Umm...we have pilots at a base outside Las Vegas flying missions over Afghanistan, we can get reasonable WiFi access on trans-oceanic flights and we're looking

Umm...we have pilots at a base outside Las Vegas flying missions over Afghanistan, we can get reasonable WiFi access on trans-oceanic flights and we're looking likely to see direct flights from Sydney to New York in the next couple of years. All of that represents progress and significant engineering achievements. What's likely changed is that the pressures that drive the engineering are different from the ones that drove early aviation and the space race. Faster just has very little value now, so less dollars flow to making mach-multiple planes. The same thing happened in the CPU market where the GHz race took a back seat to power consumption and parallelization.