15 ms·
A supersonic engine core makes the perfect power turbine
- scblock 10mo agoThis feels cynical and ugly, and I am pretty disgusted by the way things are going in this space. I don't see any reason to trust Boom based on their history, and I am sick and tired of the "solution" to bad ideas being more bad ideas. We need renewables and grid infrastructure, not yet more fossil fuels. Additionally, 1) Aeroderivative gas turbines have been around for decades. "Oh but we have supersonic engines" does not change the fundamental equation 2) They're proposing burning more fossil fuels dug up from the ground to feed a beast that in my opinion is destroying the entire world economy, and certainly harming freedom 3) Where are they even getting the fuel? Magic? Someone has to build the pipelines, and someone has to supply the fuel. Note: edited for civility
- dang 10mo agoWhoa - no matter how wrong someone is or you feel they are, or how strongly a topic makes you feel, you can't post like this to Hacker News. It's vastly against the site guidelines. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it. Edit: you've unfortunately been doing this repeatedly lately - for example https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46166929 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46166929 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45836368 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45836368 - and we've already warned you once (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44682844 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44682844). If you keep posting like this, we're going to end up banning you. I don't want to ban you because your account also posts good things, so if you'd please fix this, we'd be grateful.
- noosphr 10mo ago>someone https://www.ycombinator.com/blog/boom-yc-w16-is-building-an-affordable-supersonic-aircraft https://www.ycombinator.com/blog/boom-yc-w16-is-building-an-...
- msandford 10mo agoToday I learned a thing! It makes sense that subsonic engines and supersonic engines would be different in retrospect but upon reading the headline I thought for sure it was going to be some kind of weird "jump on the AI hype train" article. Good for them for trying to find a profitable proving ground for their engines.
- rgmerk 10mo agoSeriously? This couldn't be more "jumping on the AI hype train" if it tried.
- d_silin 10mo agoIt is at least 50% AI slop. Siemens power-generating turbines are designed for -50C/+50C temperature envelope. All jet engines lose efficiency at higher ambient temperature due to thermodynamics, no matter how good their HP turbine blade tech.
- teeray 10mo ago> About three months later, we had a signed deal for 1.21 gigawatts and had started manufacturing the first turbine. Great Scott!
- rje99 10mo agoI think we had the same though at the same time. Did you also hit your head on the toilet?
- cortesoft 10mo agoThat is clearly an intentional reference.
- bitwize 10mo agoThey probably did that deliberately, like when Google IPO'd for $2,718,281,828.
- npodbielski 10mo agoWhat is strange about it? Normal power plants have 2-3 gigawatts. Gas turbine having 300MW is probably just below average. What am I missing? Is it some US thing where G scale is not 10^9?
- foxglacier 10mo agoIt's a joke about the movie Back To The Future and 1.21 Jiggawatts.
- npodbielski 10mo agoAh now it makes sense.
- rje99 10mo ago1.21 jigowatts? Great Scott! the only power source capable of generating 1.21 gigawatts of electricity is a bolt of lightning
- lawlessone 10mo agoall this for predictive text, not even robotics. Not protein folding, not simulations of the early universe. Not even some embodied AI learning from a simulated environment.
- plorg 10mo agoSelling shovels
- whatsupdog 10mo agoGreat, that's what we need. More fossil fuel powered, CO² emitting, supersonic turbines polluting our environment. Unless I see a sea of solar powered carbon capturing machines,somewhere in the Saharan desert, churning the CO² back to natural gas to power these turbines, I hate this.
- kwanbix 10mo agoHey, but imagine all the nano banana images we can create!
- plorg 10mo agoI think you're missing the point. Once we've bruteforced the computer god into being he will absolve us of all the sins of destroying the place we live and magically create for us a utopia of so much free energy that we won't have to worry about having an atmosphere.
- whatsupdog 10mo agoI wonder how these elites (you are one, if you can reach San Altman by text) are so detached from reality, that they think that bragging about a gas powered turbine, in this day and age, in the given environment, for something as ludicrous as predictive text generation is a such a flex!
- brendoelfrendo 10mo agoWe will create computer god and ask it how to save our environment and climate and it will look at all the data we have fed it over the years and say "You've known the answer for decades, you just didn't like it. Not building me would have been a good start."
- oersted 10mo ago> I texted with Sam Altman—who confirmed power was indeed a major constraint. Such a cheap flex right up-front, and with an em-dash to boot. I get it, it's powerful to boast about such a connection. It's just not very classy.
- plorg 10mo agoIt's also a kind of ideological signpost.
- salt4034 10mo agoHere's how academics do it: > Sam Altman confirmed power was indeed a major constraint [1]. > [1]: Personal communication. Or even better: > Power is a major constraint (Sam Altman, personal communication, December 9, 2025).
- georgefrowny 10mo agoIt's also such a stupid question to ask. No one doubts AI needs fuckton of power. Not the fanboys or the haters or even the don't-cares. What next? "I emailed Donald Knuth—who confirmed software does mostly run on computers"? "I at-ed the Pope who confirmed that he is currently a Catholic"?
- giancarlostoro 10mo agoI asked Florida man if there's a gator in the nearby lake, he said prolly
- wombatpm 10mo agoBut if it wasn’t AI it would be something else. Remember when Bitcoin was consuming all the energy and destroying the environment?
