The Hermeus Podcast

The Hermeus Podcast

By HermeusTechnology
Download on the App Store

The Hermeus Podcast episodes

  • Live from Spaceport: The Road to First Flight

    The Hermeus Podcast is BACK with a special Spaceport Edition, filmed outside the hangar at Spaceport America in New Mexico.

    In the middle of our ground testing campaign for Quarterhorse Mk 2.1, AJ Piplica and Zach Shore sit down with members of the crew team to reflect on the road to first flight, what’s changed since the company's last flight, and what it takes to bring a high-speed aircraft from concept to flight line — in less than a year.

    Joined by Mike Gilliland, Marcus Spanolios, and Andrew Neal, the team shares an inside look at the rigor, complexity, and teamwork required to build, test and ultimately fly a high-Mach aircraft.

    39 min
  • Hermeus in LA

    Our LA office is growing! It’s home to a lot of our hardcore engineering work as well as smaller, highly complex component and subassembly builds.

    Listen in as Daniel Budenstein, Neel Dutta, Francis Moscal, and Tatum Hardy discuss what it's like to work at our LA office and how it compares to HQ back in Atlanta.
    00:00 - 03:10 - Welcome to the LA Office
    03:10 - 08:01 - LA office vs. Atlanta office: key differences
    08:01 - 09:28 - A Day in the LA Office
    09:28 - 21:40 - Hermeus vs. other aerospace companies: what sets Hermeus apart
    21:40 - 34:16 - Segment: This or That?
    34:16 - Hermeus frequently asked questions

    41 min
  • Special Guest: Art 'Turbo' Tomassetti

    Test pilot Art "Turbo" Tomassetti was one of only a handful of pilots to fly the X-35 – which was of course, the precursor to the F-35. Famously, he flew "Mission X" which consisted of a short takeoff, level supersonic flight, and a vertical landing, which had not been accomplished before in a single flight. Turbo shares this story and more with members of the Hermeus Flight Test team.

    00:00 – Introductions
    02:47 – Difference between test pilots and pilots
    08:17 – The allure of X-planes and first flights
    14:49 – The F-35 "Hat Trick" and "Mission X" flights
    22:36 – Preparation for a flight test mission
    30:00 – The X-35 vs the X-32
    34:37 – The challenges Hermeus is tackling
    39:04 – Autonomous flight and pilots
    43:58 – What is an aircraft you wished you has flown?
    48:43 – Turbo, what are you up to today?

    51 min
  • Airplanes and Hot Takes

    The Hermeus Flight Test team hops on the podcast to judge, drool over, and poke fun at famous aircraft. We've got an Air Force test pilot, a Navy test pilot, and a flight test engineer from the Royal Air Force – their knowledge runs deep and their opinions are strong!

    PODCAST GUESTS
    AJ Piplica – Founder, CEO
    Don "Krash" Kaderbek – VP of Test
    Pat "Vanna" Svatek – Director of Propulsion Test
    Mick "Ramjet" Mansfield – Director of Flight Test
    The Flight Test team is hiring! https://www.hermeus.com/careers

    42 min
  • Special Guests from 'Real Engineering'

    Real Engineering is probably our favorite channel on YouTube. They unpack some of the world's most epic engineering challenges with clarity and depth. It was a pleasure to have the channel's creator Brian McManus and his colleague Graham Haerther on the podcast to chat about the art of science communication and the future of YouTube and digital media. And yes, there just might be a forthcoming Real Engineering video about hypersonic flight...

    49 min
  • The Dream Team Assembles!

    From Skunk Works, Blue Origin, and the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency – our board of advisors create a dream team of aerospace wisdom. In this episode we're joined by members of our Board of Advisors to chat about the Hermeus early days and the progress we've made.

    Rob Meyerson, Rob Weiss, and Keith Masback were some of Hermeus earliest supporters. They bring together a wealth of knowledge from the aerospace world and we are privileged to have them as our advisors.

