15 ms·

Engine makers sound downbeat on supersonic, leaving Boom in a bind

87 points by kejaed 4y ago

tomohawk 4y ago
This basically boils down to ESG. With companies like Blackrock owned Morningstar rating companies on that kind of criteria, there's no way that a company is going to put themselves in a position to be providing engines for this sort of thing.
runako 4y ago
Supersonic commercial service is interesting, but it was a small niche that the pandemic made even smaller. Constraints on the customer base: - Absolutely must have face-to-face meetings on another continent - Rich/"important" enough to pay for business-class transcontinental flights - Can't do any productive work on a normal flight, so important to reduce flight time - Not staying for a long visit, so cutting a couple of hours from the flight is important (Edit: added this item) - Not rich enough to fly charter That's a tough set of criteria, especially with CFOs looking to cut unnecessary business travel. Zoom is a lot cheaper than business-class travel.
- oblak 4y ago
  Yeah but doing important drug deals on zoom is a major no-no. Seriously, we know for a fact that all internet communications have been completely compromised for a long time. If they have ever been safe. It makes plenty of sense if money is no object and certain things have to be discussed. That said, it's a massive waste. I wonder what happened to Musk's idea to have rockets fill that niche
  - nemo1618 4y ago
    Curve25519, ChaCha20, and plenty of other cryptographic primitives haven't been comprised (and there's a good chance they never will be). You can absolutely communicate over the internet without others reading your messages. Metadata though... that's another story.
  - markdestouches 4y ago
    It has been a dumb idea from the start. In a nutshell, making the whole process secure to acceptable levels would slow things down to the point where it's the same time as a regular plane flight. Yet it would cost orders of magnitude more. Edit: I'm commenting on Musk's rocket travel proposal
  - cma 4y ago
    SpaceX announced the plan for cross-world rocket flights cheaper than a business class ticket in 2018, by 2028, and Musk doubled down on the timeframe in an interview in 2020. Boom doesnt have a chance of earning back its investment if it will only be able to operate for a few years before Musk comes through on his aggressive timeline. Passengers will need to be fitted for spacesuits and there is no launch abort system.
    - zarzavat 4y ago
      Musk’s service will never fly, it’s pure fantasy. There’s no way that governments are going to allow an ICBM through their airspace just because some businessman is willing to risk his life to get to a meeting on time. To say nothing of the environmental costs.
- ghaff 4y ago
  Yeah. People are obviously getting back to face-to-face meetings. But I'd at least like to think that jetting from NYC to London just to sign some documents or to shake hands on a deal over lunch is something we'll see less of. If you're doing a longer road tour anyway, saving a few hours on the transatlantic legs doesn't really buy you a whole lot.
  - raverbashing 4y ago
    You save more time by flying a 'private plane' (with checking/security lines + it will fly at your preferred time) than flying a commercial supersonic jet
    - ISL 4y ago
      I bet early Boom clients would get luxurious treatment and priority. Speed is obviously important to them -- they are willing to pay for it.
    - wongarsu 4y ago
      I assume the airlines that buy supersonic planes also have solutions to get the ~50 passengers/plane through check-in and security in no time at all.
      - runako 4y ago
        Oh this is absolutely another problem for supersonic time savings. Supersonic flight over the continents is problematic, but not everyone lives on a coast. So many customers will have to take slow planes to aggregation hubs, which can easily add hours to an itinerary. Edit: And the aggregation hubs may not all serve the same destinations. Could easily see SF residents having to fly commercial to NYC to catch a Boom to London, even though there might be a Boom that flies SF-Tokyo. Once you add up the fixed time costs of getting to the airport, security, flying to a supersonic hub, the percentage of time that can potentially be shaved off the itinerary dwindles.
        4y ago
- skrebbel 4y ago
  Hmm I’m not so sure. My sister used to be a project manager at an Enterprise software company. She lives in NL and was put on a project in Prague at some point. Think 10-20 engineers setting up some product at the customer site, ie it was worth tens of millions (licenses + consultancy fees). After months of mostly living in a hotel, she got tired of it, told he boss she wanted to go back to basketball training in her home town so wanted a different project. Her boss solved it by flying her to Prague and back every week so she could make basketball training on Thursday nights. I think that if there was supersonic flight they’d happily have found her a project in New York next and foot the bill, twice a week, just so she could keep going to basketball training and still run the project in person.
  - WJW 4y ago
    Honestly that sounds exactly like the type of "small niche" of customers that GP talks about. There can't be too many megacorps willing to do this and I bet most project managers wouldn't go for it either. Btw, that sounds like the worst solution your sister could have agreed to. She was tired of living in a hotel but is willing to keep living in an hotel and also fly back and forth between Prague and Amsterdam every week?
    - skrebbel 4y ago
      She’d live in the hotel 3-4 nights a week and, well, she did like the project itself.
  - runako 4y ago
    This is a dying niche (source: have worked in Enterprise software for 20 years, used to live on a plane like your sister) that is largely moving to cloud deployments run by remote teams (those teams may themselves be co-located). The other prevalent model is opening a satellite office on the customer's continent, so that staff can be semi-local with shorter commutes. And even if she was a good representative, look at the ratio: 10-20 engineers to 1 project manager flying supersonic. I'm not sure that's a great market niche. > if there was supersonic flight they’d happily have found her a project in New York next and foot the bill, twice a week I do have to laugh at this, because there are numerous consultants who do this now, using our current planes. Edit: Amsterdam<->NYC 4x monthly for business/first class (equivalent to Boom pricing) looks like it will shake out in the range of $30k monthly in airline tickets. Very few employees in a company will justify that kind of travel spend. (And still not fly on a corporate jet.)
- rishav_sharan 4y ago
  I am not sure if you travel cross continent a lot. I live in India and for me to travel to the US for work takes 24 hours of continuous travel over multiple flights. If I can cut it down to 12 hrs, that would be a game changer for me.
  - runako 4y ago
    This is a classic case of "supersonic is not the answer." Depending on the city pair, this is a ~15h nonstop on a commercial flight today. If an airline started serving your city pair, you would immediately save 9 hours. Also keep in mind that supersonic won't help beyond the coasts due to noise/overflight rules that would require flights to slow down over the continents anyway.
    - kylehotchkiss 4y ago
      One example of this is Los Angeles-Delhi. Probably possible with existing planes but would require cargo or passenger limits, which would make the route not profitable. No American airline is interested, given the connections available elsewhere, and Air India's (they've expressed interest in this pair before) habit of running routes at big losses will probably start to reduce now that they're privately owned. Airlines are perfectly happy to add more hops to your trip. If there was a supersonic LAX-Singapore (I doubt India would allow supersonic planes), at least the longest leg of the trip is mostly over ocean, supersonic, and the Singapore-DEL flight is just a normal one.