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- codyb 10mo ago
- trehalose 10mo agoHow loud are these turbines? Where will they be used?
- jdc0589 10mo agoI can't wait for the town hall meetings in areas where a datacenter is coming "you want us to live next to supersonic jets powering a datacenter?"
- wmf 10mo agoAlready happening: https://www.memphisflyer.com/southaven-residents-raise-concerns-about-noise-from-xai-turbines https://www.memphisflyer.com/southaven-residents-raise-conce...
- actionfromafar 10mo agoIf there's a town hall meeting in the woods and there's no Republican representative there to hear it, did it make a sound?
- bluerooibos 10mo agoThey're jet engines - very loud. They're acting like this is new tech or something innovative - it's not. Google "RB211 industrial gas turbine" and watch a vid of one being fired up - they're used to pump oil in pipelines around the world, and power oil rigs, etc - been around for decades.
- fyrn_ 10mo agoManaged to talk about china's energy buildout _without_ mention of renewables? I think this pivot is 100% designed to get government money: - natrual gas turbine - china is scary - something something it's a race - china energy is good because no regulations, totally not because they are lapping the world on renewable buildout
- marze 10mo agoIf China had "no regulations" and was building out 100% coal, no one would be worrying that China industry would have an advantage due to low electricity cost vs rest of world.
- AuthAuth 10mo agoChina's energy buildout is still mostly coal. Go look at the last 20 years how much energy they've added for coal vs solar. Dont fall for the "solar has increased by 500%" trap.
- nandomrumber 10mo agoYou’re absolutely correct. China didn’t start adding much in the way of solar prior to about 2020, whereas they added lots of coal generation in the past 20 years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_China
- seanmcdirmid 10mo agoThey are replacing old coal plants with more efficient cleaner designers. National security wise they still have lots of coal to work with, while most renewable energy is generated in the west where ongoing grid upgrades are needed to use it where people live (in the east).
- fpoling 10mo agoThe newer plants not only more efficient going from 30-35% of peak efficiency to something like 45%, they can also operate efficiently over wider range of power output and are faster to turn on/off. This is very helpful to deal with variability with renewable output.
- skywhopper 10mo agoBurning more fossil fuels in noisy, polluting ways is not a good tradeoff considering most “AI” itself is questionably a net positive, and certainly not worth the current levels of investment.
- allenrb 10mo agoNotice as well that no mention of efficiency was made. Perhaps I missed it, but I’m somewhat familiar with power generation, and usually efficiency is front and center. Fact seems to be, nobody doing “AI” gives a damn.
- josefritzishere 10mo agoHear me out... we could just stop building enormous AI data centers for money suck products with no actual net positive revenue.
- teach 10mo agoNormally I try to go with the most charitable interpretation, but this article makes it difficult. > Meanwhile China is adding power capacity at a wartime pace—coal, gas, nuclear, everything.... China is adding solar. Mostly solar. The word "solar" does not appear even once in this press release, and that seems disingenuous. I _do_ think there's a place for more efficient use of the fossil fuels we do have. People are going to continue to burn natural gas for a while, so we might as well do it better I guess. But America isn't going to make up the energy deficit with fossil fuels, no matter how "clever" we are.
- MengerSponge 10mo agoThis is designed for "fast" and "high power", but not for efficiency: it's not a combined cycle plant.
- m4rtink 10mo agoYeah, its totally inefficient - according to Wikipedia a simple cycle gas turbine can be up to 43% efficient - with a combined cycle (you boil water with the first stage jet engine exhaust and then run a steam turbine off that) it can get up to 64%. So like this there is possibly about 20% of (a lot of) energy/fuel just wasted. You can get even better, running something like a city wide district heating off the waste heat from the steam turbine - potentially reaching 100% in the sense that people get heating, warm running water or possibly also process heat for industrial use. Or you can do none of that and power a datacenter of questionable utility with it at about 40% efficiency. :P
- delichon 10mo ago> China is adding solar. Mostly solar. The word "solar" does not appear even once in this press release, and that seems disingenuous. On the contrary, check out this graph: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-consumption-by-source-and-country?stackMode=absolute&country=~CHN https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-consumption-by-sou... Solar is a tiny portion of new energy capacity in China compared to coal, oil, and gas. But it is similar to nuclear as of 2024. New coal production swamps everything else combined.
- MengerSponge 10mo agoDoes it make anyone a little sad that we could have actual abundance with solar and wind and nuclear? Also, this is only commercially viable because this regime has rendered the EPA functionally powerless.
- infecto 10mo agoNot really. Makes me hopeful. The constraint right now to renewables in America is connecting them to the grid. The lead times are still in the years. I am hopeful that these constraints breed innovation and new solutions to the space.
- stego-tech 10mo agoJust vomited in my mouth a little bit. A supersonic aerospace company doing a half-assed pivot into fossil fuel electricity generation to, what, try to simultaneously capitalize on AI CAPEX while also soliciting government handouts? Come on, get serious.
- JohnMakin 10mo agoAnd it started by browsing X, as most things do, of course.
- foxglacier 10mo agoWhat are you trying to say? That no company that makes money from the market can also try to get government funding, even for a different part of their business? Or is this only supersonic aerospace companies, not conventional aerospace? Or only if it's fossil fuel. What a bizarre list of conditions to make you vomit. You can't possibly have thought of that in advance. I suspect you don't know what you're saying at all.