    45 min
  • Defense Tech, Startups, and More with John Coogan

    Thrilled to host special guest John Coogan on the podcast. John's working on a video about us and took an hour to hop on the pod to chat about running startups, starting a YouTube Channel, and of course, fast airplanes!

    00:04 – President for a day? Bring back the SR-71
    01:47 – Technical recruiting in the early days of a startup
    02:50 – John's background: Soylent and Lucy
    06:40 – Lessons learned from building two companies
    10:18 – Defense Tech and Founders Fund
    15:15 – Is there a key indicator for startup success?
    17:44 – Authenticity, communications, brand, and social media
    28:02 – Different types of "risks" in venture-backed startups
    36:55 – Skunk Works – what made them so special?
    41:54 – John's impressions of Hermeus

    50 min
  • Startups 🤝 DoD (Special Guest Lt. Gen. Clint Hinote) – The Hermeus Podcast 19

    Lieutenant General Clint Hinote's 35-year career in the Air Force has taken him from inside the cockpit of an F-117 to inside the Pentagon. He has most recently been focused on how to best leverage innovative technology to fortify national security. Freshly retired, we were honored to have him join us for a chat about how startups and the Department of Defense can better work together.

    00:51 – Lt. Gen. Clint “Q” Hinote introduction
    09:14 – The Future Force
    17:11 – What startups wanting to work with the DoD should know
    27:23 – Relationship with Venture Capital, entrepreneurs, and the DoD
    29:27 – How can the DoD signal to Venture Capital what they need?
    38:25 – aligning timelines between the startup, the VCs, and the customer
    41:27 – Planning, Programming, Budgeting, and Execution
    44:33 – The Defense Department is not a market, it’s a customer
    47:37 – Building relationships and trust while working with the government
    50:12 – Learning, iterating, risk-taking
    54:55 – NASA getting contracting right with COTS program
    01:07:18 – Balancing what we’re asking the military to do now and what we’re asking them to do in the future
    01:11:07 – “Purple thinking”: branches of the military working together

    1 hr 18 min
  • Hypersonic Fever! With Chris Combs and Alex Hollings

    Oh do we have a treat for you! We're joined by a couple hypersonic "influencers", Dr. Chris Combs of the University of Texas at San Antonio and Alex Hollings, the Editor in Chief of Sandboxx News, for a thrilling, engaging, and occasionally controversial conversation about the state of hypersonics in the world today.

    00:00 - Intros
    03:06 - What is hypersonics? What is hype and what is reality?
    08:58 - Hypersonic planes vs hypersonic weapons
    13:07 - What are the most interesting problems in hypersonics?
    18:50 - Airplanes are objectively cool
    22:00 - Airplane development timelines
    24:57 - Testing and developing complex air and spacecraft
    37:43 - NASA vs SpaceX development approach
    55:27 - Assessing risk and how failure breeds success
    58:02 - Perceptions vs reality
    01:00:15 - Scramjet, boost-glide, and ramjet hypersonic flight
    01:01:42 - Highly coupled systems
    01:03:43 - The hardest thing about hypersonics: people
    01:10:02 - Alex Hollings on Hermeus and Defense reporting
    01:14:41 - Wrap up and where to find Chris and Alex

    1 hr 17 min
  • Hermeus in the Cloud (the AWS cloud that is)

    In this episode of the podcast we bring on a couple all-stars from our Amazon Web Services team to discuss how we approach software development, high performance compute, data storage, and security. Naturally, the conversation gets into some AI and ML speculation and sci-fi movie talk.

    PODCAST GUESTS:

    Nandu Shah: VP of Information, Hermeus

    Jay Naves: Sr. Solutions Architect, AWS

    Scott Dieckhaus: Aerospace World Wide Solutions Leader, AWS

    Scott McCutchen: Senior DevOps Engineer, Hermeus

    39 min

About The Hermeus Podcast

From the publisher's feed

Get to know Hermeus and the future of hypersonic aircraft travel. Hermeus is a startup developing hypersonic aircraft to connect the world faster than ever before. At Mach 5, more than twice the speed…