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Agreed. I know nothing about aerospace engineering or aircraft design, but the hype around Boom always puzzled me. If this start up can all of a sudden make an

Agreed. I know nothing about aerospace engineering or aircraft design, but the hype around Boom always puzzled me. If this start up can all of a sudden make an economical supersonic jet, then surely the existing plane manufacturers could do it quicker and cheaper. Boeing, Lockheed, Airbus, etc... already have existing designs from decades past that they could at least use as a base. They have experts in material science, airplane design, and actual resources/contracts to actually build one. If it made sense.

chadash 4y ago
I agree with you, but to play devil's advocate, what if I changed your comment to: Agreed. I know nothing about automotive engineering or car design, but the hype around Tesla always puzzled me. If this start up can all of a sudden make an economical electric car, then surely the existing automotive manufacturers could do it quicker and cheaper. Toyota, Mercedes, Ford, etc... already have existing designs from decades past that they could at least use as a base. They have experts in material science, car design, and actual resources/contracts to actually build one. If it made sense. Sometimes the incumbents are just too entrenched in what they are doing to make what out an outsider sees as an obvious move.
- nfw2 4y ago
  you read my mind :)
- senko 4y ago
  One can certainly argue that Tesla is overhyped.
  - nfw2 4y ago
    Sure, but no one could argue that Tesla is a Theranos-like operation. Arguments can be made about whether Tesla's valuation is reasonable, but it's certainly a legitimate car manufacturer.
    - pclmulqdq 4y ago
      What about the times when they announced different types of car models, promised delivery in a year, took pre-orders, and then didn't deliver (and still haven't)? That's pretty Theranos-y behavior.
      - panick21_ 4y ago
        Delays in the car industry are pretty normal and you can get your reservation money back if you cancel.
    - microtherion 4y ago
      Tesla certainly delivers cars. But there are parts of it that are quite Theranesque, especially the self driving: * Re-sell third party products for a while ("Until our own offering is ready"). If the recently posted self parking video is to be believed, the in-house products are still not on par with the third party predecessors: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsb2XBAIWyA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsb2XBAIWyA * Pre-sell your product years before it's ready. * Aggressively suppress internal and external criticism. * Avoid objective evaluations of your product.
      - sidewndr46 4y ago
        You forgot "engage in lots of dubiously legal union busting"
        vkou 4y ago
        That's pretty normal for all new firms, regardless of whether or not their promises have much to do with their deliveries.
      - panick21_ 4y ago
        Tesla has literally opened up its FSD Beta an allowed people to film it. We have more insight into its behavior in a huge range of different driving conditions then we have for anything else. They have even change the terms&conditions to make it clear that beta testers were allowed to share. Beta testers have shared lots of not-flattering things and Tesla has not 'aggressively suppressed' them. They have asked for the outright fraud and slander campaign conduct by a competitor to be removed. > * Avoid objective evaluations of your product. Like what? Tesla Vision (no radar/no lidar) has just been objectively tested: https://www.tesla.com/blog/model-y-earns-5-star-safety-rating-euro-ncap https://www.tesla.com/blog/model-y-earns-5-star-safety-ratin... There are no objective evaluations for FSD as nobody has actually made general full sell driving work. But you can get the Beta and do any kind of 'objective evaluations' you want. You can even publish all the details, amount of interventions and so on of all your drives.
- mrtksn 4y ago
  Unpopular opinion but wasn't Tesla subsidised and missed the cost goals anyway? My impression is that Tesla succeeded thanks to Musks personality that made the customers forgive unfulfilled promises that they paid thousands of dollars for. Almost as if Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos imitated Musk instead of Steve Jobs and kicked the can down the road and delivered traditional but improved blood test machines and kept promising stuff down the road by collecting money and be edgy on Twitter, she could have been a hero by now. I mean, Tesla still delivered stuff that people value. Just not the promised ones. Tesla makes the best computerised vehicles out there and has built a valuable charging network, not the stated goals but valuable anyway.
  - MichaelCollins 4y ago
    I wish Tesla would cut it out with the computerized car bullshit and focus on making the best battery cars instead. They shouldn't need bullshit like "it will be fiscally irresponsible to not buy our cars because it will be a robotaxi that pays for itself"; it imperils the long-term success of the company for a short-term boost in sales. And it alienates anybody with a modicum of critical thinking.
    - mrtksn 4y ago
      Okay but the genius of Musk was this computerised car stuff and it's exactly where the traditional car manufacturers fail. Just recently the CEO of VW changed and the important part of the failure of the previous CEO was their shit software on their electric cars. It's not like Tesla managed to make cheap electric cars? They managed to make cars with good computers and this is something that people actually want. Essentially, Tesla made the first usable as daily driver electric car by promising stuff that people believed they want(but very hard to make) so they can collect money and make sales but doing stuff that people actually needed(within the reach of the current technology) to live with electric cars.
