Venus Aerospace, a Houston-based aviation startup, released new images earlier this week for the incredibly fast high-altitude vehicle Stargazer, which it hopes to develop.
According to the company’s press release, Venus Aerospace has been working on hypersonic aircraft since 2020 and has raised $33 million in investment to build the aircraft. $1 million of this came from government funding.
Hypersonic means vehicles or missiles capable of moving Mach 5 or faster, and Stargazer has the potential to reach Mach 9, nine times the speed of sound. In an email statement by the company, it was stated that the vehicle was designed to take 12 passengers while traveling at an altitude of 51.8 kilometers.
Although Venus Aerospace calls Stargazer a “spaceplane”, the vehicle will not actually go into space. The technical limit of space is still about 50 kilometers above Stargazer’s maximum altitude. So this plane won’t go beyond the Kármán line, just as space balloons don’t really go into space either. Still, passengers will reach such heights that the curvature of the Earth is clearly visible.
Stargazer is expected to be able to carry passengers from Tokyo to Los Angeles within an hour. This tremendous speed can certainly be described as an almost incredible improvement over 11 hours of flight time in a commercial airplane.
Venus Aviation CTO Andrew Duggleby explained in an e-mail sent to Gizmoda that Stargazer will use engines like a conventional airplane and then switch to rockets when it reaches a certain altitude and moves away from cities. Stargazer’s first ground test is not expected until 2025 at the earliest, and there will be at least five years of flight testing to ensure safety, reliability and performance.
Ideally, Stargazer tickets would cost roughly the same as a first-class ticket on a commercial plane, but Duggleby says a number of variables still need to be worked out to determine that price.
When Stargazer flights begin, the ability to move around the world at incredible speeds will be attractive to a select group of people who have the financial resources to do so, even if they don’t actually go into space. Yet since the crash of a Concorde plane in July 2000, there has been understandably tension about supersonic vehicles. So, in addition to the engineering challenges, Venus Aerospace will likely have to overcome some psychological challenges as well.
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