      - runako 4y ago
        Looks like United was running flights from SFO nonstop to Delhi until Russia closed their airspace to US flights. Looking at the list of longest nonstops, a hypothetical LA-Delhi, assuming usage of Russian airspace, flight would fit within the range of a couple of aircraft. The JFK-Singapore direct would still be hundreds of km longer.
      - smachiz 4y ago
        LAX-SIN is still more than 2x the best projected range of this plane.... Flying supersonic really guzzles gas, you're carrying gas to carry gas. Maybe if Boom added mid air refueling... but they'd have to slow down for an hour to do it.
- thetinguy 4y ago
  The Concorde made money for both Air France and British Airways.
  - sushid 4y ago
    At the cost of billions incurred by France and UK though. The economics never looked good for Boom.
  - runako 4y ago
    The Concord practically defines "small niche." Entirely possible it made money, but less money than could be made charging Concorde fares for First Class seats on normal flights.
  - mandevil 4y ago
    When you buy a plane for 1 pound/franc, and don't have to worry about paying any development or manufacturing costs, you should be able to make money. If you can't, it's a serious problem! And I'm not sure that Air France was actually making money. The story I heard was that AF wanted to retire their fleet after the accident, because they hadn't made money on it. BA balked because they were making money but having to pay full costs of fleet maintenance equipment, rather than splitting those with AF, changed the numbers enough that BA would have lost money, so the whole fleet was retired.
- kylehotchkiss 4y ago
  > Rich/"important" enough to pay for business-class transcontinental flights Business class from east to west (via emirates and qatar for example) can sometimes (more often pre-covid) be grabbed for $1000 above an economy ticket. The departing US business class ticket costs often seem very specific to our market. A lot of people on HN can bump up their tickets while flying outside the country even just for vacations.
- stult 4y ago
  > Not rich enough to fly charter The growing backlash against the environmental impact of private jets may change this calculation a bit.
  - foobiekr 4y ago
    The backlash only matters if you get caught. Low key charter is a luxury good. I've never done it, but I know a lot of younger co-workers who have "splurged" on chartering for destination vacations/weddings/etc. at $10k each or whatever. That kind of diffuse luxe stuff will not get cleaned up by pushback.
- foobiekr 4y ago
  Even if there was a business here, it is not a good _startup business_. Startups, especially if any hardware is involved, mostly need to be companies that are leveraging an entire stack of off-the-shelf, on-the-market, mostly commodity components into a product or solution which is mostly, at least at first, a packaging exercise on the HW side and perhaps novel go to market (AAS, for example), UI/UX, etc. experience on the SW and solution side. Very few startups are going to work outside of these guide rails, and even when they do the exit/invested is pretty poor at this point and has been getting poorer for at least 20 years. You get to tweak the last 5-10% of your tech stack in HW and had better have something really compelling as a result. There's probably _business_ in SST but between the tech stack, the dependencies, and just plain practical business issues like liability/etc. not a business that you get to as a startup.
  - credit_guy 4y ago
    By this token, we should never see fission and fusion startups. Yet NuScale is quite successful. They are now a publicly listed company (ticker SMR) with a market cap of more than half a billion dollars. Not quite a unicorn yet, but then they did not ship any reactor either. Once they do, their market cap will shoot up. Helion is the startup that Sam Altman is so happy to talk about (e.g. [1]). Maybe it will not succeed. Scratch that, most likely it will not succeed. But if it has a 1% chance to succeed, then Sam will see his investment go up by a factor of 10000, so in expected value it is a winner. Boom is just the same. The chance it will fail is about 90%. But if it does succeed, it will return much, much more than 10x to their early investors. [1] https://blog.samaltman.com/helion https://blog.samaltman.com/helion
    - foobiekr 4y ago
      You had it right at the first sentence. Becoming publicly listed at a time when total garbage was getting on the market via SPACs (which is what NuScale did) is not validation of anything. Boom has a 99.999% chance of failing. Without an engine lined up, they aren't even in the business they're claiming they are, and haven't been for years.
- UltraViolence 4y ago
  A private jet (either owned, leased or rented) is a much better option for executive and VIP's than a supersonic one.
- spaceywilly 4y ago
  Even if there was a business case, the bigger issue with Concorde was the sonic boom. This seriously limits the number of routes for any supersonic plane, essentially limiting it to NYC-London. Building a plane for one route is never going to make any sense. Boom never had any real plans that I know of to fix the… boom
- ericbarrett 4y ago
  Boom hasn't solved the shockwave issue, have they? The Concorde didn't do overland routes over populated areas because of this. For example the NYC <-> Mexico City route overflew Florida for a time, and it would slow down to subsonic speeds over land. So even if Boom launches you likely wouldn't get cross-Europe routes.
TrevorJ 4y ago
One issue they face here is that for most flights, the time wasters aren't what happens once you are in the seat of the plane. It's everything that happens before that at the airport.
- ghaff 4y ago
  Usually, I breeze through with TSA Pre but neither myself nor my car service likes to bank on that. (Also slowdowns on my >1 hour drive to the airport.) To your point, even if it's not security, there's a certain amount of overhead and buffer for a lot of people going to the airport for a flight.
- xeromal 4y ago
  These would be smart to fly out of the smaller airports in an area like out of long beach or burbank instead of LAX. Much easier and faster experience. That's how JSX operates.
deleted 4y ago
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metadat 4y ago
> supersonic passenger aircraft would use 7-9 times more fuel per passenger, per kilometre, than subsonic jets burning fossil fuel Ick.
- stephen_g 4y ago
  Yeah, that does seem like a massive drawback. Even hypothetically with SAF (Sustainable Aviation Fuel) from carbon capture that they’re spruiking, that’s still a huge amount of energy that could be used far more efficiently by not flying supersonic… If it was more like 3x, that might make it work on a cost benefit in certain cases, but physics makes fools of us all it seems…
  - cobaltoxide 4y ago
    The part of Boom's argument that makes absolutely no sense to me -- their argument about how they will be "sustainable" because they will burn SAF -- is that the same argument could be applied to traditional commercial subsonic jet aircraft.
- danw1979 4y ago
  I really hope this fails.
manacit 4y ago
