Fresh off its participation in the prestigious Y Combinator accelerator, Greater Cincinnati aerospace startup Velontra is rolling out a first-of-its-kind offering tailored for aviation and U.S. military use.
Lebanon-based Velontra, which is building a hypersonic space plane, this week announced the successful testing of the Bronco: a hypersonic turbo-ramjet engine. The company said the small, yet powerful system will deliver thrust at greater than Mach 5 – that's more than five times the speed of sound or 3,800 miles per hour.
Bronco takes Velontra to the “forefront of the hypersonic frontier,” the company said. The hypersonic propulsion system is ready to be integrated into small unmanned aerial vehicles. Its power can accelerate a drone well past the sound barrier, “thus living up to its name.”
“It is ready to buck the system,” Velontra CEO Robert Keane III said in a news release. “We sent it through a wind tunnel at Purdue University at speeds over Mach 4.5 and altitude simulated over 100,000 feet, and it successfully screamed through vigorous testing with flying colors.”
Velontra, founded in 2021 by Keane and Joel Darin, both GE Aerospace alumni, is working to create the latest unmanned hypersonic technology to help propel the U.S. past its competitors in the sector – namely China and Russia.
Velontra’s team was “discouraged by the slow pace and high cost” of innovation stemming from other American companies, Keane has said. Velontra said it can create more powerful and efficient engines at a lower cost.
Its hypersonic space plane will be able to take off from anywhere in any weather, powered by a jet engine with an afterburner. An afterburner is an additional combustion component used on some jet engines, primarily high-performance fighter aircraft. Its purpose is to increase thrust for flight, takeoff and combat, and it enables speed in excess of Mach 2 without increasing drag.
In ramjet mode, this is increased to over Mach 5.
The technology has multiple applications. One in particular is “low Earth orbit” access, or the nearest orbit to the surface of the Earth, where Elon Musk-led SpaceX is sending up Starlink satellites by the thousands.
Bronco will serve as the horsepower behind Velontra’s hypersonic aircraft.
This first prototype will evolve into the system that will take Velontra’s space plane into low Earth orbit more efficiently and reliably than has ever been done before.
“Velontra is a nimble alternative to traditional aviation organizations that get bogged down with overhead and administrative layers,” Darin, Velontra’s chief technology officer, said. “Our propulsion technology is an advanced state-of-the-art system enabling applications never before seen.”
The company in September graduated from Silicon Valley-based Y Combinator, considered one of the world’s most prestigious accelerators. Its graduates includes DoorDash, Uber, Dropbox and Airbnb.
Since the program, Velontra has more than doubled in size. It has 10 employees and has raised more than $2 million in seed funding with more than $2 million in contract revenue.
Velontra in August 2022 announced a partnership with Houston's Venus Aerospace to develop a propulsion system for Venus' hypersonic aircraft, a zero-emission, hypersonic spaceplane that aims to enable travel to any destination on Earth in one hour.
