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Cool science. But the article fails to take even a cursory stab at contextualising the plan against the economic, environmental and political backdrop - doesn’t
by darkteflon 4mo ago
Cool science. But the article fails to take even a cursory stab at contextualising the plan against the economic, environmental and political backdrop - doesn’t even mention that there’s already been one failed supersonic commercial flight programme. This is as pie-in-the-sky as it gets.
- HNisCIS 4mo agoWhenever you look at supersonic or hypersonic commercial aircraft plans you should assume one of two things. A. It's a bait and switch by a founder who wants to pivot to weapons/military aircraft but wants to be able to hire high grade talent without paying the "we're gonna kill people" premium, can pivot once a good chunk of the workforce is complacent with a paycheck. You laugh but this happens SO FUCKING MUCH. B. It's for business jet scale operations for billionaires. There are >3000 billionaires and however many corporate aviation departments and if you can build a super/hypersonic private jet that's not horribly expensive to operate the "time savings"* for that class of person will demand they buy one. * when I say time savings I mean dick measuring contest
- Seattle3503 4mo agoWhat companies are examples of that bait and switch strategy?
- Onavo 4mo agoCan't give any examples but I have definitely heard the same about a lot of aerospace startups through the grapevine. As for OP's point about private jets, Boom supersonic is your classic example.
- HNisCIS 4mo agoI can't name names but 3 of the startups I've worked at. Places I haven't worked: Skydio Applied Intuition Saildrone Planet Labs Boom Scale AI Also worth noting that sometimes it's on purpose, sometimes the founders are all "we're gonna save the world" then AFWERX enters the chat with a big fucking check and the founders yell "Nevermind! Guess we're the baddies now! How many slaughterbots did you say?"
- nine_k 4mo agoGoogle tried to become a national security contractor, and the backlash among the engineers was very intense.
- bigfatkitten 4mo agoGoogle already does national security work. https://cloud.google.com/distributed-cloud-air-gapped https://cloud.google.com/distributed-cloud-air-gapped https://www.defence.gov.au/news-events/releases/2025-12-19/defence-signs-deed-standing-offer-google-australia-defence-hyperscale-cloud https://www.defence.gov.au/news-events/releases/2025-12-19/d...
- switchbak 4mo agoI’m not in the industry, but I would say Hermeus would be a perfect example. Ostensibly building a commercial airliner, but if you look closely it feels like a military oriented startup from the inside out.
- Grosvenor 4mo ago> * when I say time savings I mean dick measuring contest And in this case smaller is better?
- nradov 4mo agoDefense contractors don't pay premium wages. Rather the opposite. Many employees specifically want to work in the field in order to contribute to the national security mission.
- HNisCIS 4mo agoI'm being a bit obtuse here to make the point, it's more complicated than that. The reality is if you create a defense startup you end up hiring defense employees which comes with its own set of issues. That said, go look at salaries right now in the defense space.
- picture 4mo agoFrom my experience with working for defense/aerospace companies as well as civilian b2b ones in the US, the general situation is that defense/aero companies pay less but demands less of a grind. People usually take the lower pay (usually 70% of equivalent role in commercial sector) for the better culture
- HNisCIS 4mo agoFor pure generic full-stack-whatever devs yes. For EEs, embedded, FPGA, RF, etc you can pull waaaaay more in the defense world, especially if you're willing to do cleared work.
- loeg 4mo agoSafety should probably also be considered.
- hdndjsbbs 4mo agoI think a lot of the Concorde failure is tied to its status as a British-French project. Trans-Pacific flights are much longer and there's a lot of money in PEK -> LAX than in JFK -> LHR. Qantas wanted to offer London to Sydney, but they couldn't fly supersonic over land. Mainland China or Japan to Australia is a feasible route for high-margin, low-capacity supersonic flights. If you could make the flight from Beijing to California take less than 5 hours that seems like a premium product many ultra wealthy people would spring for. Dubai to SFO is also a possible route.
- VerifiedReports 4mo agoORD -> Vatican
- gottorf 4mo ago> Dubai to SFO is also a possible route Is there really that much premium traffic between Dubai and the Bay Area?
- WorldPeas 4mo agoI think the more interesting question is /will/ there be that much premium traffic ongoing
- bobthepanda 4mo agoThe Middle East (was) a pretty common stopover for India flights, since India's not that well connected to the US due to a lack of capacity.
- fakedang 4mo agoHonestly not so much in my experience. It was busy, but mostly because of Emirates longhauls. Dubai to NYC and back is extremely busy though.
- vidarh 4mo agoA couple of searches suggests only Emirates operate a direct route between SFO and Dubain, so it wouldn't seem so.
- rdl 4mo agoVastly more favorable today than it was when Concorde flew. 1) Rich people are WAY richer, and time is even more valuable 2) Businesses have some very important employees and "2 day trip" vs "3-4 day trip" is worth $50-100k 3) Larger population of people able to pay $20-30k for a flight than ever before. The biggest practical impact is there's probably going to be a private jet version instead of just a commercial one, and there will likely be transpacific demand exceeding transatlantic. Also government/military use.
- deadbabe 4mo agoWhat are some examples of employees so important you would pay $100k to get them somewhere immediately?
- Nesco 4mo agoAmerican execs negotiating memory two months ago in Korea?
- infecto 4mo agoYou are not thinking high enough the food chain. I mean heck you have tenured SV engineers cracking $1mm with RSUs. It’s not rare in finance for folks to be hitting $3-5mm with bonus. So that’s what $19k comp a day. If that individual is making $5mm they are more than likely making a multiple of that for the organization.
