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Comment by the_duke | Hacker News Reader

Supersonic aircraft projects have come and gone over the years. They usually dwindle away into oblivion.

The only company that I would take seriosly right now is Aerion (http://www.aerionsupersonic.com/). They are working on a supersonic private jet (12 passengers). They already have quite a few orders (notably 20 jets for Flexjet, 120 Mil a piece) and a cooperation with Airbus, who is apparently helping them. Probably in exchange for their drag reducing "laminar flow" technology.

Building a new aircraft is a huge undertaking, both in terms of technical challenges, financing and organization. A supersonic one even more so.

I'd love to be proven wrong, but this doesn't sound too promising.

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> Supersonic aircraft projects have come and gone over the years. They usually dwindle away into oblivion.

The international aviation market is probably the largest it has ever been and I believe the expectation is that it will continue to grow. That could be a factor in determining how successful the next iteration of supersonic aircraft will be. I travel from the US to New Zealand often. I don't care about getting to LAX in 1.5 hours instead of 3 but I would love to be able to go from LAX to AKL in 5 hours. The airlines would love to be able to provide quicker service to Europe or Asia from the US.

All the same FUD spoken during the early days of SpaceX. It was correct in most cases; Bigelow, Blue Origin, Xcor are floundering, SpaceX is the exception. I just hope we have more entrants in this industry to increase the odds of success.

Space access never had the cost pressures of passenger air transport. It's not much easier than what Virgin Galactic is trying to do.

Blue Origin seems to be doing OK so far; they've just grown far slower than SpaceX due to not starting out with commercial flights.

SpaceX doesn't need to compete in a consumer market, though.

Both SpaceX and Blue Origin look like they could provide hypersonic transport to antipodes in a not too distant future.

The reliability of "things that go to space" is much, much lower than civilian airplanes.

True. But think of the status of going from point to point anywhere on earth in less than an hour. How much risk is that worth?

I think Elon said there is probably a market for delivering stuff to antipodes in under an hour, price doesn't matter. It's not a large market, and you don't get a steady daily business, but there will always be demand for it.

Until, of course, this sort of thing becomes trivial and super-reliable, and then the price will drop through the floor.

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