- stego-tech 10mo agoI’m not going to bother formulating a serious response to such an incredibly insane attempt at shoving words and positions into my mouth to fit your own preconceived narrative. Be better.
- foxglacier 10mo agoI tried my best to understand your position but the more details I included from your statement, the more ridiculous it became. You should just say what you mean instead of that.
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- tomhow 10mo agoPlease don't post snarky, shallow dismissals on HN. You may not owe aerospace startups any better, but you owe the community better if you want to participate here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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- jillesvangurp 10mo agoAI data centers still consume a lot less than most other things on the grid. In percentages it's less than 1%. Much less. It might get to a percent in a few years. The energy demand growth from other sources is much more significant. Things like industrial heating, domestic heating and other domestic usage, transport (car and truck charging), etc. are growing much more aggressively than even the most aggressive growth scenarios for AI. Electrification of the economy, which is a thing that at least the US is way behind on, is going to be a massive driver of electricity demand across the world. And a lot of countries are going to benefit from cost savings there. Not having to import expensive oil and gas in favor of cheaply produced solar/wind energy is going to wipe out quite a few billions from the trade balance of countries across the world. China is leading by example here. Their diesel imports are declining sharply already. Investments in renewables are rising accordingly. This is not driven by green washing but by raw economics. For the same reason, oil and gas prices usage is predicted to enter a steady decline pretty much everywhere. The IEA (known for overly conservative oil biased predictions) is predicting this will be in decline by 2030. They are probably wrong again and it might be a few years sooner. In China next year is a better estimate. Most growth on the grid (80-90%) is driven by renewables + battery addition to the grid. It's actually not even close in most countries. Including the US. Gas turbines are hard to get in a hurry. Most of the ones that are realistically going to be installed soonish were ordered quite some time ago. Same with nuclear reactors. Supply of those is even less elastic (decades rather than years). In the mean time, there are hundreds of gw of clean energy (which can be ordered and brought online with very short lead times) coming online every year. Think a few dozen of nuclear reactors worth of capacity. In the US alone. Every year. Vs. a handful of nuclear reactors over the next decade. And a sprinkling of gas plants barely replacing lost capacity (closures of coal and older gas plants). All at great cost of course and typically after long delays. A lot of the AI related fossil fuel usage growth is increasing load on existing infrastructure; which for cost reasons was being under utilized. As soon as cheaper power can be secured, that capacity will revert back to being underutilized. That's just simple economics. Whether the US will be able to adapt to other countries doing things cheaper and better than them remains to be seen. It looks like it will have lots of expensive and obsolete gas infrastructure pretty soon. And a lot of debt that financed that. And a lot of data centers operating under high gas prices competing with data centers built close to ones with access to cheap renewables might become a thing as well. Some people are predicting a bubble. When that bursts, the more economical data centers might have a higher chance of surviving.
- PunchyHamster 10mo agoIt's funny to portray "USA need more power for GPUs" and then contrast China getting the power to actual industry making actual stuff useful to people
- nickff 10mo agoWe're all too busy filling out forms to manufacture anything in the West. They don't have to declare their conflict minerals contents (which seem impossible to verify), or even try to measure the PFAS in their products (good luck figuring out the PFAS contents of complex products like electronics).
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- King-Aaron 10mo agoMore like we've spent decades offshoring every step of the manufacturing pipeline - from material processing to manufacturing tooling and all the skills and expertise in between - and now it's reached a state where even if you wanted to spin up manufacturing on the same scale locally, you need those decades again to bring every part of the economy back to support it.
- Propelloni 10mo agoThat's true, but the GP still has a point. Manufacturing is easier in countries with less regulation about it. Yet we have to ask ourselves, how do we want to live? I mean, we have those regulations because nobody wants to live in Lahore, Pakistan.
- deadeye 10mo ago100% Personal experience: In my town a public parking lot could not be built due to it possibly being "endangered moth" habitat. There are places where you can still build things in the US, but they are more and more scarce.
- hinkley 10mo agoThey're still scrubbing the scorch marks out of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UPS_Airlines_Flight_2976 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UPS_Airlines_Flight_2976 tragedy. I understand that turbines are very handy in power generation but we don't use gyroscopic power storage because the inertia gets scary at high RPMs. Turbines lake the momentum but make up for it by being entirely made of knives. You lose an engine mount or throw a blade and you're deep in the shit.
- krisoft 10mo agoI don’t understand your point about UPS 2976. You make it sound as if people there were hurt by the engine parts hitting them. But in actuality it is the airplane crashing into them which killed those unfortunate. Even aviation turbines are quite safe and uncontained engine mallfunctions are very rarely a problem. On top of that there is every reason to think that ground based power generating applications can be even safer. There weight is much less of a constraint, so you can easily armour the container to a much higher assurance level. The terrestrial turbine is not jostled around so you have less of a concern about gyroscopic effects. And finally you can install the power generating turbine with a much larger keep out zone. All three factors making terrestrial power generating jets safer than the aviation ones.