This company is the next Theranos, and I don't think it's even that bold of a statement to say. They don't have an engine for a plane that they have yet to fly, for a concept that has limited commercial viability in the first place. We will look at companies like United and American Airlines that signed letters of intent to purchase these as foolish idiots. In the day and age of remote meetings, there is nearly no alpha in being able to be in London three hours earlier from NYC. You would simply hop on a Zoom call if it were that urgent. Nobody is going to pay up for the cost if they are flying for leisure. There are limited viable routes in in the first place.
- ceejayoz 4y ago
  > We will look at companies like United and American Airlines that signed letters of intent to purchase these as foolish idiots. Has it cost them anything at this point? A little PR bump for zero expense and zero consequences doesn't seem all that foolish.
- rippercushions 4y ago
  LOIs are nearly free. They're basically securing a spot at the front of the line just in case Boom manages to deliver. Unlike Theranos, supersonic engines already exist and they are regularly used by the military. The issue is that none of the big boys are willing to pony up a lot of money to build, test and certify one for civilian use unless they can definitely get paid for their effort. And yes, there are willing buyers who will pay ludicrous amounts for comfort or speed, as the increasingly elaborate arms race in first class (eg. multi-room suites a la Etihad's Residence) and the entire private jet market demonstrate. The Concorde was profitable towards the end of its life despite mind-bogglingly high fuel costs, so there's definitely a market if -- and it's a big if -- Boom can pull it off.
- seehafer 4y ago
  > This company is the next Theranos, and I don't think it's even that bold of a statement to say. It’s a very bold statement to say when you have no evidence that Boom would or even could ship an airplane that would put people’s lives in danger. Theranos was not simply a company that made large promises that required leaps in technology and then lied repeatedly about having succeeded in making those leaps. They risked patient safety by providing phony blood test results. It’s important not throw around that epithet unless it’s earned.
BasilPH 4y ago
> Boom’s other partners include Safran Landing Systems, Collins Aerospace, fuel-system company Eaton and Northrop Grumman, which is helping with a military variant. Does anybody know more about this "military variant"?
- cwmma 4y ago
  Air Force One seems to be the military use case.
  - cobaltoxide 4y ago
    Air Force One is gigantic: a modified 747, with offices, bedrooms, etc. That would not fit inside of Boom's aircraft.
MichaelZuo 4y ago
If it costs in the same ballpark per seat as a long range private jet, then for nearly all city pairs under roughly 5000km it's difficult to find an economic justification. Especially if the plane needs long runways to takeoff. Due to the travel times others have touched on to the major airports in nearly all big cities. Lighter private jets have a huge advantage in travel time of being able to take off from the closest small airports. If it's a really long route, like Sydney to London, then it would start making sense. But this could not support the thousands of engines needed to break even on R&D costs.
- nilsbunger 4y ago
  It's amazing how much of end-to-end travel time is NOT the plane flying. It would be much more cost-effective to optimize everything besides the actual flight time for almost all flights. Things like: * Airport-to-city travel time * Airport security time * Optimize boarding (very straightforward solutions but require passenger education) * Speeding up taxiing / takeoff sequencing (not sure how but there's gotta be a better way than what we do now) Each of those are challenging but would be more impactful (and more solvable?) than supersonic flight time!
  - spaetzleesser 4y ago
    I think having a private jet solves the first three.
    - smachiz 4y ago
      it also solves the 4th, since you typically are going to land your private jet at Teterboro instead of JFK or LGA (i.e. small fields without a lot of taxiing, or more importantly in NY, queuing for a runway (I've heard that we're 23rd in line for takeoff more times than I can count)).
- Schroedingersat 4y ago
  It doesn't work for long routes because maximum range is capped at around 8000km due to physics and the energy density of fuel.
gandalfian 4y ago
Presumably if nasa makes their x-59 low boom noise plane technology work then everyone will jump onboard? And if not... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_X-59_QueSST https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_X-59_QueSST
insane_dreamer 4y ago
supersonic is cool, but a solution looking for a problem
torginus 4y ago
I think the reality is that aerospace engineering is literal magic - the amount of resources, facilities, time and brainpower is absolutely it takes to develop anything approaching modern military hardware in performance makes it prohibitively expensive to fund the development on market terms. Developing a jet engine that could allow Boom to meet its performance targets is a nation-state level endeavor.
monkaiju 4y ago
I really hope supersonic passenger aviation stays dead. Its environmental footprint alone is completely unjustifiable.
- qayxc 4y ago
  Depends. If (and that's a mighty big "if") the fuel situation could be sorted out in terms of being able to produce it in a sustainable way, the footprint would be quite minimal compared most other modes of transportation. You also wouldn't need to add any additional infrastructure as opposed to ideas like vac-trains or MAGLEV in general.
  - Schroedingersat 4y ago
    > You also wouldn't need to add any additional infrastructure as opposed to ideas like vac-trains or MAGLEV in general. You still need one of the most expensive parts of that infrastructure which is the rights of way, stations/highway interchanges and a transport corridor from the city to an airport (which can't be as close as a conventional airport due to 5x the flight volume, louder engines and sonic booms). The 900km of a rail corridor in the low population regions doesn't cost as much as that 30km of highway or metro tunnel directly under the CBD and 70km of arterials, onramps and interchanges.
UltraViolence 4y ago
Boom is basically a scaled down Concorde when you look at it from a distance. They've reduced the speed somewhat to keep the fuel burn within certain limits, but it has the same drawbacks that Concorde had: a supersonic boom and enormous fuel burn per passenger. In this day an age of Climate Hysteria this simply won't fly. I foresee the failure of all supersonic airplane ventures until NASA comes up with a viable sonic-boom free design. Even then, the fuel burn could still make it unsalable.
therealbilly 4y ago
I thought Boom had a smaller plane in the works. Trying to design a big 4 engine plane sounds daunting to me. A smaller craft with two engines sounds somewhat easier. Something able to transport 25 people maybe.
hi_herbert 4y ago
