Alice Cruz (7:33)

Yes I do. Thanks Maria. You can always find links to further reading on all the stories Maria mentions in the show in the Selected Reading section of our show notes and@space.n2k.com you just need to click on this episode title. We also include extra stories that don't make the headlines. Today we have an announcement from Aegis Aerospace and Texas A and M, who are collaborating on a new flight facility on the ISS and another on a new appointment at Rivada.

Maria Varmazes (8:00)

Thank you for that Alice. Hi T Minus crew. If you would like daily updates from us directly in your LinkedIn feed, be sure to follow the official N2K T minus page over on LinkedIn. And if you're more interested in the lighter side of what we do here we are at T Minus Daily on Instagram and that is where we post videos and pictures from events, excursions, and even some behind the scenes treats for you. And links are in the Show Notes. Hope you will join us there.

Dave (8:39)

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Maria Varmazes (9:21)

And we're bringing you more of our chats from Spacecom 2025 this week and today we have Mark Russell and he's the CEO at General Hypersonics, and Mark's working on a new launch system and I asked him where the idea for his pipeline to space came from.

Mark Russell (9:39)

After working for Blue Origin, I had this idea actually even before working for Blue Origin, that you could launch what we call impulse impulsively, meaning you don't have to carry all the fuel that the rocket has to, you know, create a velocity which then puts you into orbit. You could carry a lot less if you exited or left Earth with Velocity. So not a gun. This thing is called a ram accelerator and it's a tubular structure that fits underground. It looks like drill pipe.

Maria Varmazes (10:10)

Yep.

Mark Russell (10:11)

And it is a ramjet in the ground and the sidewalls of this steel tube. And the sharp nose projectile flies through compressed air and natural gas. In doing so, it sets up a shock wave. And it rides through this wave in the tube like a surfer riding a wave in the ocean. And it exits at velocities that are helpful in getting you off the planet. And then you put a small engine into. Into your second stage and that gets you into orbit.

Maria Varmazes (10:42)

That's. It's. The idea makes a lot of sense when you describe it. It's like. It feels very intuitive. And my brain goes, why have we never tried something like this before? This is so cool.

Mark Russell (10:52)

Because it's rocket science.

Maria Varmazes (10:53)

Yeah. Because it's literally rocket science. It's really hard.

Dave (10:55)

That's why.

Mark Russell (10:56)

Yeah.

Dave (10:56)

No.

Mark Russell (10:56)

There's a group out of the University of Washington in Seattle and I went and visited when I was 19. They had this tubular thing. It was all steel. A bunch of sharp projectiles. Looked nothing like aerospace. Who knew that 20 some years later I'd come back and I funded the lab.

Maria Varmazes (11:10)

It stayed in there. It just percolated for a bit.

Mark Russell (11:13)

A ramjet is the simplest jet engine. You don't need any moving parts, except in our case, the projectile. And that's what's different about it. It makes it super easy to leave all that energy on the ground. You travel through it and this fairing then comes out at high speed and then releases a payload into the upper atmosphere, which then turns on a second stage engine and we go. But yeah, it's taken years for us to master the technology. And yeah, after leaving Blue Origin, I started actually drilling deep holes for mining exploration. My whole family. Third generation miner. So I went back to the family business to figure out all these things I needed to learn in order to start what's now rig launch.

Maria Varmazes (11:58)

You had to. You had to dig down to go way up.

Mark Russell (11:59)

You had to go down to go up. That's right. It's visionary.

Maria Varmazes (12:03)

It's really poetic.

Mark Russell (12:04)

A big leap for me, honestly.

Maria Varmazes (12:06)

I love that. So you were showing me some really cool videos of like the development work that you all have been doing. Tell me a bit about what you've been doing to actually like to bring this to bear.

Mark Russell (12:15)

Sure. So we started small. We actually built the very smallest version of this. Was half an inch in diameter. And we called it Tabletop Ram Accelerator. So when working For Jeff Bezos, we always had these thought experiments. What could you do kind of simply. And that was the next thing after your thought experience. How could you prove it? And so the University of Washington got them under contract. They taught us how it would work. And then we started making our own systems. And we went from very small, and then we grew it to something that was about 4 inches in diameter, and then grew it up. And we got a NASA contract, a small one, to do some research. And we went down to Spaceport America with a water well rig and something's about 20 inches in diameter and about 9ft tall. And that was our first kind of impulsive test out of the ground. And then we've gone back and refined that. There's some really new breakthrough that we had at both the university and in our labs that allowed us to do something pretty amazing with the tech. It simplified everything. I can't tell you all about.

