Los Angeles to Tokyo in an hour – This Texas startup is building the world’s fastest hypersonic plane that could travel at over 9,000 miles per hour

This week, Jeff Bezos’ space company Blue Origin and William Shatner made history after the 90-year-old Canadian actor became the world’s oldest astronaut to go to space. Shatner and three others went to the edge of space in a tourist spacecraft built called NS-18, the New Shepard mission after a journey that last about 11 minutes.

Today, most space companies are focused on reaching the stars including launching the first space manufacturing satellite to take factories off planet Earth, building the first industrial park in space, launching the Internet from space, putting tourists in space, gas stations on the moon, and colonizing Mars. But one new space startup is setting its sights set right here on earth, where travel is still well, light years behind space ambitions.

Venus Aerospace is a Houston startup that is pushing the boundaries of high-speed transportation. The startup is working on a Mach 12 hypersonic aircraft designed to travel at the edge of space that would cut travel time from Los Angeles to Tokyo to one hour. The company is building a passenger aircraft for “regular people” that it said would revolutionize the world’s transportation sector with hypersonic flight.

Here’s how their hypersonic flight works. The space plane travels just like the regular plane except for the middle part. After the plane takes off and reaches 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 then travels at that speed for about 15 minutes, then glides against the atmo­sphere to slow itself down.

Founded by two former Virgin Orbit LLC employees Sarah “Sassie” Duggleby, a code-writing launch engineer, and her husband, Andrew.  Sarah is a launch engineer, and her husband, Andrew, manages launch, payload, and propulsion operations.

The couple became fascinated with hypersonic travel after missing Sassie’s grandmother’s 95th birthday party because the flights were too long from Japan, where they were living at the time. So they left Virgin last June to launch their own space company.

“Every few decades humans attempt this,” Andrew Duggleby told Bloomberg, as for now, the dream of high-speed global travel is in reach because of new rocket engine and hypersonic technologies. “This time, it will work.”

The couple says their space plan has more efficient engines, wings, landing gear, and jet engines that allow it to take off like a commercial airliner.

In March, the startup raised $3 million in s funding round. They plan to build a Mach 12 hypersonic aircraft designed to travel at the edge of space, allowing passengers to go from Los Angeles to Tokyo in one hour. The startup has about 15 employees.

So how will Venus Airspace hypersonic stack up with the top ten hypersonic aircraft in the world? Below is a video of the top 10 fastest hypersonic aircraft.