      - mrguyorama 4y ago
        Actually, I desperately want the software world to stay as far away from cars as possible. Even in a VW, I know I will go 100k miles with zero issues with most of the stuff. Someone somewhere wants to put javascript between me and that, and I hope they have a bad life.
- gamblor956 4y ago
  The existing automakers are making EVs faster and cheaper than Tesla did, and the EVs they are making have substantially greater build quality than Tesla's vehicles.
  - signatoremo 4y ago
    Tesla’s profit margin is higher than most of automakers. So no, EVs made by traditional automakers are not cheaper. If anything that means Tesla’s cars are more desirable because they can command a premium. Faster? What is that supposed to mean? Tesla is the largest EV maker by volume (not sure if I miss any Chinese ones). Substantial better build quality? Define substantial. Who decide that? Certainly not the consumers, because they can’t get enough of Tesla cars.
    - silon42 4y ago
      They can easily make a better interior on usability.
      - ngcc_hk 4y ago
        Or better QC.
    - gamblor956 4y ago
      It's easy to goose profit margins when you don't use automotive grade parts and skip quality control. Consumer Reports stopped recommending Teslas because of the abysmal quality of their vehicles. And every Tesla owner I personally know has said their first Tesla will also be their last.
      - panick21_ 4y ago
        This is just complete nonsense. Go look at the tear-downs of Tesla where actual engineers with automotive analyses each part. The reality is Tesla is ahead in a whole number of areas and have better quality in many areas. Tesla have top ranks in safety, the best most performant interior board computer, their glass roofs are pretty amazing, their internal heating/cooling system is the best in the industry by far. The reliability of their engines and battery packs is actually extremely good. Their structural engineering with their castings is ahead of anybody in the industry. The Model S is literally the fastest production car in the world. They have the largest global fast charging system and the single best integration of cars and charging. If Tesla gets criticized for quality control most of the times its fit and finish something a lot of people don't actually car that much about. The majority of Tesla cars are produced in China and those cars have an excellent reputation for quality. > I personally know has said their first Tesla will also be their last. Tesla has the highest consumer satisfaction ratio and the highest costumer retention ratio in the industry. But I'm sure your personal experience is what is most important in this discussion.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- cycomanic 4y ago
  The difference there is that the traditional car manufacturers didn't want to push EVs because that would have canabalized their ICE business and their competitive advantage (electric motors are really easy to build in comparison to an ICE). That's how Tesla could just zoom past them, they did not want EVs to be successful. The situation with supersonic flight is very different, the requirements and skills are very similar the ones of traditional plane manufacturers and supersonic flight wouldn't really canabalize their traditional business. I think they simply see that it doesn't make sense. I mean boom can't really explain what has fundamentally changed since tge concorde that supersonic flight is now economically viable.
- Ajedi32 4y ago
  Yeah, I hate this kind of weakly justified pessimism. Sure, if you just assume every new idea will fail you'll be right 95% of the time. But if everyone did that we'd be stuck in the dark ages. I applaud people and organizations that take that chance, innovating and trying new things even when there's a high chance of failure. Worst-case, they fail and other people can learn from their mistakes and hopefully do better next time. Best case, they change the world.
  - rollinggoron 4y ago
    I wasn't trying to be pessimistic, just trying not the fall for the "too good to be true" hype machine common in tech (e.g. new batteries with 100x the capacity are right around the corner, carbon nanotubes uses, etc...). Is this a new idea, though? It's not like supersonic commercial jets are a new thing and they haven't been built. The economics of building a commercially viable production supersonic plane is much more difficult to do than building a car or writing a new website to disrupt Facebook or Google. I 100% agree that people need to be exploring this stuff. That being said, I'll believe it when I see it.
nfw2 4y ago
I also know nothing about the subject, but just to play devil's advocate here, doesn't SpaceX show that a startup could potentially solve hard physical engineering problems more effectively than established incumbents?
- bell-cot 4y ago
  Yes, definitely. BUT - there is a very wide and thinly-populated gulf between the folks who only talk about doing that, and those who actually deliver viable, working systems. SpaceX went from founding the company to their first orbital launch attempt in 4 years, was obviously d*mn close to successful orbit 1 year later, and actually made orbit another 18 months after that. Vs. Boom Supersonic, not having had to design nor build its own jet engines, is already 5+ years behind on their 1/3-scale, zero-passenger technology demonstrator even trying to taxi down the runway.
- pclmulqdq 4y ago
  It does, but a supersonic personal jet is a much bigger feat of engineering than a rocket that lands. Most people don't appreciate that. We had landing rockets in the 80's, but Boom was trying to do several things that are completely new. SpaceX's real technology is about launching the rockets cheaply, not re-using them (which is only part of the problem). And SpaceX started with engineers who knew a lot about the domain of the actual problem (rocket engines). Boom has never designed an engine. Starlink satellites are a great example of SpaceX solving engineering problems that an incumbent couldn't, but SpaceX was a pretty large company at the time the effort started.