This article is a bit fallacious/misleading: I have no clue wether Boom design is vaporware or serious engineering but: 1) The initial premise, that there is a costly need to design a new engine is meta-unecessary AKA not necessarily necessary. The article raise 2 reasons for a new engine: fuel efficiency and noise reduction. I'd argue the concorde engine (the Rolls-Royce/Snecma Olympus 593) is excellent regarding efficiency -> The overall thermal efficiency of the engine in supersonic cruising flight (supercruise) was about 43%, which at the time was the highest figure recorded for any normal thermodynamic machine.[3] I don't know for sure what is the SOTA efficiency nowadays but IIRC last generations engines are ~10% more fuel efficient than the ones from the 80s, which where at the time behing the Rolls-royce engine hence I even doubt modern engine have better thermal efficiency than aforementioned 43%. Regarding the topic of thermal efficiency, engines are not supposed to reach 43% without being supercritical, did Rolls-royce bypass physics laws? There must be something I ignore here. Anyway even if (?) we could design supercritical jet engines the best possible thermal efficiency would be 46-7% AKA a minor improvement. Boom can increase fuel efficiency via the airplane architecture with e.g. composites. The near commercialisation new civil aircraft from china achieved a 10% reduction doing so. The same can be said for noise reduction. Hence what Boom should do is simply to order Rolls royce to produce the same engines again. However one should know that R&D for the successor of the concorde engine has already been spent and such engine has been designed. Unfortunately the U.S imperialist oppressive bans killed the concorde economics before the production of said engine, cf: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolls-Royce/Snecma_Olympus_593 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolls-Royce/Snecma_Olympus_593.... Now about the noise levels let's adress the fact that it is a non-issue. 1) If you look at the empirical scientific comparisons, the mean noise of the concorde is significantly lower than many civil airplanes, especially the ones with 4 engines. 2) The boom while intense, is very transient. It is not heard from people inside the airplane. It is a non-problem for the obvious reason that your jet does not need to be supersonic for 100% of the trajectory, therefore a plane can and should go to very high altitude (already a supersonic requirement) and/or above low density population (rural, ocean) and only then bypass the speed of sound, making the noise boom a moot problem. While this solution is trivial, political bans and people hysteria isn't. What is at stakes? A lot of things, supersonics isn't just cool, it is a life saving technology that can allow the transfer of key people in records time (expert surgeon in niche disease emergency for example) which can have very high utilitaristic value. It can also make it much more pratical for key people to meet physically (e.g. key academicians for a symposium about advancing the state of the art in a topic) which is high impact considering cognitive biases regarding human agency. Note however there are other supersonic engine makers than rolls royce, for example any country that makes supersonic military jets can obtain such engines. It is easy to forget that the first commercial supersonic engine was not the concorde but a russian tupolev. While the tupolev has reliability issue, few know they had an alternative engine (likely more reliable). In addition to the tupolev engines, I would look into the state of the art https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturn_AL-31 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturn_AL-31 Regarding SOTA civilian turbofan there is the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviadvigatel_PD-14#PD-35 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviadvigatel_PD-14#PD-35 in development, although it can power an antonov (!) and seems very versatile I wonder if (not a turbojet) it can perform supersonicity without afterburners. regarding those options however, russia bad, china bad.
MauranKilom 4y ago
That title is unusually difficult to parse, especially since you only realize halfway through that it's about aircraft.
- JasonFruit 4y ago
  It's almost as though I'm right when I say that making nouns of adjectives causes confusion. If we must have nouns from serverless, solar, and contactless, we're damn well going to get supersonic, too.
- danpalmer 4y ago
  It's on an airline industry news website, I think they just know their audience.
- ape4 4y ago
  It could be about music
  - dylan604 4y ago
    Or the ++ version of a hedgehog franchise
- MarkMc 4y ago
  May I plug my Hacker News app reader? In the app the image associated with this title makes it immediately clear it's about aircraft https://mclarentimes.com/ https://mclarentimes.com/
rayiner 4y ago
Anyone who has studied aerospace engineering in the last couple of decades was taught that the economics of supersonic travel are unworkable in an environment where fossil fuel energy costs what it does and is on the way out altogether. I was hoping Boom had cracked some constraint in that equation.
- bell-cot 4y ago
  Peeking at Boom's Wikipedia page - their 1/3 scale "technology demonstrator" test aircraft, which they originally said would fly in 2017, has been changed & pushed back & changed & pushed back... And it still has not managed to even taxi down a runway. It doesn't much matter what is/isn't possible, or what could/couldn't be economical, if the company & engineers who say they are working to develop it...are not actually capable of shipping even a puny nerfed toy version of their supposed product. My guess: the RR engineers concluded "maybe it's possible, but these idiots will never achieve it". Then quietly shared that with their colleagues at other engine makers.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - rjsw 4y ago
    The guess in a thread commenting on an earlier article was that Boom expected RR to fund the development of a new engine. Haven't seen any explanation on why Boom can't just buy a few current fast jet engines for their demonstrator.
    - mrguyorama 4y ago
      Because no existing commercial engine can supercruise. It needs to be a new design.
    - bell-cot 4y ago
      Wikipedia strongly suggests that Boom already has bought some of these engines - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Electric_J85 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Electric_J85 - to power the demonstrator. My impression is that Boom was not looking to RR for engines for their demonstrator, but for their full-size production model. Those engines would have to be carefully designed & optimized for economic long-haul supersonic operation. (Vs. existing supersonic military jet engines are basically cost-no-object gas-guzzling hot rods.)
blutack 4y ago
Question for anyone with inside insight... When something like Boom announces: American said it too had paid a “non-refundable deposit” – it also did not say how much – as part of an agreement to buy up to 20 of the jets. Does that really mean AA paid them $1 (or a nominal amount) in return for the marketing impact of having AA's name mentioned in a few press releases?
- dylan604 4y ago
  Think of it as AA backed a Kickstarter campaign that never got off the ground.
rjsw 4y ago
An earlier related thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32768166 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32768166
ghaff 4y ago
I wonder if United will now take down the Boom advertising they have (inexplicably) scattered around various airport terminals.
zionic 4y ago
Starship E2E (earth 2 earth) will make in-atmo supersonic pointless.
- jraines 4y ago
  If you’re healthy enough to withstand 3 Gs and they make rocketry about a million times safer
  - zionic 4y ago
    E2E payload weight will be much lower than typical LEO configs, total altitude lower. You don't need to circularize etc etc. This means you can spend more fuel/be less efficient overall for a much more comfortable acceleration profile. In terms of safety, starship will fly hundreds, perhaps thousands of times before people fly on them. They'll get there.
- ramesh31 4y ago
  I have a feeling most normal people will be reticent to strap themselves into a suborbital rocket.
  - qayxc 4y ago
    And don't forget the required pressure suits. You can't just to use simple masks like in airplanes, since cabin pressure loss at heights beyond 25km would make breathing using just oxygen masks impossible.
- Ekaros 4y ago
  And would such craft be allowed to launch from your average airport?
  - dylan604 4y ago
    Does a cruise ship launch from your average airport?
newaccount2021 4y ago

