the SABRE engine goes well (which it really seems to be, all the frankengraphics notwithstanding), well … the SABRE engine was a darn good one. If a half dozen of them can be lashed to a large airframe to take a full-on rocket up to the stratosphere and let it go on at Mach 4+ … that’d be an achievement.

    Would it give SpaceX a run for the money? Hmmm… I’m not so bowled over by it.

    It seems logical enough (in a way), just to consider really large versions of the SABRE engine to be strap-ons to the SpaceX rockets at launch. No stupid wings. Just engines. Engines and fuel tanks. Doubling or tripling the thrust from take-off up to say “the stratosphere” would be darn helpful. MUCH larger payloads possible. That would make an economic argument worth investing in. It surely would impact the $/kg (delivered to LEO) cost.

    But I really think the recycled frankengraphics, the 1960s space-plane graphics (how quaint!) has to go. Spiff these images up to 2025 AI-generated standards, boys and girls. It is really not that hard any more. Even on a shoestring budget.

    ⋅-⋅-⋅ Just saying, ⋅-⋅-⋅
    ⋅-=≡ GoatGuy ✓ ≡=-⋅

  9. It is not clear (at least to me) how they will power the electric motor.
    1) If you use a battery, it is not only the weight of the extra turbine that has to be taken into account but the weight of the battery, too (which will always weigh more than a tank).
    2) If you use a generator you need to take into account the extra weight of the generator (and fuel) to run it.

  10. Turbo fan is electric, engine is burning fuel, not converting propellant into plasma and accelerating it with electro-magnetic field.
    Didn’t they just re-invented SABRE engine? Then, they’ll have the same challenge to cool it down at ramjets velocities.

    • It’s an Air Turboramjet (also known as an Air Turborocket) engine. Super simple really. Give it a wiki lookup. They just used an electric motor, which I think isn’t the best choice, and then have it go through an areospike cone vs straight out. The advantage is they can, at height, pump in oxygen and have a full rocket in the same component.

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