  - signatoremo 4y ago
    Boom isn’t trying to do something completely new. Concord was in commercial services for many years. Benefits and shortcomings are well known. OTOTH, there was never a rocket that could land, only suborbital prototypes. Shuttle doesn’t count since it’s reusable in name only, as it still cost substantial amount of money and time for refurbishing. In fact there are still no other reusable rockets, seven years after SpaceX did it for the 1st time.
klintcho 4y ago
This argument could be made about any big SV company the past 30 years. - Anyone of IBM, Microsoft or Yahoo could build a better (quicker and cheaper) search engine than what a bunch of new grads from Stanford can (Google) - Anyone of the car manufacturer can build a better (quicker and cheaper) electric car than a software millionaire (Tesla) I don't agree with the statement, I think there are numerous reason people embark on ambitious project that incumbents "could" do, but are not doing; - An unexpected insights, - A new research breakthrough from some other field - Collecting a bunch of the most bright people coming up at the same time in the field (Mueller for SpaceX comes to mind for instance) etc. But most of the time it's just that it's not really in their business to do a 100 million dollar - 1 billion bet on something that risky, they are in the business of returning like 7 - 10% a year to their shareholder, not producing 5x returns (like the VC/startup business).
- raverbashing 4y ago
  Except costs for prototyping and building a plane are (no kidding) 100x the costs of prototyping and building a car And that's for "easy" stuff like electric cars. Not a supersonic plane (which has a full bag of hurt to go with) If you don't believe me just look at the price tag of a brand new Cessna (which is old/proven/boring technology)
- rollinggoron 4y ago
  Eh, I figured I would get this response but writing software e.g. your IBM, Yahoo, and Microsoft example is much easier and faster to do than building a cutting edge, physical, supersonic commercial jet. To build Google, all you needed was a computer, and a new approach/algorithm to solving web search. Software companies are much easier to disrupt than physical product companies. As others have pointed out the Tesla isn't a great example either because building a car is still 100x easier to do than building aircraft, let alone supersonic planes. "Unexpected Insights" and "A new research breakthrough from some other field" seems to be handy wavy. A supersonic jet breakthrough is not something that can be discovered in a dorm room. It requires millions in research and expensive materials to build and test against.
  - 4y ago
samatman 4y ago
I would say that a brand-new rocket company making a rocket which can land itself would sound more implausible than what you're describing, if we didn't all know that it in fact has happened. That doesn't mean Boom is that, however.
- hef19898 4y ago
  Landing rocket boosters happened in the 70s already, and said rocket company benefited heavily from NASA, government and defence contracts and research. If Boom would have had access to supersonic jet research from the government, along with government contracts, development or production doesn't matter, RR wouldn't have stopped the cooperation. Edit: Reusable or VTOL rocket were tested, successfully landing, in the early 90s by McDonnel Douglas under the DC-X program. No idea where the 70s thing came from...
  - signatoremo 4y ago
    Which rockets landed in the 70s? Note that SpaceX didn’t get any meaningful defense contract until they’ve proved themselves with Falcon 9.
    - MichaelCollins 4y ago
      He must either be talking about the Apollo Lunar Module which first landed on the Moon in the 60s (but was not "landing a booster", much less on earth.), or more likely he's talking about the Delta Clipper which was in the 90s (and also not a rocket booster.) Probably the latter, because there are some low-brow skeptics on reddit and youtube who inexplicably seem to think the Falcon 9 is a stolen Delta Clipper with a new paint job.
      - hef19898 4y ago
        I kind of take ofense with the low-brow reddit sceptic :-) Obviously, a Falcon 9 is not a reused DC-X. The technologyvto land a booster was already there before, it wasn't invented by SpaceX and was discussed as far back as the 60s. SpaceX made it possible, which in itself is quite an achievement. That nobody else tried so is due to the fact that there were not enough launches to make it economically viable (I found a ESA study on that topic a couple of years ago and subsequently lost it again, Google and DDG fail to dig it up again ever since). And whether or not reusable booster do make econommic sense or not, and just how many launches are needed to break even, is impossible to tell without SpaceX financials, they are the only ones doing it right now, which we don't have.
deepnotderp 4y ago
Agreed, SpaceX has no chance against ULA /s
rockemsockem 4y ago
The reason why startups continue to make things that big companies don't is because your assumption that big companies *can* do it is wrong. They cannot due largely to organizational challenges and inertia in one direction or another. It is very rare that a large company successfully continues to innovate indefinitely.
- tarunkotia 4y ago
  Also known as Innovator's Dilemma https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma Most established players don't want to cannibalize their existing market by launching a product in a niche segment. Sales and Marketing $$$ eat into the profits which is not easy to justify when you are profitable. If you are fighting for your survival then it's easy to reallocate resources to fight.
pbreit 4y ago
"surely the existing plane manufacturers could do it quicker and cheaper" How could you possibly think that?