87 points by kejaed 4y ago

This basically boils down to ESG. With companies like Blackrock owned Morningstar rating companies on that kind of criteria, there's no way that a company is going to put themselves in a position to be providing engines for this sort of thing.

runako 4y ago

Supersonic commercial service is interesting, but it was a small niche that the pandemic made even smaller. Constraints on the customer base: - Absolutely must have face-to-face meetings on another continent - Rich/"important" enough to pay for business-class transcontinental flights - Can't do any productive work on a normal flight, so important to reduce flight time - Not staying for a long visit, so cutting a couple of hours from the flight is important (Edit: added this item) - Not rich enough to fly charter That's a tough set of criteria, especially with CFOs looking to cut unnecessary business travel. Zoom is a lot cheaper than business-class travel.

oblak 4y ago
Yeah but doing important drug deals on zoom is a major no-no. Seriously, we know for a fact that all internet communications have been completely compromised for a long time. If they have ever been safe. It makes plenty of sense if money is no object and certain things have to be discussed. That said, it's a massive waste. I wonder what happened to Musk's idea to have rockets fill that niche
- nemo1618 4y ago
  Curve25519, ChaCha20, and plenty of other cryptographic primitives haven't been comprised (and there's a good chance they never will be). You can absolutely communicate over the internet without others reading your messages. Metadata though... that's another story.
- markdestouches 4y ago
  It has been a dumb idea from the start. In a nutshell, making the whole process secure to acceptable levels would slow things down to the point where it's the same time as a regular plane flight. Yet it would cost orders of magnitude more. Edit: I'm commenting on Musk's rocket travel proposal
- cma 4y ago
  SpaceX announced the plan for cross-world rocket flights cheaper than a business class ticket in 2018, by 2028, and Musk doubled down on the timeframe in an interview in 2020. Boom doesnt have a chance of earning back its investment if it will only be able to operate for a few years before Musk comes through on his aggressive timeline. Passengers will need to be fitted for spacesuits and there is no launch abort system.
  - zarzavat 4y ago
    Musk’s service will never fly, it’s pure fantasy. There’s no way that governments are going to allow an ICBM through their airspace just because some businessman is willing to risk his life to get to a meeting on time. To say nothing of the environmental costs.
ghaff 4y ago
Yeah. People are obviously getting back to face-to-face meetings. But I'd at least like to think that jetting from NYC to London just to sign some documents or to shake hands on a deal over lunch is something we'll see less of. If you're doing a longer road tour anyway, saving a few hours on the transatlantic legs doesn't really buy you a whole lot.
- raverbashing 4y ago
  You save more time by flying a 'private plane' (with checking/security lines + it will fly at your preferred time) than flying a commercial supersonic jet
  - ISL 4y ago
    I bet early Boom clients would get luxurious treatment and priority. Speed is obviously important to them -- they are willing to pay for it.
  - wongarsu 4y ago
    I assume the airlines that buy supersonic planes also have solutions to get the ~50 passengers/plane through check-in and security in no time at all.
    - runako 4y ago
      Oh this is absolutely another problem for supersonic time savings. Supersonic flight over the continents is problematic, but not everyone lives on a coast. So many customers will have to take slow planes to aggregation hubs, which can easily add hours to an itinerary. Edit: And the aggregation hubs may not all serve the same destinations. Could easily see SF residents having to fly commercial to NYC to catch a Boom to London, even though there might be a Boom that flies SF-Tokyo. Once you add up the fixed time costs of getting to the airport, security, flying to a supersonic hub, the percentage of time that can potentially be shaved off the itinerary dwindles.
      - 4y ago
skrebbel 4y ago
Hmm I’m not so sure. My sister used to be a project manager at an Enterprise software company. She lives in NL and was put on a project in Prague at some point. Think 10-20 engineers setting up some product at the customer site, ie it was worth tens of millions (licenses + consultancy fees). After months of mostly living in a hotel, she got tired of it, told he boss she wanted to go back to basketball training in her home town so wanted a different project. Her boss solved it by flying her to Prague and back every week so she could make basketball training on Thursday nights. I think that if there was supersonic flight they’d happily have found her a project in New York next and foot the bill, twice a week, just so she could keep going to basketball training and still run the project in person.
- WJW 4y ago
  Honestly that sounds exactly like the type of "small niche" of customers that GP talks about. There can't be too many megacorps willing to do this and I bet most project managers wouldn't go for it either. Btw, that sounds like the worst solution your sister could have agreed to. She was tired of living in a hotel but is willing to keep living in an hotel and also fly back and forth between Prague and Amsterdam every week?
  - skrebbel 4y ago
    She’d live in the hotel 3-4 nights a week and, well, she did like the project itself.
- runako 4y ago
  This is a dying niche (source: have worked in Enterprise software for 20 years, used to live on a plane like your sister) that is largely moving to cloud deployments run by remote teams (those teams may themselves be co-located). The other prevalent model is opening a satellite office on the customer's continent, so that staff can be semi-local with shorter commutes. And even if she was a good representative, look at the ratio: 10-20 engineers to 1 project manager flying supersonic. I'm not sure that's a great market niche. > if there was supersonic flight they’d happily have found her a project in New York next and foot the bill, twice a week I do have to laugh at this, because there are numerous consultants who do this now, using our current planes. Edit: Amsterdam<->NYC 4x monthly for business/first class (equivalent to Boom pricing) looks like it will shake out in the range of $30k monthly in airline tickets. Very few employees in a company will justify that kind of travel spend. (And still not fly on a corporate jet.)
rishav_sharan 4y ago
I am not sure if you travel cross continent a lot. I live in India and for me to travel to the US for work takes 24 hours of continuous travel over multiple flights. If I can cut it down to 12 hrs, that would be a game changer for me.
- runako 4y ago
  This is a classic case of "supersonic is not the answer." Depending on the city pair, this is a ~15h nonstop on a commercial flight today. If an airline started serving your city pair, you would immediately save 9 hours. Also keep in mind that supersonic won't help beyond the coasts due to noise/overflight rules that would require flights to slow down over the continents anyway.
  - kylehotchkiss 4y ago
    One example of this is Los Angeles-Delhi. Probably possible with existing planes but would require cargo or passenger limits, which would make the route not profitable. No American airline is interested, given the connections available elsewhere, and Air India's (they've expressed interest in this pair before) habit of running routes at big losses will probably start to reduce now that they're privately owned. Airlines are perfectly happy to add more hops to your trip. If there was a supersonic LAX-Singapore (I doubt India would allow supersonic planes), at least the longest leg of the trip is mostly over ocean, supersonic, and the Singapore-DEL flight is just a normal one.
    - runako 4y ago
      Looks like United was running flights from SFO nonstop to Delhi until Russia closed their airspace to US flights. Looking at the list of longest nonstops, a hypothetical LA-Delhi, assuming usage of Russian airspace, flight would fit within the range of a couple of aircraft. The JFK-Singapore direct would still be hundreds of km longer.
    - smachiz 4y ago
      LAX-SIN is still more than 2x the best projected range of this plane.... Flying supersonic really guzzles gas, you're carrying gas to carry gas. Maybe if Boom added mid air refueling... but they'd have to slow down for an hour to do it.
thetinguy 4y ago
The Concorde made money for both Air France and British Airways.
- sushid 4y ago
  At the cost of billions incurred by France and UK though. The economics never looked good for Boom.
- runako 4y ago
  The Concord practically defines "small niche." Entirely possible it made money, but less money than could be made charging Concorde fares for First Class seats on normal flights.
- mandevil 4y ago
  When you buy a plane for 1 pound/franc, and don't have to worry about paying any development or manufacturing costs, you should be able to make money. If you can't, it's a serious problem! And I'm not sure that Air France was actually making money. The story I heard was that AF wanted to retire their fleet after the accident, because they hadn't made money on it. BA balked because they were making money but having to pay full costs of fleet maintenance equipment, rather than splitting those with AF, changed the numbers enough that BA would have lost money, so the whole fleet was retired.
kylehotchkiss 4y ago
> Rich/"important" enough to pay for business-class transcontinental flights Business class from east to west (via emirates and qatar for example) can sometimes (more often pre-covid) be grabbed for $1000 above an economy ticket. The departing US business class ticket costs often seem very specific to our market. A lot of people on HN can bump up their tickets while flying outside the country even just for vacations.
stult 4y ago
> Not rich enough to fly charter The growing backlash against the environmental impact of private jets may change this calculation a bit.
- foobiekr 4y ago
  The backlash only matters if you get caught. Low key charter is a luxury good. I've never done it, but I know a lot of younger co-workers who have "splurged" on chartering for destination vacations/weddings/etc. at $10k each or whatever. That kind of diffuse luxe stuff will not get cleaned up by pushback.
foobiekr 4y ago
Even if there was a business here, it is not a good _startup business_. Startups, especially if any hardware is involved, mostly need to be companies that are leveraging an entire stack of off-the-shelf, on-the-market, mostly commodity components into a product or solution which is mostly, at least at first, a packaging exercise on the HW side and perhaps novel go to market (AAS, for example), UI/UX, etc. experience on the SW and solution side. Very few startups are going to work outside of these guide rails, and even when they do the exit/invested is pretty poor at this point and has been getting poorer for at least 20 years. You get to tweak the last 5-10% of your tech stack in HW and had better have something really compelling as a result. There's probably _business_ in SST but between the tech stack, the dependencies, and just plain practical business issues like liability/etc. not a business that you get to as a startup.
- credit_guy 4y ago
  By this token, we should never see fission and fusion startups. Yet NuScale is quite successful. They are now a publicly listed company (ticker SMR) with a market cap of more than half a billion dollars. Not quite a unicorn yet, but then they did not ship any reactor either. Once they do, their market cap will shoot up. Helion is the startup that Sam Altman is so happy to talk about (e.g. [1]). Maybe it will not succeed. Scratch that, most likely it will not succeed. But if it has a 1% chance to succeed, then Sam will see his investment go up by a factor of 10000, so in expected value it is a winner. Boom is just the same. The chance it will fail is about 90%. But if it does succeed, it will return much, much more than 10x to their early investors. [1] https://blog.samaltman.com/helion https://blog.samaltman.com/helion
  - foobiekr 4y ago
    You had it right at the first sentence. Becoming publicly listed at a time when total garbage was getting on the market via SPACs (which is what NuScale did) is not validation of anything. Boom has a 99.999% chance of failing. Without an engine lined up, they aren't even in the business they're claiming they are, and haven't been for years.
UltraViolence 4y ago
A private jet (either owned, leased or rented) is a much better option for executive and VIP's than a supersonic one.
spaceywilly 4y ago
Even if there was a business case, the bigger issue with Concorde was the sonic boom. This seriously limits the number of routes for any supersonic plane, essentially limiting it to NYC-London. Building a plane for one route is never going to make any sense. Boom never had any real plans that I know of to fix the… boom
ericbarrett 4y ago
Boom hasn't solved the shockwave issue, have they? The Concorde didn't do overland routes over populated areas because of this. For example the NYC <-> Mexico City route overflew Florida for a time, and it would slow down to subsonic speeds over land. So even if Boom launches you likely wouldn't get cross-Europe routes.

