Space Plane Startup Promises One-Hour Rides to Anywhere on Earth

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Traveling in a space plane is a lot like traveling in a regular plane, except for the middle part. After reaching cruising altitude, the pilot hits the rocket boosters and blasts the aircraft to the edge of space at more than 9,000 mph, or about 12 times the speed of sound. The plane travels at that speed for about 15 minutes, then glides against the atmosphere to slow itself down, cruising back to Earth to land at a conventional airport.

Venus Aerospace Corp., a startup pursuing a hypersonic space plane, is aiming to use this technique to ferry people from Los Angeles to Tokyo in about an hour.

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Once the technology is worked out, Venus will still have to figure out the business, which consists of finding passengers willing to pay a premium to get halfway around the globe quicker. “This is for regular people,” Sassie Duggleby says. But past attempts at superfast flight, such as the Concorde, which traveled at twice the speed of conventional aircraft, and Aerion Supersonic, which promised travel between any two spots on Earth in three hours, didn’t last. Jesse Klempner, a partner at McKinsey & Co.’s aerospace and defense practice, says there’s a limit to people’s impatience: “It hasn’t been proven that the vast majority of humanity will pay a lot for an hour of time.”

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