chadash 4y ago

I agree with you, but to play devil's advocate, what if I changed your comment to: Agreed. I know nothing about automotive engineering or car design, but the hype around Tesla always puzzled me. If this start up can all of a sudden make an economical electric car, then surely the existing automotive manufacturers could do it quicker and cheaper. Toyota, Mercedes, Ford, etc... already have existing designs from decades past that they could at least use as a base. They have experts in material science, car design, and actual resources/contracts to actually build one. If it made sense. Sometimes the incumbents are just too entrenched in what they are doing to make what out an outsider sees as an obvious move.

nfw2 4y ago
you read my mind :)
senko 4y ago
One can certainly argue that Tesla is overhyped.
- nfw2 4y ago
  Sure, but no one could argue that Tesla is a Theranos-like operation. Arguments can be made about whether Tesla's valuation is reasonable, but it's certainly a legitimate car manufacturer.
  - pclmulqdq 4y ago
    What about the times when they announced different types of car models, promised delivery in a year, took pre-orders, and then didn't deliver (and still haven't)? That's pretty Theranos-y behavior.
    - panick21_ 4y ago
      Delays in the car industry are pretty normal and you can get your reservation money back if you cancel.
  - microtherion 4y ago
    Tesla certainly delivers cars. But there are parts of it that are quite Theranesque, especially the self driving: * Re-sell third party products for a while ("Until our own offering is ready"). If the recently posted self parking video is to be believed, the in-house products are still not on par with the third party predecessors: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsb2XBAIWyA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsb2XBAIWyA * Pre-sell your product years before it's ready. * Aggressively suppress internal and external criticism. * Avoid objective evaluations of your product.
    - sidewndr46 4y ago
      You forgot "engage in lots of dubiously legal union busting"
      - vkou 4y ago
        That's pretty normal for all new firms, regardless of whether or not their promises have much to do with their deliveries.
    - panick21_ 4y ago
      Tesla has literally opened up its FSD Beta an allowed people to film it. We have more insight into its behavior in a huge range of different driving conditions then we have for anything else. They have even change the terms&conditions to make it clear that beta testers were allowed to share. Beta testers have shared lots of not-flattering things and Tesla has not 'aggressively suppressed' them. They have asked for the outright fraud and slander campaign conduct by a competitor to be removed. > * Avoid objective evaluations of your product. Like what? Tesla Vision (no radar/no lidar) has just been objectively tested: https://www.tesla.com/blog/model-y-earns-5-star-safety-rating-euro-ncap https://www.tesla.com/blog/model-y-earns-5-star-safety-ratin... There are no objective evaluations for FSD as nobody has actually made general full sell driving work. But you can get the Beta and do any kind of 'objective evaluations' you want. You can even publish all the details, amount of interventions and so on of all your drives.
mrtksn 4y ago
Unpopular opinion but wasn't Tesla subsidised and missed the cost goals anyway? My impression is that Tesla succeeded thanks to Musks personality that made the customers forgive unfulfilled promises that they paid thousands of dollars for. Almost as if Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos imitated Musk instead of Steve Jobs and kicked the can down the road and delivered traditional but improved blood test machines and kept promising stuff down the road by collecting money and be edgy on Twitter, she could have been a hero by now. I mean, Tesla still delivered stuff that people value. Just not the promised ones. Tesla makes the best computerised vehicles out there and has built a valuable charging network, not the stated goals but valuable anyway.
- MichaelCollins 4y ago
  I wish Tesla would cut it out with the computerized car bullshit and focus on making the best battery cars instead. They shouldn't need bullshit like "it will be fiscally irresponsible to not buy our cars because it will be a robotaxi that pays for itself"; it imperils the long-term success of the company for a short-term boost in sales. And it alienates anybody with a modicum of critical thinking.
  - mrtksn 4y ago
    Okay but the genius of Musk was this computerised car stuff and it's exactly where the traditional car manufacturers fail. Just recently the CEO of VW changed and the important part of the failure of the previous CEO was their shit software on their electric cars. It's not like Tesla managed to make cheap electric cars? They managed to make cars with good computers and this is something that people actually want. Essentially, Tesla made the first usable as daily driver electric car by promising stuff that people believed they want(but very hard to make) so they can collect money and make sales but doing stuff that people actually needed(within the reach of the current technology) to live with electric cars.
