Space Engine Systems (SES) appears to be pivoting its business plans rapidly due to requests by its investors, and the regulatory environment. But it still says it is on track for a 2023 flight to demonstrate a hypersonic vehicle for commercial and potentially military service.
The company now is targeting a United States location (instead of a Canadian one) to test a Mach 5 demonstrator using air-breathing hypersonic ramjet engines, one of which is shown being tested in a short YouTube video released earlier this month.
The company next plans an integration test (as it has tested all the components independently), via the hypersonic demonstrator. Dubbed Hello-1 Experimental, the first flight is expected sometime later in 2022 if regulatory authorities permit. That first flight is planned to run at 20 km to 32 km in altitude and to take off and land at one of the spaceports in the United States.
Assuming the demonstrator goes to plan, SES still hopes to run a flight test as planned in 2023 to enable a single-stage-to-orbit (SSTO) aircraft. But the company is now planning to fly at the stratospheric altitude of 110 km, rather than the 32 km it previously advertised, due to requests from its investors looking at business opportunities, the company says.
“There is a major push from the defense industry, which may have requirements for interceptor vehicles for NORAD,” president and chief technology officer Pradeep Dass told SpaceQ. While the need was expressed before this year, he said, the recent conflict in Ukraine has accelerated the demand for such vehicles. He added he is in discussion with U.S. defense authorities, but it is too early to give more details.
The company is already taking tickets for individuals to fly in the next vehicle, Hello-2, for “as early as 2025,” according to the website. Pricing has not yet been released, nor a detailed development timeline. That said, meeting the 2025 date for customer flights will depend on how demonstration flights perform for Hello-1 and Hello-2, Dass emphasized.
Major changes to its hypersonic vehicle business plans
SES has made a hard pivot since its last major update in October 2021. A press release from that period said the company is teaming up with Lynn Lake Airport, in northern Manitoba, to drop a ramjet demonstrator vehicle from a stratospheric balloon. In the press release, Dass said he expected Transport Canada to approve the project by the end of 2021.
Six months later, Dass says the Manitoba testing is completely off and SES has switched demonstrator vehicles to an airplane type, Hello-1, as a result. “We applied to Transport Canada. It’s a very lengthy process. So we abandoned that,” he said.
SES also has a United Kingdom connection, as in January 2020 it signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Spaceport Cornwall, the United Kingdom’s first horizontal launch facility. But Dass said the regulatory environment there was such that he felt the United States would still be a faster process, despite the MOU.
SES is now hoping to do a demonstration flight instead in the U.S., perhaps at Mojave Air and Space Port in California, but again that will depend on a regulatory approval from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). But Dass said once that flight happens, he is confident that Canadian and U.K. authorities will have more confidence in granting approvals.
The U.S. location is not fixed, and SES appears to have connections elsewhere; for example, SES has said before it is working with Spaceport Florida to set up ground and launch facilities, including a hardened aircraft building.
Given all this activity – and the fact that SES plans to manufacture the engines and the rest of the aircraft completely in-house to save on time – it’s no surprise to hear the company is hiring. They now have 22 engineers on staff in Canada (mainly near Edmonton), and hope to double that in the next few months.
SES is also making moves to ease some trade requirements in these various jurisdictions, as Dass said the company has separate entities registered in Canada, the United States and the United Kingdom to allow Canadians to work in these various regions. Assuming that first flight happens in the U.S., however, he said it is most likely the company will add some Americans to their employee roster as well.
Financing is also ongoing. Dass is internally funding the company, along with a handful of undisclosed angel investors he has known for a long time. “It’s basically a fully closed financial team,” he said, but added that he is working on a potential private placement opportunity. He’s still discussing with other investors, however, what direction to take.
“We might take a bit more money, but we might even not take any money,” he said. “We are going through that process of whether we should do a small raise, with another 5% to 10% of the company, or not. But the thinking is our valuation right now is at $120 million US.” (That’s compared to $90 million just before the pandemic, he added.)
What this means
It’s common for startups to pivot their plans rapidly as the environment changes, and regulation is often a factor that can greatly influence timelines. SpaceX, for example, has been waiting several extra months beyond its hopes to put the first orbital Starship flight aloft.
That’s because it requires the FAA to complete its environmental impact review of its facilities in Boca Chica, Texas. The review is taking several extra months due to the massive public interest and submissions, the FAA has said, adding more complexity to an already lengthy process.
Canadian companies also may face additional challenges in working in the United States due to International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR), which restrict the export of information or components that have defense purposes.
The U.S. has been so sensitive lately to these requirements that it is not running Artemis 1 communications in real time during its wet dress rehearsal, out of concerns that the Russians may take this technical information about the booster and repurpose it for the military. (As context, the U.S. has imposed wide-ranging sanctions on Russia after its Feb. 24 invasion of Ukraine and most of its space relationships with Russia are severed, although International Space Station operations so far are unaffected.)
Adam Trumpour, a rocket and gas turbine propulsion professional best known for the Launch Canada Challenge for students, has just announced the Rocket Innovation Challenge to allow Canadian students to deepen their rocketry skills. While he is not involved with SES in any way, he provided an outside voice as a fellow Canadian in the industry.
Hypersonics, Trumpour said, have been receiving a lot of attention. He told SpaceQ he is happy to “see a Canadian company that is actively doing work in this field, because for such a long time, we really haven’t done a lot.”
He also said it is not surprising about Transport Canada’s reticence, given such projects are newer in Canada. “It will take a bit of time,” he said of regulatory acceptance. SES, he said, is likely facing a “double whammy” when applying for regulatory approval. “On the one hand, you’ve got a new company that might not be entirely familiar with the language of flight safety, and aviation and aerospace regulation,” he said.
This field of experimental aircraft and spacecraft is quite complex and nuanced, Trumpour continued. And Transport Canada also has few domestic examples to assess against SES, meaning this type of flight testing has few established processes for the regulator to follow.
Trumpour noted that even larger aerospace companies can struggle with the complexity, even with the FAA that has seen more experimental flights of this sort. “At established aerospace companies, that whole aspect of regulatory compliance isn’t just something that gets done as an afterthought, to get that rubber stamp to go fly. It’s something that really is an ongoing process, that happens in parallel with the technology development,” Trumpour said.
For these reasons, Trumpour noted, “certainly their [SES’s] approach to do an initial flight test in the U.S. probably makes good sense.” He agreed with Dass in saying that when it comes to convincing other regulatory authorities, “actual data does tend to speak fairly loudly.”
Trumpour noted he often gives similar advice to students looking to build new systems for flight tests. “Paper rockets and paper propulsion systems always perform amazing. It’s turning those into real practical hardware where the art and the challenge does lie. The reality is, especially if you’re new to it, you learn a lot as you go along. So I think that the sooner they [SES] can get to real hardware demonstration, the more credible their program is going to become.”
He further urged the company to do what so many others in Canadian businesses do – to attend industry events, to get students involved, and to show their work in peer-reviewed journals alongside the videos and website. All of these things, Trumpour said, helps a company gain credibility and a voice in the industry.
“It’s a great way to engage with the Canadian and international community,” Trumpour said. “It would certainly be interesting, and probably beneficial, to see that kind of engagements or work like this. You always learn a lot, and benefit a lot, from putting your yourself out there a little bit, and getting that kind of engagement from the wider scientific community.”