Mark Russell

In a workshop in Spokane, Washington, a tube fires a projectile into rock at roughly 6,700 miles an hour - about nine times the speed of sound. Then it does it again. And again. "Every 15 seconds, we're firing something at hypersonic speeds," Mark Russell says. "Nobody does that. NASA doesn't do it. Boeing doesn't do it. But we do it."

Russell would know. He worked at both. The thing he is firing is a ram accelerator - an in-tube jet engine that uses combustion to drive a slug of metal, concrete, or plastic to speeds normally reserved for re-entry vehicles. Point it down and it drills rock as much as ten times faster than a conventional rig. Point it up and, in theory, it lobs a payload toward space. Russell has built a company around pointing it both ways.

That company is HyperSciences, and Russell is its founder and CEO. The pitch is deceptively plain: most of the planet's clean energy is locked underground as heat, and the only thing standing between us and it is the cost and speed of drilling. "I think I'm solving a huge energy problem," he says, "and we are going to drill 10 times faster than anyone else has drilled before, which means you can access energy faster than ever before."

The physics is older than he is. Ram accelerators have been studied since the mid-20th century, much of the modern work coming out of the University of Washington. What was missing was someone willing to treat the lab curiosity as a product - and willing to fire it thousands of times to find out where it broke. That willingness has a source. Before HyperSciences, Russell was a lead engineer and manager at Blue Origin, where he worked on crew capsule development for Jeff Bezos's space company.

Blue Origin left him with a method more than a memory. "Test early, test often" was the Bezos refrain, and Russell took it literally. "At this point I realized, you really have to change the paradigm, and you need to test an awful lot," he says. So HyperSciences became a place that tests an awful lot - a cadence of one shot every few seconds rather than one carefully instrumented experiment a year. The data piles up faster than doubt can.

His résumé reads like an aerospace tour: an aeronautical engineering degree from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, a master's in aeronautics and astronautics from Stanford, then Boeing, then Kistler Aerospace, then Blue Origin. But the part that explains HyperSciences is not the rockets. It is the rock.

Russell calls himself a third-generation miner, and he means it as fact, not flourish. His grandfather helped bring electricity to the Bunker Hill mine in Idaho. His father was a superintendent there. Russell grew up around hard-rock mining the way other engineers grow up around model planes. When he looked at a ram accelerator, he did not only see a launch tube. He saw a faster way to break rock - the family business, accelerated to Mach 9.

That double vision is why HyperSciences keeps two stories running at once. The near-term business is industrial: drilling, tunneling, mining, and deep geothermal energy, where the product is branded HyperDrill. The sister venture, Pipeline2Space, chases the long shot - using the same combustion tube to fire cargo and small satellites to suborbital and eventually orbital space at a fraction of a rocket's cost. One gun, two directions. As Russell puts it, "the next bit of space exploration really does need to drill holes."

The money came from an unusual place too. Rather than march through Sand Hill Road, HyperSciences raised roughly $9.6 million from 3,552 individual investors through equity crowdfunding on SeedInvest - a crowd of believers buying into a tube that fires concrete at the sky. The institutions came anyway. NASA awarded a $125,000 Small Business Innovation Research grant for a HyperCore launch system. Shell Global's GameChanger program put in more than $1 million toward the drilling application, with a letter of intent dangling a field trial worth millions more.

There is a quiet elegance to the byproduct, too. Each hypersonic impact sends a shockwave into the ground, and an array of sensors can read those shocks the way sonar reads water - building density maps of what lies beneath. Hunt for a geothermal reservoir. Hunt for a mineral deposit. The drill and the survey are the same act. The thing that breaks the rock also tells you what the rock is.

Skeptics have a fair question: is this a drilling company or a space company or a science project wearing two hats? Russell's answer is that they are the same machine and the same bet - that hypersonic impact, fired often enough and cheaply enough, changes the economics of getting energy out of the Earth and getting mass off of it. Most of the world drills the way it has for a century. Russell would rather shoot.

For now, the work is unglamorous and loud. A tube. A projectile. A wall of rock. A sensor reading the echo. Then fifteen seconds, and the whole thing again - a third-generation miner using an aerospace engine to do the oldest job in his family, faster than anyone has done it before.