    - mrguyorama 4y ago
      Actually, I desperately want the software world to stay as far away from cars as possible. Even in a VW, I know I will go 100k miles with zero issues with most of the stuff. Someone somewhere wants to put javascript between me and that, and I hope they have a bad life.
gamblor956 4y ago
The existing automakers are making EVs faster and cheaper than Tesla did, and the EVs they are making have substantially greater build quality than Tesla's vehicles.
- signatoremo 4y ago
  Tesla’s profit margin is higher than most of automakers. So no, EVs made by traditional automakers are not cheaper. If anything that means Tesla’s cars are more desirable because they can command a premium. Faster? What is that supposed to mean? Tesla is the largest EV maker by volume (not sure if I miss any Chinese ones). Substantial better build quality? Define substantial. Who decide that? Certainly not the consumers, because they can’t get enough of Tesla cars.
  - silon42 4y ago
    They can easily make a better interior on usability.
    - ngcc_hk 4y ago
      Or better QC.
  - gamblor956 4y ago
    It's easy to goose profit margins when you don't use automotive grade parts and skip quality control. Consumer Reports stopped recommending Teslas because of the abysmal quality of their vehicles. And every Tesla owner I personally know has said their first Tesla will also be their last.
    - panick21_ 4y ago
      This is just complete nonsense. Go look at the tear-downs of Tesla where actual engineers with automotive analyses each part. The reality is Tesla is ahead in a whole number of areas and have better quality in many areas. Tesla have top ranks in safety, the best most performant interior board computer, their glass roofs are pretty amazing, their internal heating/cooling system is the best in the industry by far. The reliability of their engines and battery packs is actually extremely good. Their structural engineering with their castings is ahead of anybody in the industry. The Model S is literally the fastest production car in the world. They have the largest global fast charging system and the single best integration of cars and charging. If Tesla gets criticized for quality control most of the times its fit and finish something a lot of people don't actually car that much about. The majority of Tesla cars are produced in China and those cars have an excellent reputation for quality. > I personally know has said their first Tesla will also be their last. Tesla has the highest consumer satisfaction ratio and the highest costumer retention ratio in the industry. But I'm sure your personal experience is what is most important in this discussion.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
cycomanic 4y ago
The difference there is that the traditional car manufacturers didn't want to push EVs because that would have canabalized their ICE business and their competitive advantage (electric motors are really easy to build in comparison to an ICE). That's how Tesla could just zoom past them, they did not want EVs to be successful. The situation with supersonic flight is very different, the requirements and skills are very similar the ones of traditional plane manufacturers and supersonic flight wouldn't really canabalize their traditional business. I think they simply see that it doesn't make sense. I mean boom can't really explain what has fundamentally changed since tge concorde that supersonic flight is now economically viable.
Ajedi32 4y ago
Yeah, I hate this kind of weakly justified pessimism. Sure, if you just assume every new idea will fail you'll be right 95% of the time. But if everyone did that we'd be stuck in the dark ages. I applaud people and organizations that take that chance, innovating and trying new things even when there's a high chance of failure. Worst-case, they fail and other people can learn from their mistakes and hopefully do better next time. Best case, they change the world.
- rollinggoron 4y ago
  I wasn't trying to be pessimistic, just trying not the fall for the "too good to be true" hype machine common in tech (e.g. new batteries with 100x the capacity are right around the corner, carbon nanotubes uses, etc...). Is this a new idea, though? It's not like supersonic commercial jets are a new thing and they haven't been built. The economics of building a commercially viable production supersonic plane is much more difficult to do than building a car or writing a new website to disrupt Facebook or Google. I 100% agree that people need to be exploring this stuff. That being said, I'll believe it when I see it.