TrevorJ 4y ago

One issue they face here is that for most flights, the time wasters aren't what happens once you are in the seat of the plane. It's everything that happens before that at the airport.

ghaff 4y ago
Usually, I breeze through with TSA Pre but neither myself nor my car service likes to bank on that. (Also slowdowns on my >1 hour drive to the airport.) To your point, even if it's not security, there's a certain amount of overhead and buffer for a lot of people going to the airport for a flight.
xeromal 4y ago
These would be smart to fly out of the smaller airports in an area like out of long beach or burbank instead of LAX. Much easier and faster experience. That's how JSX operates.

deleted 4y ago

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metadat 4y ago

> supersonic passenger aircraft would use 7-9 times more fuel per passenger, per kilometre, than subsonic jets burning fossil fuel Ick.

stephen_g 4y ago
Yeah, that does seem like a massive drawback. Even hypothetically with SAF (Sustainable Aviation Fuel) from carbon capture that they’re spruiking, that’s still a huge amount of energy that could be used far more efficiently by not flying supersonic… If it was more like 3x, that might make it work on a cost benefit in certain cases, but physics makes fools of us all it seems…
- cobaltoxide 4y ago
  The part of Boom's argument that makes absolutely no sense to me -- their argument about how they will be "sustainable" because they will burn SAF -- is that the same argument could be applied to traditional commercial subsonic jet aircraft.
danw1979 4y ago
I really hope this fails.