- hinkley 10mo agoThe plane suffered an engine mount failure, which tore a hole in the wing, sprayed shrapnel into engine 2, which caused a compressor stall reducing thrust past the survivable level. Then it crashed into a fuel recycling plant with a full load of jet fuel. The scary part of the mount failure is that the mounts cracked in an unexposed part where visual inspection did not reveal the damage. It wasn't due for a teardown and inspection until it had traveled 25% (80% of the maintenance window) farther. That's why they grounded the entire fleet. Takeoffs are dangerous because they run the engines hard, and parts are operating in the supersonic range.
- krisoft 10mo agoI’m aware of the facts you say. But they have nothing to do with terrestial operations. If the same thing happened to an engine sitting next to a data center the worst thing which could happen is it knocks the neighbouring engines out too. And if you are worried about that you can add more armouring between the engines. Which you can do because they don’t need to fly. Heck you can put a row of hesco barriers between engines in a terrestial application. But either way the data center is not going to suddenly fall on a fuel recycling plant.
- ggm 10mo agoGas turbines have a role in energy production worldwide. If this means they can run more efficiently, then there's a place for it. If the intent is to run 24/7 then it should replace existing Gas 24/7 service deployment, not add new, unless there is a reason wind+solar+storage and a (smaller? different configuration) gas peaker cannot do the job. If this works as a rapid start gas peaker, it could help in the shift off coal and diesel. It depends on the CO/CO2 burden.
- pdx_flyer 10mo agoThere are already quite a few rapid start gas peakers not only being produced but in-service. Nothing about Boom's stands out as being significantly different.
- ggm 10mo agothats kind-of what I thought. GE sell a lot, so maybe this introduces some supply chain diversity and has a different maintenance burden and duty cycle. Thats about it.
- kreelman 10mo agoIt could be a good, relatively portable gas peaker. Though I would have thought batteries might be a better step for peak load management? This might sit somewhere between peak load and base load? Since the CO/CO2 exhaust from this turbine should be able to be captured fairly well, would it be possible to capture it on the spot into tanks of some kind? There are most probably some large thermal issues to deal with here.. I also wonder about the MIT COF-99 (https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/exotic-powder-pulls-carbon-dioxide-from-the-air-at-a-record-rate/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/exotic-powder-pul...) that eats up CO2 very efficiently. If simply CH4 is being passed to the turbine, is the water generated from the combustion being captured anywhere? What about the sound characteristics of this beasty? There are cases in the US of people noticing the new AI data centre fans whining at all hours. There'll be an engineer/physicist out there somewhere who'll come up with a generally efficient way to move heat around (Graphene ?) and he'll start a multi-billion dollar business.
- kristianp 10mo ago> Superpower is sort of like our Starlink moment Great analogy if it pays off. I'd wonder how it competes with nuclear for scale and existing gas turbines for cost and efficiency.
- tim333 10mo agoI can see some issues there. Spacex was in a unique position to do starlink as about the only cheap launch provider whereas there are many existing gas turbine producers. Also the gas turbine thing is a bit of a temporary fix to get power for the AI bubble. Longer term they'll probably use more environmentally friendly solutions?
- trollbridge 10mo agoWhy would they switch to something more expensive long term?
- Cthulhu_ 10mo agoYeah, if (BIG if) they actually generate demand for it, mass producing power generators will be easier to do than mass producing planes. Starlink was SpaceX's way to generate their own demand - they have a vision of scaling up rocket launchers, but without Starlink there wouldn't be enough demand for it. Likewise I can imagine there won't be much demand for hypersonic airplanes, not enough to run a business. At least the Concorde was only one of several models that the manufacturers produced, so it wasn't their only product.
- namirez 10mo agoWell, even Blake knows that Overture is highly unlikely to survive as a product. Best of luck to him with this pivot. I really wish him success. He has spent more than a decade of his life on this project.
- tim333 10mo agoI'm curious how the planes are going. Looking it up it seems th XB-1 prototype did mach 1.1 but then they retired it which seems odd as it's design was for mach 2.2 and a 1000 mile range. If they could say to investors we said 2.2 and look, it really happened than might be a better sell? The top speed is interesting because they are claiming to go fast with relatively little power due to superior aerodynamics which would be more convincing if they demonstrated it.
- pdx_flyer 10mo agoGrifts really have become mainstream.
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- maxglute 10mo agoNow deliver 500 turbines by Q2 2026... oh you can't because you need 4-5 years to build and scale up manufacturing and train a skilled workforce? Well that's better than 5-10 years to build centralized power plants... or just truck in a shit load of low skilled Mexicans to build out island solar and battery to alleviate bottle neck and throw in a bunch of diesel/gas generators. The problem isn't better turbine, it's lead times that can satisfy data center demands at current rollout timeline. America being america makes large scale centralized infra difficult, building supply chains for essentially aviation turbines may be faster, but not more than just slapping down renewables and diesel/gas generators. You can get all the commodity generators and solar tomorrow. Like ~85% of of PRC's new power generation this year growth is mostly renewables. It's a new distributed tech stack that can be spung up at scale incredible speed vs centralized generation infra. PRC built out about 300GW of renewables this year, US data centre needs projected at 100GW by 2035 with no sign centralized plants will be online in time. Combine with some dirty generators and US datacentres can survive on islanded utilities until the bubble burst.