nfw2 4y ago

I also know nothing about the subject, but just to play devil's advocate here, doesn't SpaceX show that a startup could potentially solve hard physical engineering problems more effectively than established incumbents?

bell-cot 4y ago
Yes, definitely. BUT - there is a very wide and thinly-populated gulf between the folks who only talk about doing that, and those who actually deliver viable, working systems. SpaceX went from founding the company to their first orbital launch attempt in 4 years, was obviously d*mn close to successful orbit 1 year later, and actually made orbit another 18 months after that. Vs. Boom Supersonic, not having had to design nor build its own jet engines, is already 5+ years behind on their 1/3-scale, zero-passenger technology demonstrator even trying to taxi down the runway.
pclmulqdq 4y ago
It does, but a supersonic personal jet is a much bigger feat of engineering than a rocket that lands. Most people don't appreciate that. We had landing rockets in the 80's, but Boom was trying to do several things that are completely new. SpaceX's real technology is about launching the rockets cheaply, not re-using them (which is only part of the problem). And SpaceX started with engineers who knew a lot about the domain of the actual problem (rocket engines). Boom has never designed an engine. Starlink satellites are a great example of SpaceX solving engineering problems that an incumbent couldn't, but SpaceX was a pretty large company at the time the effort started.
- signatoremo 4y ago
  Boom isn’t trying to do something completely new. Concord was in commercial services for many years. Benefits and shortcomings are well known. OTOTH, there was never a rocket that could land, only suborbital prototypes. Shuttle doesn’t count since it’s reusable in name only, as it still cost substantial amount of money and time for refurbishing. In fact there are still no other reusable rockets, seven years after SpaceX did it for the 1st time.