- bobthepanda 4mo agoEven these days, a lot of retailers operate fleets of private jets even for district or regional managers, because it saves somebody like Walmart a lot of paid hours to fly someone from rural town A to rural town B rather than potentially deal with the hassle of an overnight booking at an airport hub.
- snicky 4mo agoI still don't quite get it given I have never worked high enough or in a big enough corp. What kind of mission a person earning $19k a day have to do at the destination to justify the cost? I imagine to earn this much their main responsibility is to lobby / influence someone important (at dinners, golfing and such). Otherwise, if there are no outsiders involved the whole thing could be just done online. If it's about lobbying though - does it have to be done immediately and 3-4 times a week? Another example that comes to my mind is a highly skilled expert in repairing some important machinery, e.g. ship engines or factory lines.
- amanaplanacanal 4mo agoI think the SpaceX plan for point to point travel might be even more pie in the sky. Or maybe a tie.
- bob1029 4mo agoI think it's more practical. They've already got humans flying.
- Snafuh 4mo agoGood luck getting a launch and landing pad anywhere close to a population centre. Logistics around the flight would be a big asterisk behind the flight time.
- jojobas 4mo agoPoint to point rocket travel was never a good faith pitch, it was a hype thing (and your pension money are going into the fraud soon).
- godelski 4mo ago> This is as pie-in-the-sky as it gets. All your critiques are things we heard about Starlink too. "Oh, you're just reinventing Globalstar[0], which already failed. What makes you think this time will be different?" The question isn't wrong, per say, but most of the time it is used dismissively rather than in earnest. There's thousands of products you use today that were invented and ahead of their time. Hell, Google itself is famous for this. A great example being Google Glasses. When they first came out you could get punched in the face[1], but now there's Meta Glasses, Snap's, and dozens of others. The landscape changes, and fast. Just because others failed before doesn't mean others later won't. It's not bad to ask these questions, but it is easy to be too dismissive. People love to tear things down, but not build them up. The two go hand in hand, but there needs to be a more measured approach. Frankly, projects can fail for many reasons. Too often it is simply bad luck. You either learn from the past or you repeat it. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Globalstar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Globalstar [1] https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/google-glass-blamed-for-melee-in-sf-bar/ https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/google-glass...
- darkteflon 4mo agoI’m in favour of projects like these - even on spending taxpayer money on them. I think it’s super cool and I would love to see it. Yeah, I also think it’s extremely unlikely. However, when you’re doing journalism, you should contextualise for your readers. TFA doesn’t even try to do the bare minimum.
- godelski 4mo ago> I’m in favour of projects like these - even on spending taxpayer money on them. Even a few hits is extremely valuable. I mean the US's investments in CERN and ARPA sure lead to way more economic activity and resultant tax money than they ever spent. By many orders of magnitude (I mean the US still is committing like a billion a year, that's nothing in government money. Let alone considering how many multi-trillion dollar companies there are?) > However, when you’re doing journalism Which is why I say the questions are fair and to not use them dismissively. I agree, context matters.
- _carbyau_ 4mo ago> This is as pie-in-the-sky as it gets. I saw the "sounding rocket" and thought: Oh, hypersonic missiles money.
- sfifs 4mo agoConcord was very old technology. I am quite sure a clean sheet now 1. Would have much lower sonic booms thanks to recent research (quite a bit of it by NASA on wing geometry) and more importantly computer simulation available now 2. The engines would be far more fuel efficient 3. The flights would be able to have better efficiency in the subsonic regime as well. Just see what winglets and the like have done to fuel economy . I fly 14 to 18 hour routes maybe 4-5 times a year on business paying 5x the economy cost and it still sucks. Breaking the flight with a connection (IMO) sucks more. My management flies such routes every month. There is a lot of revenue headroom in that fare gap for something that flies maybe 3x-4x as fast which military aircraft already do. What will hold back the idea is conservatism among the business managers in aircraft manufactures and incumbent airlines who will "draw lessons" from a 50 year old experiment
- notahacker 4mo agoIt'd be far more efficient than the 50 year old tech, but so is the baseline tech they're comparing it with, and the market has optimised heavily for price competition (and has a lot more private jets doing exactly the route and time executives with Concorde money want) and needs speed somewhat less when it's a lot easier to stay in touch with a business whilst inflight. Ultimately there's not much to draw lessons from that suggests it's going to sell enough aircraft to recover the investment of building and certifying it (even comparatively simple niche aircraft like the A380 struggled there), which is why even Boom is now reinventing itself as a provider of turbines for AI datacentres to try to fund its development costs...
- trhway 4mo ago>2. The engines would be far more fuel efficient not really. In supersonic regime Concorde engines were pretty good, and you'd not beat them today by much. Concorde was using afterburners to accelerate to supersonic and this is where it burned a lot of fuel. Designing engines which would give you good thrust at subsonic speeds without afterburners and would still perform well in supersonic is still much unsolved. Just look at the best military engines today - they all under Mach 2 and can't give even 3000 miles range. And without increasing efficiency we can't really get much beyond the Concorde's 4500 miles. I.e. unfortunately there seems to be no current tech (or coming right tomorrow morning) that will allow Trans-Pacific. It looks more feasible to me that Starship suborbital SFO-to-Shanghai will come well before a new Concorde on that route. Especially considering that Starship's ballistic trajectory is more fuel efficient on such long distances than supersonic plane flight.
- zardo 4mo agoProbably because there is no plan to develop a commercial plane.