- qwe----3 10mo ago> It's a new distributed tech stack that can be spung up at scale incredible speed vs centralized generation infra. When you get too much renewables solar/wind you can get blackouts like spain did. Fast grids fail fast. It's also important to have grid inertia to resist changes in frequency (which you get from due to the kinetic energy stored in spinning generators)
- maxglute 10mo agoHence Islanded i.e. skip grid because US incompetence is inability to hook up grid with multiyear lead times due to skilled labour shortage. The entire point is to skip the grid or rather, due to US constraints, hook up to grid not really an option to meet rollout timelines.
- phh 10mo agoYou can make frequency inertia with solar (even without batteries if you accept running with a constant reserve so with reduced efficiency). Spain showed that there is a learning curve, that's for sure, but their issue was a "simple" oscillation problem that can be fixed by adjusting frequency-follow rate and grid-disconnect rules. It wasn't like a peak of energy consumption or loss of energy production that only a rotating mass could compensate.
- robotresearcher 10mo ago"AI didn’t just need more turbines—it needed a new and fundamentally better turbine. Symphony was the perfect new engine to accelerate AI in America." I completely hate that we can't just motivate this in terms of making electricity, the stuff we all use every day for a hundred things. No, it has to be about AI. Bah!
- bradfa 10mo agoIt’s interesting that this implies that building natural gas pipelines to data centers is easy, at least easier than building out substations and transmission lines. Because you don’t run a (or several) 42MW natural gas generator without a big fat natural gas pipe. Why is it so much easier to build the pipelines than to bring in electric lines?
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- pwarner 10mo agoTransmission loss in gas pipes is probably lower than electric transmission? Underground probably easier than above ground. Lastly I think they are building data centers near natural gas fields...
- stephen_g 10mo agoI wouldn't expect so, because it's not just fugitive emissions we're talking about, but that you need to run a lot of big compressors to run pipelines. But often that cost isn't really counted because they just burn more gas to power them.
- Cthulhu_ 10mo agoIt's amortized for sure, gas is relatively dense in energy and can be transported long distance with minimal loss, unlike electricity. High voltage DC power lines are used in some places for long distance transport, but that's nowhere near the continent-spanning oil and gas pipes.
- mNovak 10mo agoI'm guessing it's not just the overhead lines, but you need the actual power plants somewhere.
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- fortranfiend 10mo agoHmm curious as to how loud it will make the data center.
- tintor 10mo agoHow much pollution would this generate?
- tikimcfee 10mo agoThis is all I can think of and it depresses me how exciting the video is about turning more materials into emissions. I get I have no power over these people building this, but I just wish they didn't make it. I don't want the world to keep building more amazing ways to burn things I or my neighbors will eventually have to breathe in.
- trollbridge 10mo agoParticularly when burnt to no purpose at all.
- meindnoch 10mo agoBut you have to consider that they could use this energy to generate AI videos about renewable energy and environmentalism, which will educate the next generation of kids. So on a long enough timescale, this could actually decrease the overall pollution! It's basically Effective Altruism applied to energy.
- javascriptfan69 10mo agoThis article feels like the perfect distillation of a uniquely American problem. Some weird tech startup proposing a novel solution based on a product that isn't even in it's production phase yet. Lots of pretty 3d renders and a wall of (what appears to be AI written) corpo-speak proposing some crazy technology that will revolutionize x. It looks cool -- don't get me wrong -- but how is this going to get power online faster than just installing solar and batteries?
- shrubble 10mo agoYou get 42MW inside the footprint of what looks like 2 truck trailers, that you can park in the parking lot next to the electrical transformers. Virtually no permitting or installation required.
- javascriptfan69 10mo agoI think a 42MW turbine might run into some permitting issues regarding safe noise levels.
- gorgoiler 10mo agoPossibly, but I suspect mobile turbines (aircraft) are unquietened (noisy) by design because they don’t really need to be quiet at 35000ft. Presumably a static turbine is minimizing noisy thrust in exchange for torque while also exhausting through an expansion chamber surrounded by deflective earthworks or some other shielding. (Although the one in the article is indeed all outside in the open.)
- mattmaroon 10mo agoNo, they’ve been intentionally designing them to be quieter for decades because they are in hearing distance for quite a lot of miles during takeoff and landing. I suspect you can better insulate one on land though since you’re less constrained on size and weight.
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- gjrq 10mo agoOh come on, what is this crap? Absolutely no thermal efficiency numbers or anything else you could use to validate any claims. Especially if you are claiming that an aero-derived turbine is somehow going to be better than a purpose-built unit. The "supersonic engines are better because they are designed to operate at hotter temperatures" argument is particularly insane: turbine efficiency is driven by turbine inlet temperature (already 3000ish C), not ambient temperature. I suppose it's only right that VCs are going to get scammed by LLM slop.
- mNovak 10mo agoUnfortunately there's too much distraction regarding the AI side of the discussion, to actually look at the generation tech itself. For all their discussion of high temperature operation, it seems the only advantage at the end of the day is to eliminate water consumption in cooling. I question if that's really so valuable?
- gjrq 10mo agoI also don't think it's necessarily true? A jet engine (which many many power turbines can run off of) can obviously run without cooling water on a hot day just fine.
- Cthulhu_ 10mo agoThere may be some use cases, this makes it comparable to an emergency generator (no water or steam involved)... but that very much limits its uses, and it's marketed as if it should be part of the main power grid.