Maria Varmazes (13:24)

Can you tell me anything about that?

Mark Russell (13:26)

And what, even a sprinkle of it. Heavier projectiles, meaning the ones that need to carry things into space, are now very possible with this tech.

Maria Varmazes (13:34)

Wow.

Mark Russell (13:34)

Early on, they tested very light projectiles and had a lot of parts to it. We simplified it all, and now we're testing horizontally every single day in Washington State, running these systems horizontally. And this year, we're looking to take that now into the ground again and launch all the way to the Karman Line.

Maria Varmazes (13:53)

Wow.

Mark Russell (13:53)

And do it again and again and again. Set a world's record. That's actually what we're trying to do this year. It's pretty simple to start with. I mean, in the future, it'll be larger systems that carry those bigger pipes. So right now, a simple water well rig, you literally just show up, drill a small, you know, short hole, and now you have this distance, and it's a couple hundred feet long, and you can carry small projectiles. But they would reach the Karman line on impulsive flight alone.

Maria Varmazes (14:21)

So what would be the. I'm gonna say, like, the reload time. How quickly could you go, you think? In theory, this could go pretty quickly, like one after the other.

Mark Russell (14:32)

So we can launch with our system horizontally every 90 seconds. It is a radical different cost and timing for what we call hypersonic flight. Now, I'll tell you a little bit about.

Maria Varmazes (14:45)

Please. Yeah, we should get hypersonics, please. Yeah.

Mark Russell (14:48)

So when I formed this, we actually have two companies. One company is called Hypersciences, and the other company is called Pipeline to Space, which I thought was pretty simple. You know, it's A pipeline that takes you to space. But Hypersciences was all about developing the core technology. With the University of Washington in our own labs, Hypersciences got funded by Shell and Exxon and some very large mining companies because we found that you could kinetically impact rock, drill for geothermal energy very quickly, as well as tunnel bore quickly. So we got very good at this at a scale about the size of a banana, if you will. We were launching things that were iron and concrete into Rock at Mach 4. And that means that you could carry all that energy, break the rock really efficiently. Wow. DARPA tested this in the 1970s with a howitzer. And we found that if we could get funded to build something that was good for Earth first, it would actually teach us everything we needed to know. And it worked. We actually are under contract. We tunnel bore, we drill, and then pipeline to space and Hyperscience got together and created general Hypersonics, which does rig launch. That's how these two companies have come together.

Dave (16:04)

Yeah.

Mark Russell (16:05)

Hypersonics.

Maria Varmazes (16:06)

Yeah. Yeah.

Mark Russell (16:07)

We should probably chat a little bit about what that means.

Maria Varmazes (16:09)

Yeah. Because it's something that very hot word in our world. And. Yeah. I wanted to hear you kind of walk me through that one, if you don't mind.

Mark Russell (16:17)

Yeah. It's now becoming sort of an everyday household term. Oh. You know, the US Is getting behind in hypersonics, and generally supersonic means you're going one or more times the speed of sound. So if you're in a jet aircraft and you're flying along around 30,000ft, you're very close to Mach 1. You're at about Mach 0.98 or so. Any faster drag rises, and then you get a sonic boom below you and around you. However, when you go above the speed of sound substantially, the drag actually drops. You actually have a much easier time getting through. But it getting through that barrier, you know, the old sound barrier.

Maria Varmazes (17:04)

Yep.