manacit 4y ago

This company is the next Theranos, and I don't think it's even that bold of a statement to say. They don't have an engine for a plane that they have yet to fly, for a concept that has limited commercial viability in the first place. We will look at companies like United and American Airlines that signed letters of intent to purchase these as foolish idiots. In the day and age of remote meetings, there is nearly no alpha in being able to be in London three hours earlier from NYC. You would simply hop on a Zoom call if it were that urgent. Nobody is going to pay up for the cost if they are flying for leisure. There are limited viable routes in in the first place.

ceejayoz 4y ago
> We will look at companies like United and American Airlines that signed letters of intent to purchase these as foolish idiots. Has it cost them anything at this point? A little PR bump for zero expense and zero consequences doesn't seem all that foolish.
rippercushions 4y ago
LOIs are nearly free. They're basically securing a spot at the front of the line just in case Boom manages to deliver. Unlike Theranos, supersonic engines already exist and they are regularly used by the military. The issue is that none of the big boys are willing to pony up a lot of money to build, test and certify one for civilian use unless they can definitely get paid for their effort. And yes, there are willing buyers who will pay ludicrous amounts for comfort or speed, as the increasingly elaborate arms race in first class (eg. multi-room suites a la Etihad's Residence) and the entire private jet market demonstrate. The Concorde was profitable towards the end of its life despite mind-bogglingly high fuel costs, so there's definitely a market if -- and it's a big if -- Boom can pull it off.
seehafer 4y ago
> This company is the next Theranos, and I don't think it's even that bold of a statement to say. It’s a very bold statement to say when you have no evidence that Boom would or even could ship an airplane that would put people’s lives in danger. Theranos was not simply a company that made large promises that required leaps in technology and then lied repeatedly about having succeeded in making those leaps. They risked patient safety by providing phony blood test results. It’s important not throw around that epithet unless it’s earned.

BasilPH 4y ago

> Boom’s other partners include Safran Landing Systems, Collins Aerospace, fuel-system company Eaton and Northrop Grumman, which is helping with a military variant. Does anybody know more about this "military variant"?

cwmma 4y ago
Air Force One seems to be the military use case.
- cobaltoxide 4y ago
  Air Force One is gigantic: a modified 747, with offices, bedrooms, etc. That would not fit inside of Boom's aircraft.

MichaelZuo 4y ago

If it costs in the same ballpark per seat as a long range private jet, then for nearly all city pairs under roughly 5000km it's difficult to find an economic justification. Especially if the plane needs long runways to takeoff. Due to the travel times others have touched on to the major airports in nearly all big cities. Lighter private jets have a huge advantage in travel time of being able to take off from the closest small airports. If it's a really long route, like Sydney to London, then it would start making sense. But this could not support the thousands of engines needed to break even on R&D costs.

nilsbunger 4y ago
It's amazing how much of end-to-end travel time is NOT the plane flying. It would be much more cost-effective to optimize everything besides the actual flight time for almost all flights. Things like: * Airport-to-city travel time * Airport security time * Optimize boarding (very straightforward solutions but require passenger education) * Speeding up taxiing / takeoff sequencing (not sure how but there's gotta be a better way than what we do now) Each of those are challenging but would be more impactful (and more solvable?) than supersonic flight time!
- spaetzleesser 4y ago
  I think having a private jet solves the first three.
  - smachiz 4y ago
    it also solves the 4th, since you typically are going to land your private jet at Teterboro instead of JFK or LGA (i.e. small fields without a lot of taxiing, or more importantly in NY, queuing for a runway (I've heard that we're 23rd in line for takeoff more times than I can count)).
Schroedingersat 4y ago
It doesn't work for long routes because maximum range is capped at around 8000km due to physics and the energy density of fuel.

gandalfian 4y ago

Presumably if nasa makes their x-59 low boom noise plane technology work then everyone will jump onboard? And if not... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_X-59_QueSST https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_X-59_QueSST

insane_dreamer 4y ago

supersonic is cool, but a solution looking for a problem

torginus 4y ago

I think the reality is that aerospace engineering is literal magic - the amount of resources, facilities, time and brainpower is absolutely it takes to develop anything approaching modern military hardware in performance makes it prohibitively expensive to fund the development on market terms. Developing a jet engine that could allow Boom to meet its performance targets is a nation-state level endeavor.

monkaiju 4y ago

I really hope supersonic passenger aviation stays dead. Its environmental footprint alone is completely unjustifiable.

qayxc 4y ago
Depends. If (and that's a mighty big "if") the fuel situation could be sorted out in terms of being able to produce it in a sustainable way, the footprint would be quite minimal compared most other modes of transportation. You also wouldn't need to add any additional infrastructure as opposed to ideas like vac-trains or MAGLEV in general.
- Schroedingersat 4y ago
  > You also wouldn't need to add any additional infrastructure as opposed to ideas like vac-trains or MAGLEV in general. You still need one of the most expensive parts of that infrastructure which is the rights of way, stations/highway interchanges and a transport corridor from the city to an airport (which can't be as close as a conventional airport due to 5x the flight volume, louder engines and sonic booms). The 900km of a rail corridor in the low population regions doesn't cost as much as that 30km of highway or metro tunnel directly under the CBD and 70km of arterials, onramps and interchanges.

UltraViolence 4y ago

Boom is basically a scaled down Concorde when you look at it from a distance. They've reduced the speed somewhat to keep the fuel burn within certain limits, but it has the same drawbacks that Concorde had: a supersonic boom and enormous fuel burn per passenger. In this day an age of Climate Hysteria this simply won't fly. I foresee the failure of all supersonic airplane ventures until NASA comes up with a viable sonic-boom free design. Even then, the fuel burn could still make it unsalable.

therealbilly 4y ago

I thought Boom had a smaller plane in the works. Trying to design a big 4 engine plane sounds daunting to me. A smaller craft with two engines sounds somewhat easier. Something able to transport 25 people maybe.