- rayiner 10mo ago> Meanwhile China is adding power capacity at a wartime pace—coal, gas, nuclear, everything—while America struggles to get a single transmission line permitted. I have been saying for years that upgrading civilization requires more power output, not conservation and windmills. If we had been investing in nuclear since the 1960s we would be ready for the needs of next generation technologies and we could do it without burning fossil fuels.
- mattmaroon 10mo agoWe’re ready for them with current technology, the problem is regulatory.
- ceejayoz 10mo agoSome progress on that front: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/08/climate/trump-offshore-wind-federal-judge.html https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/08/climate/trump-offshore-wi... > A federal judge on Monday struck down President Trump’s halt on approvals of all wind power projects on federal lands and waters, dealing a significant legal setback to the administration’s campaign against wind farms.
- SideburnsOfDoom 10mo agoWho matches China's current scale and cost of producing solar panels? No-one is ready to compete.
- mattmaroon 10mo agoWe were talking about nuclear energy but… Nobody competes with China on lots of things because of government subsidies both direct and indirect (like devaluing currency). We could do those too if we had to.
- SideburnsOfDoom 10mo agoI agree that the problem is regulatory. But I don't think that it's easily waved away. Chinese solar and is a huge benefit to humankind, but also they have a commanding lead on it. And possibly in BEVs too.
- phire 10mo agoI hate the product. But as a business staggery for Boom Supersonic, it kind of seems like a good idea. They get a (hopefully short term) revenue stream, and a whole bunch of "real world" testing on their engine core.
- bluerooibos 10mo agoIt's about as good an idea as firing up a bunch more coal power stations. The grid, at least in the UK, has a bunch of these industrial gas turbines for coping with peak demand, etc and being able to quickly add more power to the grid. Not exactly something you want running in huge numbers for a long time or you may as well wave your climate emissions targets goodbye.
- shtzvhdx 10mo agoWe're using plane engines to generate electricity and my residential bill is almost $0.20/kWh because we invested in chat bots instead of the infrastructure the chat bots need. Make it make sense.
- BostonEnginerd 10mo agoJealous sitting here in MA, where we pay $0.35/kWh and burn a ton of methane to get that.
- shtzvhdx 10mo ago$0.35.... wow
- buildbot 10mo agoMeanwhile in Seattle... 0.14$ per KW https://www.seattle.gov/city-light/residential-services/billing-information/rates https://www.seattle.gov/city-light/residential-services/bill... (Oh wow off peak will be 0.08$?!)
- UltraSane 10mo agoThat is some of the most expensive electricity in the world.
- monster_truck 10mo agoNatural gas turbines are pretty common (power plants, large on site/mobile generators) and the efficiency levels of these are the same as what you'd see in similar use cases. Turbines don't really care what they're doing (within reason), these just happen to share a lot of parts with a plane engine. The cost issue is completely unrelated to supply or usage, there is a cyclic issue of power companies using their profits for lobbying in order to push through measures that allow them to further increase their rates. It is often far more than is publicly disclosed. For example, last year in this state my power company made billions of dollars and claims they spent less than a million on political contributions. But if you look at their donations, grants, and development programs there is over a hundred million dollars mostly going to companies and nonprofits owned in part by the same politicians or their family members, as well as the municipalities where the policymakers live. In my state the combined total of rate increases in the past five years for both electricity and natural gas is >1.5x compared to inflation. Each time it is framed in the press as a good thing "we reached a solid deal, for less than half as much of what they were asking!". Every year the profits exceed their expectations by a few percent, each year more people are having their power shut off.
- joshtbradley 10mo agoThis sounds like the “t-shirt printers” of the 90s. While everyone was busy trying to invent the future, boring old manufacturing got ignored. Turns out printing t-shirts isn’t that different from printing silicon. Now Taiwan produces 90% of the world’s advanced chips and NVIDIA is the most valuable company in the world. Boom’s founder, Blake, comes from a e-commerce background. What a legend for this innovation.
- jjk166 10mo agoI spent years working in aerospace turbines. This is BS. Power generation turbines are designed to work at ambient sea level conditions. They don't rely on ambient air being especially cold for cooling, they can keep cool thanks to the large mass flow rate. There is no technological difference between boom's engine and conventional jet turbines. It is still a subsonic turbine, it just happens to sit behind a diffuser that slows the air from supersonic to subsonic speeds. Genuine supersonic turbines are a radically different, and much less efficient, technology. Turbines for supersonic propulsion are actually more temperature sensitive and less efficient than those for subsonic applications specifically because they need to prevent more heating in the compression stages to keep their combustion chambers stable. The other talking points are likewise bogus. The problem with aeroderivative turbines is maintenance - planes need to be high performance and don't stay up in the air for very long, so their engines are designed around frequent maintenance events. Powerplants, especially those for datacenters, need consistent uptime, not good power to weight ratios. Boom isn't doing anything special in terms of materials or data monitoring. Yes, power turbines have been a thing for decades, and in those decades they have been arguably the most advanced machines humans have built industrially at any given time. Going back to the maintenance thing, turns out people really want to know if there's an issue before their $200 million machine fails. I like Boom, I have friends working for Boom. I presume this is just an elaborate way to hop on the AI investment bandwagon. I get it, but it's still ugly to see. I hope this doesn't begin a string of hype-creep that causes their actual goal to fail.