Mark Russell (17:04)

Well, hypersonic means you're going five times the speed of sound. So in, you know, meters per second, speed of sound is 343 meters per second. So at Mach 5, we're doing 1750 meters per second. It's. It's fast. It's like, you know, thousands of miles per hour. And when you go that fast, a lot of amazing things happen. In the industrial side, when you impact things, everything looks like a liquid for a moment. It's. It's in. It goes hydroelastic. And that's why you get such efficient rock breaking. And because we started testing this in my grandfather's old mine, Tunnel. We wanted to be super safe, but we also found out holy cow, this is like Velcro and Tang for NASA. We finally found something. We just pay the bills while we learned. So that was kind of, that's awesome fun way to do it. So hypersonic is bringing all that energy with you. So what rig launch does is it has a much bigger system, half meter meter and larger and encapsulate your satellite and you put it in a tube and you bring it out at these high velocities. Then you don't have to have this big rocket engine. So we get rid of that big first stage booster and that velocity carries you right to the edge of space. And then you put that rocket engine on.

Maria Varmazes (18:29)

Does it allow larger, you know, larger payloads for the rocket? Is that, is that what you're sort of imagining long term you get large?

Mark Russell (18:34)

I would say large. I think heavy lift is still going to be the domain of, you know, the space Xs and the blue origins and the NASA's for a while. But we're talking about being able to put up significant payloads every few minutes. So the aggregate number of kilograms to orbit could actually be quite large with ours. In fact larger than the heavy lift over time. So think about this. If you wanted to ship a next day envelope, you put it on FedEx or carrier DHL. You don't put it on a cargo ship. And that's really the problem with big rockets today is it takes months to years of integration and a lot of complex engineering to get that thing even if you're riding as a ride share. So all the small satellites are just waiting. There is literally a line out the door. There sure is for responsive space. And that's what we bring to the equation is not just one rig. We're looking at these waterborne platforms, drill called drill rig platforms. And we have them everywhere around the planet. You can any orbit anytime. So it's a fulfillment center.

Maria Varmazes (19:45)

If it makes that makes a lot of sense.

Mark Russell (19:47)

That is what we're looking for. Filament centers everywhere to reach orbit.

Maria Varmazes (20:05)

We'll be right back.

Dave (20:12)

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Maria Varmazes (21:33)

Since Valentine's Day last year, ESA's Euclid telescope has been on a mission. A little love letter to the cosmos, if you will. It's been working on creating a 3D map of the known universe as it investigates what parts, gravity and dark energy and dark matter have all played in the formation of the aforementioned universe. Know NBD Gravitational lensing is one of the many phenomena that Euclid is keeping an eye out for. And that is when light from a distant galaxy gets all squashed and stretched by the supermassive gravity of a galaxy that is closer to us. It makes those smear like light streaks that you might remember from Hubble or Webb images. And those gravitational lenses also allow us to see extremely distant objects that we wouldn't normally be able to see. That distortion of space time is like a handy shortcut for us. And when the lens hits your eye like a big pizza pie, that's an Einstein ring. Sorry, Dean Martin. If you happen to look at the right galaxy at the right alignment, and it happens to be lensing something else, you may just see what looks like a halo instead of a smear or a swoop of a gravitationally lensed distant galaxy. And that ring is called an Einstein Ring. It's both very rare and very scientifically useful. And Euclid has spotted such a ring by looking at Galaxy NGC 6505, which is a mere 590 million light years from us, practically next door. But the galaxy that, to our view is forming, the ring around NGC 6505 is both unnamed and unknown, and it is 4.42 billion light years away. Exciting and beautiful. The best combination. And that's it for February 10, 2025. Brought to you by N2K CyberWire. For additional resources from today's report, check out our show notes@spare.n2k.com we'd love to know what you think of this podcast. Your feedback ensures we deliver the insights that keep you a step ahead in the rapidly changing space industry. If you like the show, please share a rating and review in your podcast app. Also, please fill out the survey in the show notes or send an email to space2k.com we're privileged that N2K CyberWire is part of the daily routine of the most influential leaders and operators in the public and private sector. From the Fortune 500 to many of the world's preeminent intelligence and law enforcement agencies, N2K makes it easy for companies to optimize your biggest investment your people. We make you smarter about your teams while making your teams smarter. Learn how@n2k.com N2K's senior producer is Alice Carruth. Our producer is Liz Stokes. We're mixed by Elliot Peltzman and Trey Hester with original music by Elliot Peltzman. Our executive producer is Jennifer Ibin. Peter Kilpe is our publisher and I am your host, Maria Varmazes. Thanks for listening. We'll see you tomorrow.

Mark Russell (24:40)

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