hi_herbert 4y ago

This article is a bit fallacious/misleading: I have no clue wether Boom design is vaporware or serious engineering but: 1) The initial premise, that there is a costly need to design a new engine is meta-unecessary AKA not necessarily necessary. The article raise 2 reasons for a new engine: fuel efficiency and noise reduction. I'd argue the concorde engine (the Rolls-Royce/Snecma Olympus 593) is excellent regarding efficiency -> The overall thermal efficiency of the engine in supersonic cruising flight (supercruise) was about 43%, which at the time was the highest figure recorded for any normal thermodynamic machine.[3] I don't know for sure what is the SOTA efficiency nowadays but IIRC last generations engines are ~10% more fuel efficient than the ones from the 80s, which where at the time behing the Rolls-royce engine hence I even doubt modern engine have better thermal efficiency than aforementioned 43%. Regarding the topic of thermal efficiency, engines are not supposed to reach 43% without being supercritical, did Rolls-royce bypass physics laws? There must be something I ignore here. Anyway even if (?) we could design supercritical jet engines the best possible thermal efficiency would be 46-7% AKA a minor improvement. Boom can increase fuel efficiency via the airplane architecture with e.g. composites. The near commercialisation new civil aircraft from china achieved a 10% reduction doing so. The same can be said for noise reduction. Hence what Boom should do is simply to order Rolls royce to produce the same engines again. However one should know that R&D for the successor of the concorde engine has already been spent and such engine has been designed. Unfortunately the U.S imperialist oppressive bans killed the concorde economics before the production of said engine, cf: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolls-Royce/Snecma_Olympus_593 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolls-Royce/Snecma_Olympus_593.... Now about the noise levels let's adress the fact that it is a non-issue. 1) If you look at the empirical scientific comparisons, the mean noise of the concorde is significantly lower than many civil airplanes, especially the ones with 4 engines. 2) The boom while intense, is very transient. It is not heard from people inside the airplane. It is a non-problem for the obvious reason that your jet does not need to be supersonic for 100% of the trajectory, therefore a plane can and should go to very high altitude (already a supersonic requirement) and/or above low density population (rural, ocean) and only then bypass the speed of sound, making the noise boom a moot problem. While this solution is trivial, political bans and people hysteria isn't. What is at stakes? A lot of things, supersonics isn't just cool, it is a life saving technology that can allow the transfer of key people in records time (expert surgeon in niche disease emergency for example) which can have very high utilitaristic value. It can also make it much more pratical for key people to meet physically (e.g. key academicians for a symposium about advancing the state of the art in a topic) which is high impact considering cognitive biases regarding human agency. Note however there are other supersonic engine makers than rolls royce, for example any country that makes supersonic military jets can obtain such engines. It is easy to forget that the first commercial supersonic engine was not the concorde but a russian tupolev. While the tupolev has reliability issue, few know they had an alternative engine (likely more reliable). In addition to the tupolev engines, I would look into the state of the art https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturn_AL-31 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturn_AL-31 Regarding SOTA civilian turbofan there is the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviadvigatel_PD-14#PD-35 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviadvigatel_PD-14#PD-35 in development, although it can power an antonov (!) and seems very versatile I wonder if (not a turbojet) it can perform supersonicity without afterburners. regarding those options however, russia bad, china bad.

MauranKilom 4y ago

That title is unusually difficult to parse, especially since you only realize halfway through that it's about aircraft.

JasonFruit 4y ago
It's almost as though I'm right when I say that making nouns of adjectives causes confusion. If we must have nouns from serverless, solar, and contactless, we're damn well going to get supersonic, too.
danpalmer 4y ago
It's on an airline industry news website, I think they just know their audience.
ape4 4y ago
It could be about music
- dylan604 4y ago
  Or the ++ version of a hedgehog franchise
MarkMc 4y ago
May I plug my Hacker News app reader? In the app the image associated with this title makes it immediately clear it's about aircraft https://mclarentimes.com/ https://mclarentimes.com/

rayiner 4y ago

Anyone who has studied aerospace engineering in the last couple of decades was taught that the economics of supersonic travel are unworkable in an environment where fossil fuel energy costs what it does and is on the way out altogether. I was hoping Boom had cracked some constraint in that equation.

bell-cot 4y ago
Peeking at Boom's Wikipedia page - their 1/3 scale "technology demonstrator" test aircraft, which they originally said would fly in 2017, has been changed & pushed back & changed & pushed back... And it still has not managed to even taxi down a runway. It doesn't much matter what is/isn't possible, or what could/couldn't be economical, if the company & engineers who say they are working to develop it...are not actually capable of shipping even a puny nerfed toy version of their supposed product. My guess: the RR engineers concluded "maybe it's possible, but these idiots will never achieve it". Then quietly shared that with their colleagues at other engine makers.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- rjsw 4y ago
  The guess in a thread commenting on an earlier article was that Boom expected RR to fund the development of a new engine. Haven't seen any explanation on why Boom can't just buy a few current fast jet engines for their demonstrator.
  - mrguyorama 4y ago
    Because no existing commercial engine can supercruise. It needs to be a new design.
  - bell-cot 4y ago
    Wikipedia strongly suggests that Boom already has bought some of these engines - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Electric_J85 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Electric_J85 - to power the demonstrator. My impression is that Boom was not looking to RR for engines for their demonstrator, but for their full-size production model. Those engines would have to be carefully designed & optimized for economic long-haul supersonic operation. (Vs. existing supersonic military jet engines are basically cost-no-object gas-guzzling hot rods.)

blutack 4y ago

Question for anyone with inside insight... When something like Boom announces: American said it too had paid a “non-refundable deposit” – it also did not say how much – as part of an agreement to buy up to 20 of the jets. Does that really mean AA paid them $1 (or a nominal amount) in return for the marketing impact of having AA's name mentioned in a few press releases?

dylan604 4y ago
Think of it as AA backed a Kickstarter campaign that never got off the ground.

rjsw 4y ago

An earlier related thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32768166 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32768166

ghaff 4y ago

I wonder if United will now take down the Boom advertising they have (inexplicably) scattered around various airport terminals.

zionic 4y ago

Starship E2E (earth 2 earth) will make in-atmo supersonic pointless.

jraines 4y ago
If you’re healthy enough to withstand 3 Gs and they make rocketry about a million times safer
- zionic 4y ago
  E2E payload weight will be much lower than typical LEO configs, total altitude lower. You don't need to circularize etc etc. This means you can spend more fuel/be less efficient overall for a much more comfortable acceleration profile. In terms of safety, starship will fly hundreds, perhaps thousands of times before people fly on them. They'll get there.
ramesh31 4y ago
I have a feeling most normal people will be reticent to strap themselves into a suborbital rocket.
- qayxc 4y ago
  And don't forget the required pressure suits. You can't just to use simple masks like in airplanes, since cabin pressure loss at heights beyond 25km would make breathing using just oxygen masks impossible.
Ekaros 4y ago
And would such craft be allowed to launch from your average airport?
- dylan604 4y ago
  Does a cruise ship launch from your average airport?

newaccount2021 4y ago