klintcho 4y ago

This argument could be made about any big SV company the past 30 years. - Anyone of IBM, Microsoft or Yahoo could build a better (quicker and cheaper) search engine than what a bunch of new grads from Stanford can (Google) - Anyone of the car manufacturer can build a better (quicker and cheaper) electric car than a software millionaire (Tesla) I don't agree with the statement, I think there are numerous reason people embark on ambitious project that incumbents "could" do, but are not doing; - An unexpected insights, - A new research breakthrough from some other field - Collecting a bunch of the most bright people coming up at the same time in the field (Mueller for SpaceX comes to mind for instance) etc. But most of the time it's just that it's not really in their business to do a 100 million dollar - 1 billion bet on something that risky, they are in the business of returning like 7 - 10% a year to their shareholder, not producing 5x returns (like the VC/startup business).

raverbashing 4y ago
Except costs for prototyping and building a plane are (no kidding) 100x the costs of prototyping and building a car And that's for "easy" stuff like electric cars. Not a supersonic plane (which has a full bag of hurt to go with) If you don't believe me just look at the price tag of a brand new Cessna (which is old/proven/boring technology)
rollinggoron 4y ago
Eh, I figured I would get this response but writing software e.g. your IBM, Yahoo, and Microsoft example is much easier and faster to do than building a cutting edge, physical, supersonic commercial jet. To build Google, all you needed was a computer, and a new approach/algorithm to solving web search. Software companies are much easier to disrupt than physical product companies. As others have pointed out the Tesla isn't a great example either because building a car is still 100x easier to do than building aircraft, let alone supersonic planes. "Unexpected Insights" and "A new research breakthrough from some other field" seems to be handy wavy. A supersonic jet breakthrough is not something that can be discovered in a dorm room. It requires millions in research and expensive materials to build and test against.
- 4y ago

samatman 4y ago

I would say that a brand-new rocket company making a rocket which can land itself would sound more implausible than what you're describing, if we didn't all know that it in fact has happened. That doesn't mean Boom is that, however.

hef19898 4y ago
Landing rocket boosters happened in the 70s already, and said rocket company benefited heavily from NASA, government and defence contracts and research. If Boom would have had access to supersonic jet research from the government, along with government contracts, development or production doesn't matter, RR wouldn't have stopped the cooperation. Edit: Reusable or VTOL rocket were tested, successfully landing, in the early 90s by McDonnel Douglas under the DC-X program. No idea where the 70s thing came from...
- signatoremo 4y ago
  Which rockets landed in the 70s? Note that SpaceX didn’t get any meaningful defense contract until they’ve proved themselves with Falcon 9.
  - MichaelCollins 4y ago
    He must either be talking about the Apollo Lunar Module which first landed on the Moon in the 60s (but was not "landing a booster", much less on earth.), or more likely he's talking about the Delta Clipper which was in the 90s (and also not a rocket booster.) Probably the latter, because there are some low-brow skeptics on reddit and youtube who inexplicably seem to think the Falcon 9 is a stolen Delta Clipper with a new paint job.
    - hef19898 4y ago
      I kind of take ofense with the low-brow reddit sceptic :-) Obviously, a Falcon 9 is not a reused DC-X. The technologyvto land a booster was already there before, it wasn't invented by SpaceX and was discussed as far back as the 60s. SpaceX made it possible, which in itself is quite an achievement. That nobody else tried so is due to the fact that there were not enough launches to make it economically viable (I found a ESA study on that topic a couple of years ago and subsequently lost it again, Google and DDG fail to dig it up again ever since). And whether or not reusable booster do make econommic sense or not, and just how many launches are needed to break even, is impossible to tell without SpaceX financials, they are the only ones doing it right now, which we don't have.

deepnotderp 4y ago

Agreed, SpaceX has no chance against ULA /s

rockemsockem 4y ago

The reason why startups continue to make things that big companies don't is because your assumption that big companies *can* do it is wrong. They cannot due largely to organizational challenges and inertia in one direction or another. It is very rare that a large company successfully continues to innovate indefinitely.

tarunkotia 4y ago
Also known as Innovator's Dilemma https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma Most established players don't want to cannibalize their existing market by launching a product in a niche segment. Sales and Marketing $$$ eat into the profits which is not easy to justify when you are profitable. If you are fighting for your survival then it's easy to reallocate resources to fight.

pbreit 4y ago

"surely the existing plane manufacturers could do it quicker and cheaper" How could you possibly think that?