- chii 10mo ago> elaborate way to hop on the AI investment bandwagon ... hype-creep that causes their actual goal to fail. their current goal might already be "failing" (as in, lack of real demand for hypersonic travel). Investment getting hard to obtain means they're looking for more/broader investment from other investors. Thus, the hopping on of the AI bandwagon. It doesn't paint a pretty picture tbh.
- Cthulhu_ 10mo agoThat's what I was thinking, if they have an engine design, I can imagine (uninformed armchair opinion) it's easier to build a power generator than a plane around it.
- exabrial 10mo ago> announcing Superpower, our new 42‑megawatt natural gas turbine Is global warming solved? Last time I checked, I was to throw away my repairable ICE vehicle for an expensive unrepairable disposable vehicle in order to save the planet. Just curious how a 42-megawatt gas turbine is helping the planet.
- rgmerk 10mo agoYou missed the iron law of the universe, which is never get between a capitalist and the possibility of a bucket of money.
- trollbridge 10mo agoA 2 GW DC only needs 48 of those things. About 11.5M tons of CO₂ per year. It’s always on full blast so everything must be calculated 100%. A new Civic going 8,000 miles a years at will produce 2.4 tons. So yeah one new DC is 4,700 cars. Which you’re supposed to replace with electric cars that will be fed with a non-existent power source, which means apparently even more gas turbine power plants. Most assumptions about renewables don’t account for continuous 24/7 loads. Stuff like storage doesn’t help with that. I have noticed very little talk about AI DCs varying their loads to match renewable generation from solar/wind.
- littlestymaar 10mo agoI found this paragraph very interesting: > If America wants to build at the speed AI requires, vertical integration isn’t optional. We’re standing up our own foundry and our own large scale CNC machining capability. Yet China, the industrial superpower, doesn't work like that. Nothing is vertically integrated and instead a massive amount of suppliers are part of a gigantic and flexible supply-chain. The fact that CCP's China able to have a working market of independent industrial actors, whereas Venture Capital-funded America can only works with corporation-scale central planning is an interesting paradox that I would like to have an in depth explanation for.
- Cthulhu_ 10mo agoIt's a neat picture of US vs China's mindset and societies - vertical integration is individualism (we'll do it alone) and exceptionalism (we are better than other companies at foundrying / machining). Versus central planning where things like manufacturing are part of a national plan. Both have their place, but China is winning and has been for years now. They took over worldwide manufacturing because they were cheaper at it, first due to lower wages, but now due to their supply chains, resources, etc.
- fluxusars 10mo agoThis to me is the strongest proof that we are in a bubble so far.
- torginus 10mo agoI though at least with this AGI datacenter push we'd see a renaissance in nuclear investments, with timelines getting more aggressive and plants actually getting built. Also getting some tangible progress in fusion would've been nice as well. Turns out its all gas turbines.
- prism56 10mo agoThis seems like marketing nonsense to me... Carnot efficiency of a gas turbine is a function of the temperature the CT blade can sustain and the ambient temperature. (1-Tc/Th). So unless they've somehow had a massive breakthrough in material science they'll be as limited as all other gas turbine OEMs. Air blast chillers are common in this power category so water usage isn't very high. More importantly gas turbine power figures are quoted at an ISO 15C. So if you require 42MW at 40C ambient you'll buy an overrated engine to maintain your output. They've written this as a gotcha that their engine is more powerful than a less powerful engine. Well yeah...
- meindnoch 10mo agoBurn more fossil fuel to generate more slop. Wonderful! Also, I somehow doubt that an upstart aerospace company can make more efficient gas turbines than companies with ~sixty years of experience in this space (Siemens, Westinghouse, GE, Mitsubishi).
- joshfraser 10mo agoI miss the days when Hacker News would root for startups and brave innovators instead of the stogy old incumbents
- Cthulhu_ 10mo agoBut would the responses be any different back then? Energy innovations like battery tech were also looked at critically back then. There's even a template doing the rounds with a checklist for supposedly revolutionary battery tech. Using a turbine to generate electricity isn't innovative or brave, it's been done, the technology has been around for over a hundred years, but it's not widely used because there's better ways to generate electricity.
- quickthrowman 10mo agoThere are multiple manufacturers currently making gas turbines that are exactly this size. They’ve been making them for at least 50 years. This is not brave or innovative, it’s a cash grab during a bubble. You can call a Siemens or GE sales rep and place an order right now for the exact same thing.
- gWPVhyxPHqvk 10mo agoI don't root for startups who will make the world a worse place.
- mrweasel 10mo agoA quick search indicates that at least Mitsubishi have a 41MW gas turbine generator, with some configurations producing 120MW. So it AI companies want to power their datacenters with gas turbines, they can just place an order right now. I'd guess it's probably not something they want to deal with, better to offload the risk/cost to the exciting power companies.
- mmustapic 10mo agoI'm very glad Boom has to pivot to AI data centers: this means their main objective (building a supersonic plane) is in trouble, and they'll go broke soon. Since the beginning they've been lying with green buzzwords or even "USD 100 in 4 hours to anywhere in the world". The reality is that the plane would be used by business and rich travelers burning more fuel just to save a couple of hours. Flying slower if always going to be cheaper and more efficient (unless they are working on a new technology, but they aren't). They even have the audacity to applaud themselves with the phrase "the first completely private supersonic plane", with a picture of their demonstrator beside a supersonic chase plane from the 60s.
