7 ms·
It's just nuts to think about people on Concorde sipping champagne at Mach 2.04. I wonder if that's something which will be possible again in my lifetime.
by VBprogrammer 3y ago
It's just nuts to think about people on Concorde sipping champagne at Mach 2.04. I wonder if that's something which will be possible again in my lifetime.
- sneak 3y agoIt's likely there will be Starship-based passenger transport from point to point on Earth within 10-15 years. The biggest hurdle will be getting countries to allow an ICBM filled with humans to approach their mainland.
- dumpsterlid 3y ago[dead]
- JustLurking2022 3y agoHighly doubt. The Concorde's problem was economics not science and a rocket based solution is even less economical - even a reusable one.
- thereisnospork 3y agoFor normal people sure, but for VIPs and especially military it will happen. Imagine being able to drop Seal Team Six into Taipei, the Red Square, or literally any other piece of earth with a ~50ft clearing on ~30 minutes notice? That's a capability which is very hard to put a price on.
- vkou 3y agoI'd like to not imagine a boots-on-the-ground shooting war, where you are launching a craft that is indistinguishable from an ICBM at a nuclear power's capital. I'd like anyone at the DOD who is imagining it to either be fired or shot, before they drag the rest of us into their geno-suicidal fantasies.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- ianburrell 3y agoStarship is worse than an ICBM. ICBM carries a handful of MIRV warheads. Starship potentially carries hundreds of warheads. It is a single rocket first strike. Nobody would put that many warheads on one rocket, but the target needs to act like it could.
- vinaypai 3y agoIn real life adetachment of a couple of hundred soldiers with very limited support dropped into the middle of enemy territory, with their destination known 30 minutes in advance to anyone with tracking satellites will be very quickly overrun. Said adversary will also be thankful for the gift of the vehicle delivered to them with now way to get it out.
- SEJeff 3y agoYou sir, have clearly never met us special forces. A “couple hundred” with combat load would be an absolute force to be reckoned with.
- Breza 3y agoSpecial Forces aren't great in head-to-head combat against well-equipped and well-supplied soldiers who know they're coming. They lose their advantage. Plus they would need a whole lot of resupply.
- bee_rider 3y agoIs there any reason this would be more possible with a rocket than with, say, a plane? It has to land slow enough that the passengers survive, and during that process it can be spotted and shot down, or surrounded. I mean I’m definitely in favor of getting some sci-fi style orbital drop troops, but I think it will require some development beyond the rockets; we’ll need to figure out how to get people who can survive a bunch of extra G’s.
- thereisnospork 3y agoA human being can withstand ~8g's for medium short duration with minimal accommodation, say tens of minutes - see fighter pilots. I would imagine that would be enough to get someone on the ground pretty quickly. 30 minutes door-to-door is also incredibly fast, how much of the world could be covered by AA or a fighter plane in time? As a for instance, imagine if in the initial invasion of Ukraine Russia had the capability to drop a starship heavy's worth of men and supplies onto Antonov airport as soon as it was secure, instead of waiting for transport planes that didn't arrive in time.
- ianburrell 3y agoStarship is insanely vulnerable for landings. It starts fast but has to slow down for landing. Which means that is vulnerable to every SAM in Beijing region. I guess it could be done as drop of pods or something. The problem is that target can’t know the pods are troops and has to assume that they are nukes and this is first strike. China has no choice but to launch ICBMs immediately. Plus, this risks the Starship itself. It might be possible to drop pods, now space and recently capable, and change directions. But is more likely that get in range of anti-ballistic missile.
- kiratp 3y agoConcorde was profitable. Accidents + 9/11 pullback killed it. The major factor against supersonic is actually the fact that sonic booms are not allowed over the continental United states. Companies like Boom Supersonic are focussed on eliminating those. https://simpleflying.com/did-british-airways-make-a-profit-flying-concorde/ https://simpleflying.com/did-british-airways-make-a-profit-f... > If British Airways and Air France were looking for more profit, these issues would have to be addressed. And that was the plan. British and French aerospace divisions were looking to create a brand new supersonic aircraft before plans to take the Concorde out of service in 2000 were realized. > Of course, that never happened. With a plethora of odds stacked against it, the 2000 crash in France, 9/11 affecting interest, and Airbus scrapping Concorde part replacements, the Concorde was shelved before its time.
- Breza 3y agoTwo quotes from the link you provided. > In total, both the French and UK governments put in $1.44bn to get Concorde off the ground. $2.8bn went into realizing the world's first mass supersonic transport. > At the end of it all, British Airways had gained £1.75bn in revenue with the Concorde against an operating cost of £1bn.
- fmajid 3y agoThe prohibition on sonic booms mysteriously appeared when it came out neither the Lockheed nor Boeing SST would ever become a reality, leading to the embarrassing situation of the only supersonic airliner being a British-French collaboration. NASA's X-59 project is aiming for a very low sonic boom
- wkat4242 3y ago> The major factor against supersonic is actually the fact that sonic booms are not allowed over the continental United states. How do military pilots train then I wonder?
- richiebful1 3y agoOnly civil aviation above Mach 1 is prohibited by the FAA. Rulemaking to certify quieter supersonic planes is underway. [1] 1. https://www.faa.gov/newsroom/supersonic-flight https://www.faa.gov/newsroom/supersonic-flight
- dylan604 3y agoIt was also limited in where it could operate out of. I'm guessing that landing Starship at SFO or JFK or Dulles is not going to happen, ever.
- zamnos 3y agoEver is a long time! In 50 years when travel via rocket between cities on Earth is common, why wouldn't airports build rocket pads for it? When you can fly New York to Singapore in less than an hour, JFK isn't going to just give up that market, they're going to want to capture some of that money.
