I would be extremely impressed if they could pull this off. Developing a supersonic passenger plane must possibly be one of the most expensive and complex things to do. Probably harder than what SpaceX does.
SpaceX has brought reusability to space travel. That's slightly more impressive than a fast airplane.
Err... is trying to bring?
A rocket is not worth 10s of millions in raw materials, so it is the process of creating it that makes it worth tens of millions. So the 10s of millions of dollar question is: how much cheaper is the process of re-using a rocket vs the process of building a new one? It seems impossible to ever fully recoup the other 97.7%, but how much can they?
SpaceX is still very far from their goal, but it's worth describing that "full and rapid" reusability was not how the Shuttle worked. A reusable SpaceX rocket would be able to launch, deliver payload to orbit, land, refuel itself and load the next payload all in less than 1 hour and with a cost of ~$300k. They are very far from that of course, but it's a fantastical goal.
Remember the second / final stage get's to orbit so return needs a heat shield or an obscene amount of fuel. The shuttle demonstrated the issues with reusing heat shields very well.
PS: IMO, Space X is all about execution not technology. Landing a first stage rocket vs using taking a dip in the ocean is probably a good trade-off. But, most of there gains are about being lean and making incremental improvements.
ED: It's the classic doing X, trying to do X, or hope to someday do X.
The only reason this idea is even being entertained right now is because oil prices are so low. As soon as the oil producers are finished crushing this round of alternative energy companies oil prices will go back up and Boom won't sound so good.
Sure, that was the only ever Concorde crash, but then they really didn't fly very much compared with conventional aircraft. There are individual commercial aircraft that logged around as many flight cycles as the entire Concorde programme without incident.
But afaik the main culprit in the crash was a piece of titanium that fell off from another airplane and was left on the runway. This metal-piece cut into the tyre and caused an explosion.
You can think of lots of reasons why, but it mainly boils down to this: VCs are hired to make bets within an asset class (startups) and not outside that asset class. Institutional investors (upstream of VCs) have other managers to do commodities etc.
Also, at least in theory, the market price of oil takes all info into account. If the VCs could really predict the price of oil in 3-5 years, they should probably be trading that alpha instead of investing in VC.
That doesn't mean that the investment isn't expected to be hurt (or wiped out completely) should the price of oil rise, it just means that a competent investor would have looked at that possibility and decided that the investment was still worthwhile.
The comment I was responding to IMO assumed flippancy on the part of investors and implied that they would be surprised by an increase in oil. That's absurd.
For flight testing a scale model, they could use a F-5E Tiger [0] ($1-5m each, de-milled) to test the wing and nose aerodynamics, keeping as much systems as possible from the original jet. NASA have done similar modifications before [1]
I expect this will be more of a project management challenge than a technical challenge.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northrop_F-5
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shaped_Sonic_Boom_Demonstratio...
Yes. Also, regardless of the human pilot, this is intended as a passenger aircraft. That necessitates people on board for it to operate as intended.
Boom can't do this. Unlike SpaceX, they need enough investment money to take them all the way to passenger-safe.
Also passenger safe for a few highly trained and risk aware astronauts is a lower bar than passenger safe for the general public.
The military has used supersonic aircraft on cargo missions in exceptional cases, actually. Their supersonic aircraft tend to be vastly less efficient than even Concorde, though.
To answer that
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tupolev_Tu-160
and
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rockwell_B-1_Lancer
The only long range strategic bomber developed after the 50s that wasn't supersonic was the B-2 stealth bomber (not that there have been very many strategic bombers developed after the 50s).
In the case of SpaceX, consider their last launch failure. The general consensus seemed to be "well, rockets are really hard. And it was the strut manufacturer's fault to some extent. They'll do better next time, and they're still changing the world. Anyway, SpaceX rockets are 4x cheaper than any competitor so even with the occasional launch failure it's still the best option!"
Can you imagine the reaction today if e.g. a Boeing plane blew up on launch? In fact, recall all the criticism Boeing received after issues with the 787's batteries...
But again, I certifiably don't really know. Someone could write about energy requirements and wet/dry mass and how thin rocket skins are and aerodynamic forces and easily convince me rockets are harder.
Think how many more cycles a plane goes through a day / month / year / decade. Times that by the number of models of that plane out there.
Building a totally new passenger airplane just seems a hugely complex thing. Getting it to fly is one thing but you need safety, long-term maintenance, fuel efficiency, international regulation and many other factors.
At least from the outside a rocket looks simpler to me.
Don't get me wrong. I would love to see them succeed but it seems really, really, really hard. Much harder than anything any of the current unicorns has achieved.
From a technical POV, I don't think this is anywhere near unicorn territory. In fact, I think they are aiming too low. I'd ideally want a supersonic plane that is quiet enough to fly over land and cheap enough that your average traveler can afford if they want to trade price for speed. Full autonomous capability so that the plane itself can have thousands of flight hours under its belt before a human test pilot gets on-board.