- oldpersonintx2 10mo ago[dead]
- 542354234235 10mo agoI don’t think business and rich people will use it either. The Concorde worked because you were in a black hole while you crossed the Atlantic, unable to work and unplugged from what was going on. So saving 5 hours was extremely valuable. Now, we have laptops and in-flight wifi, so you don’t miss much on the plane like you used to. Combine that with ultra luxury first class cabins that make the flight extremely comfortable, and saving some time while having to sacrifice all the amenities that come with a good first/business class cabin on a full sized airplane just doesn’t make sense. Even private planes just don’t feel like they would make sense. Most private jets are used for regional and transcon, and the time savings would be much less significant at those distances. I feel like most wealthy individuals would rather upgrade to a larger, more comfortable, and/or longer-range jet than to sacrifice comfort, size, and range for supersonic. Only the truly ultra-wealthy seem like they might pick up a few, but that is such a vanishingly small market.
- wffurr 10mo agoHow long until Starlink allows luxury ocean liners come back? You can get a lot more space on a boat than a plane.
- 10mo ago
- fsloth 10mo agoReminds me of General Atomics. They wanted to build a spaceship (project Orion), but first had to come up with something they could sell immediately, hence they designed the commercially very succesfull Triga reactor.
- raviolo 10mo agoIs it a coincidence it’s 42 megawatts and not 41 or 43?
- Gud 10mo agoMy father, who used to be a power plant mechanic, and before that a ship mechanic , helped install converted old aeroplane turbines from decommissioned US bomber planes in the 70s(we are Swedes) for use as power plants. I think the turbine was used as a spare power generator to start the actual gas turbine, in case the plant itself lost power, if that makes sense.
- mmaunder 10mo agoI want these guys to succeed because they're a mile from my hangar at KAPA, but I guess key questions and points are: Industry is already using single crystal blades and superalloys, so the diagram labeling those is eye candy. No hot-day derate is great, but buyers still care about fuel burn so what does that look like? Power markets care about availability, maintenance cost and TBO in long duration operation. e.g. TBO for a King Air turboprop engine is around 3600 hours. (Sorry I happen to know that space better than others) That's 150 days of continuous operation. Overhaul cost for a P&W engine is around $850K, so a supersonic? I'm thinking a million per engine? And then there's the supply chain manufacturability risk. It's a nice announcement. Here's a video that's been going around the pilot community on how, what Boom is calling "legacy" engines are made. You'll notice they're already using superalloys and single crystal blades and are running at temps that the metal should melt, but are using neat tricks to overcome that. And these engines are flying all around the world today. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QtxVdC7pBQM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QtxVdC7pBQM You can't build-fast-and-break-stuff with physics at this level. The rules are non-negotiable and you're taking the engineering right to the edge of what is possible and then pushing it a little further to differentiate your product. I think the GE, Rolls and Pratt are watching this and wondering how Boom is going to solve all the problems they've spent decades solving, and then still have time and budget to take it to the next level. Edit: Superalloys in existing engines: https://youtu.be/QtxVdC7pBQM?si=fxzFXoSICX8dtsg5&t=1027 https://youtu.be/QtxVdC7pBQM?si=fxzFXoSICX8dtsg5&t=1027 Single crystal blades in existing engines: https://youtu.be/QtxVdC7pBQM?si=XpnAgVH1QmLiX0g0&t=1650 https://youtu.be/QtxVdC7pBQM?si=XpnAgVH1QmLiX0g0&t=1650
- simonebrunozzi 10mo agoWow, thanks a lot for a deep and insightful comment like this. I've learn quite a lot just by following your links. This is one of the reasons why I love HN and keep participating after all these years.
- mmaunder 10mo agoThanks, that's very kind.
- 10mo ago
- broretore 10mo ago> It started, as many things do these days, by scrolling on X. Thanks Blake. This is the sign I needed to cancel my Twitter subscription and hellban X from my LAN.
- WorldPeas 10mo agoThis article makes me wonder what's become of the RR/Snecma_Olympus_593 of concorde fame (beyond being museum showpieces). Could they have been repurposed? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolls-Royce/Snecma_Olympus_593 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolls-Royce/Snecma_Olympus_593
- bluerooibos 10mo agoMarketing hype bullshit. These guys are acting as though this is some new concept, whilst they've just rebranded it in a shiny silver package. Aero derived gas turbines like the RR RB211 are everywhere, already packaged like this, powering oil rigs and pipelines everywhere - I worked on them years ago. Looking forward to coal companies jumping on the bandwagon if they haven't already - "Introducing CoalGen 3.0 - our new cloud connected, AI powering, next gen coal power station." Every passing day it feels more and more like we're living in some Wall-E like, capitalist dystopia where everything has just lost all purpose and capitalism has just gone into runaway mode, having fine tuned everything for maximum profit, instead of us producing things we and the planet actually need.
- boringg 10mo agoHonestly smells like they are trying to raise more capital by selling another potential revenue arm by leveraging on AI hype. Is it possible? Yes. Is it probably that an early stage company like this can provide this at scale and have it work…
- _jzlw 10mo ago[flagged]
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