- dylan604 3y agoProbably because the blast radius during lift off is close to the entire JFK property size? Of course, let's not forget the blast radius of a Starship undergoing unscheduled rapid disassembly.
- Breza 3y agoFifteen years is a long time in software but a blink of an eye in the world of infrastructure. A decade of Starship development has created a missile that blows up when launched. I'm sure they'll eventually get to orbit, but they're a loooooong way away from anything that the FAA will allow to operate for regular passenger flights near cities. And that's ignoring all the logistics involved in creating a profitable passenger service.
- brookst 3y agoI mean, I like roller coasters, but I think the biggest challenge might be getting hundreds of humans on that ICBM with the current flight profiles.
- rtkwe 3y agoThat seems to be mostly scrapped, they sold off the offshore platforms they'd purchased. It also wouldn't be nearly as fast as the point to point numbers suggested because the trips out to the platforms would have been rather slow on either end.
- Breza 3y agoThe classic problem with civilian air travel: Gains in airspeed can matter a whole lot less than gains in groundspeed. Getting from your house to the plane and then from the plane to your hotel on the other end can take as long as the flight itself. I live in DC, and we (finally) opened up a subway to Dulles airport. That drops the cost-adjusted travel time for DC residents more than a faster airplane for many flights.
- rtkwe 3y agoWith the added wrinkle that you're out at sea and right now for the Falcon 9 SpaceX loads fuel after loading the people because they use super cooled fuels so they're denser. For Falcon 9 this is only 35 minutes before launch but Starship requires much more fuel so if they needed to follow that pattern they'd have to wait quite a while on the pad waiting for sufficient fuel to load for whatever trip too. (Plus do you have people in suits for this? Survivability of your passengers would point to yes so you've got to deal with all that or having some extremely fast abort to a survivable altitude)
- jasonwatkinspdx 3y agoMy aunt once rode the concord from Paris back home to NYC as an indulgence. She ended up sitting next to Jacque Cousteau of all people and had a fantastic time. It's one of her favorite stories. I'd check into Reaction Engines, and the concept of precooled jet engines in general. The math says they should be capable of efficient cruising at speeds up to mach 5. The question is if anyone can make the engineering practical and affordable. But in terms of pure possibility, there's wide open possibilities.
- dclowd9901 3y agoIsn’t the temperature on the body surface the big factor here? The sr-71 would heat up tremendously and it barely had any air pressure to contend with.
- jasonwatkinspdx 3y agoIt's difficult but not a show stopper. Materials have come a long way. Also, a pre-cooled engine will be using cryogenic fuels so active cooling is an option, even desirable (some of these engines harvest energy from the precooler using turbines on the hot side). SpaceX thinks they can handle the thermal loads of Starship re-entry with ceramic tiles and stainless steel.
- killjoywashere 3y agoRecently got inside the Concorde used for testing, now at Duxford. That plane is much cozier than I thought, even with no seats. And the number of fuses is slightly crazy.
- giobox 3y agoThe example at the Museum of Flight in Seattle (somewhat ironically resting at a Boeing factory...) still has original seating and the interior is open to the public - it's really cramped. What got me most though is the tiny portal of a window you got, due to the design constraints of supersonic flight etc. All that cost and prestige, but a cramped seat and no view.
- xattt 3y ago> I wonder if that's something which will be possible again in my lifetime. Is there a historical situation where a form of travel was long forgotten only to be brought back decades or centuries later? My thought goes to the Viking Colonies in Newfoundland.
- Breza 3y agoMy toddler loves the movie Moana. Turns out part of the movie is based on a real historical time period where Polynesian people stopped sailing long distances to colonize new areas. https://historydaily.org/disneys-moana-depicts-an-actual-event-in-polynesian-history/5 https://historydaily.org/disneys-moana-depicts-an-actual-eve...
- Sharlin 3y agoNot really forgotten, but trams/streetcars definitely went out of fashion in many places and have been making a comeback in the form of modern LRT systems.
- Tangurena2 3y agoMany tram lines were built by developers at a time before cars were affordable. Otherwise there would have been no way for the homeowners to commute to work.
- Sharlin 3y agoYes, except I don't think developers have built tramlines anywhere but the US (and also the expansion to the suburbs didn't quite happen that way). I'm talking about the period of time that in Europe started in the 60s, and in the US earlier due to the earlier rise of the personal car, when many cities abolished their tram systems due to being "old-fashioned".
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- jbc1 3y agoRegion dependent on exact dates but common bicycle ownership predates common car ownership by 40 years or so. So a lot of existing cities that are introducing dedicated bicycle infrastructure likely fit.
- beachy 3y agoI was sitting at JFK back in the day waiting for my flight back to London. Over the speakers came an announcement: "if anyone is prepared to give up their seat on [my London flight] we'll fly them back tomorrow on Concorde and put them up in [a ritzy hotel] tonight". I bolted for the service desk to take up the offer and got there in seconds but there were already several people ahead of me. Never got to fly Concorde.
- cogogo 3y agoI had a professor who said that in the early days of priceline he used to book fully refundable flights from London or Paris to NYC on the concorde then cancel them - just to pick them back up on priceline for a few hundred bucks at the last minute. Never knew if it was bullshit but certainly made a good story when I heard it in 2008. The context of the global financial crisis made the .com boom/bust look quaint.
- dwighttk 3y agoThat is (a reason) why airlines overbook
- kjhughes 3y agoBlake Scholl and Boom Supersonic are trying to make that possible again. https://boomsupersonic.com/ https://boomsupersonic.com/