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Whenever 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 t
by HNisCIS 5mo ago
Whenever 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 5mo agoWhat companies are examples of that bait and switch strategy?
- Onavo 5mo 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 5mo 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 5mo agoGoogle tried to become a national security contractor, and the backlash among the engineers was very intense.
- bigfatkitten 5mo 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 5mo 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 5mo ago> * when I say time savings I mean dick measuring contest And in this case smaller is better?
- nradov 5mo 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 5mo 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 5mo 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 5mo 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.