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Comment by valj | Hacker News Reader

Yikes, when did HN become so full of haters? This is easily one of the most exciting startups out there at the moment. It would be a game changer for so many people living in Europe and Asia who would love to live outside the US and commute to the US regularly for work.

Is it the everyman's plane? Certainly not. But it essentially makes living in Tokyo/Hong Kong/Singapore/Sydney and working in SF much closer to living in New York and working in SF (which a lot of senior executives and investors do). Imagine if Australia East Coast was a 6hr flight and 5hr time difference to SF. New York is a 6hr flight and a 3hr time difference to SF. Seems a lot different all of a sudden doesn't it?

Focussing on gas is the complete wrong way of looking at this. Humans and our ideas are the ultimate resource, not gas. When we work together we solve problems, and the weapon engineer who had to relocate back to HK to raise kids near family can often be the difference between a breakthrough we all benefit from and nothing at all. Having these senior people able to work locally can enable them to seed their hometowns with thriving local offices that train new generations of talent.

Tesla won in cars and SpaceX won in rockets (both very complex industries) over very well established incumbents. Don't underestimate how much organizational dynamics can weigh on a company. Do you think the best people at Boeing are going to risk the next decade of their career working on a plane that might only do 300 orders when they could go get easy promotion working on the next 787?

Good luck to the team at Boom!!

View on HN

"Humans and our ideas are the ultimate resource, not gas. When we work together we solve problems, and the weapon engineer who had to relocate back to HK to raise kids near family can often be the difference between a breakthrough we all benefit from and nothing at all"

Jeez, this again.

What is it about we tech folk that allows a little aptitude to let our ego get so far out of whack?

I'm not that special. You're not that special. Your weapon engineer is not that special.

There's a bunch of guys and gals in Hong Kong/Canada/Iceland/wherever who are just as capable of doing the same job without intercontinental commuting.

As others have said, the Internet exists, which mitigates the need for international travel like you've suggested anyway (which is absurd, not least for the environmental damage this implies).

"Tesla won in cars and SpaceX won in rockets"

I'm a fan, but this very much remains to be seen.

>What is it about we tech folk that allows a little aptitude to let our ego get so far out of whack?

it's startup culture nonsense

What is it about corporate that makes everyone say ‘This is the way it’s always been done, so there cannot possibly be a better way.’?

Lets enjoy laughing at them after they fail, rather than before.

Who here is saying that? And who or what in the thread is "corporate"?

"Lets enjoy laughing at them after they fail, rather than before"

Suggesting someone apply a little humility to their worldview is a pretty far cry from laughing at them for having goals.

I also don't know why you would laugh at someone for failing, it seems a bit harsh.

>> I'm not that special. You're not that special. Your weapon engineer is not that special.

There are a few target markets that are special. Celebs are each unique, their earning power is tied to this uniqueness. Such an aircraft is great if you want to film in the UK but spend your weekends in NY. Much of Concorde's passenger base fit this profile.

Then there are the truly wealthy. There might actually be an environmental argument for them to use this aircraft. Compare it against the carbon footprint of someone flying on Emirates in that airborne apartment they sell on the A380. I'd bet that a semi-normal seat on this rocket will be less carbon intensive than one of those giant first class seats on a slower aircraft. Maybe a few people opting for a less-opulent but far faster option might actually reduce net carbon emissions.

As far as the carbon footprint goes, the energy required to move a thing with a given mass scales quadraticly with speed, same goes for overcoming air resistance. However, there could be some novel gains in engineering an engine that isn't dogshit inefficient at low speeds like the Concorde ones were.

Think you are missing the point. Earth doesent just give us resources we then use, we invent ways to use things as resources. Oil wasnt a resource, uranium wasnt a resource,the sun wasnt a resource, we had to find ways to turn them into resources.

Kerosene is a lot less special than a domain expert who can save your company $100k/hr or whatever.

To have any chance of taking control of our collective carbon footprint we need to move away from technology like this not towards it.

And until we can manifest fundamentally different technology for air travel we should collectively and rapidly scale down our dependence on long distance commute.

Fossil fuel driven flight is not viable in a sustainable future. We need to understand this.

Why is that an absolute? Can't biofuel sources be refined into jet fuel?

I understand that subsidies currently create perverse incentives in that industry, but I struggle to see why bioengineered carbon-neutral jet fuel is fundamentally not viable. That thinking seems very closed-minded.

Biofuels have been a disaster inasmuch as we've destroyed enormous amounts of rainforest to grow them, releasing quite a bit of carbon in the process (and destroying wildlife habitat, of course)

That'd not an argument that carbon-neutral supersonic jets are impossible and should be abandoned.

Biofuels doesn't necessarily mean subsidized corn fields... for example, algae and bacteria grown under specialized LEDs powered by renewable energy are another path forward.

Perfect is the enemy of the good. We can research supersonic jets in addition to better electric storage and propulsion systems.

> Perfect is the enemy of the good.

This saying is not suitable here because unsustainable technology isn't good. It's simply not worth the cost and we are borrowing from the future.

If the venture would be unprofitable up until the point when it would be sustainable would we still push money into it?

I say we should treat any venture that is unsustainable the same way we treat those that are unprofitable. But we don't. We allow unsustainable ventures to carry on without ever becoming sustainable. Which means that it is constantly borrowing (stealing) means from everyone else.

That's great if we have the algae and bacteria. Right now we don't seem to. Maybe we should invest the money there.

In theory, you can power a big car on responsibly sourced fuel. In reality, selling millions of big cars is a huge problem, because of course people will understandably put in the cheap, ubiquitous fuel for which they're not covering externalities.

In my mind the most viable way to make air travel sustainable is to use synthetic fuels produced with commercialised fusion power and atmospheric greenhouse gases as input.

It sounds very sci fi and I'm not sure it would even work on a napkin calculation produced by a thermodynamics professor.

Sure; it's not an unreasonable approach for making such travel carbon neutral; the idea being you're sequestering parity amounts of carbon via the atmospheric gases -> fuel process, and nuclear power covers the inefficiency of such a process.

Downsides include:

1. It's only neutral. It doesn't remove gases we've already released.

2. The process is almost certainly extremely expensive. Until something like emissions taxes are levied, it will not be a competitive fuel.

It's slightly better than neutral. Captured atmospheric carbon would be stored out of the atmosphere in fuel tanks until use. And we could decide to capture and sequester more than we plan to burn again, since in this scenario we have the capturing tech sorted out.

Sure, under the assumption it's cheap to sequester more than all of the oil we extract out of the ground and consume today, then some could be stored to make it neutral or even positive. There are two big steps in there that might or might not ever happen.

>Fossil fuel driven flight is not viable in a sustainable future. We need to understand this.

But it's the reality. Electrification of individual ground transportation, and the phasing out of gasoline cars, is absolutely inevitable over the next 20 years. But jet fuel isn't going anywhere for a long, long time. It's just a matter of physics. It's foreseeable to have small scale electrified commuter aircraft shuttling people within 400 miles. But any type of long haul flight will be done with turbine engines burning kerosene. Even with a 10x increase in energy density for LiPo batteries, we still wouldn't be there.

I don't disagree with anything you've said, but not having a viable alternative to fossil fuel driven flight right now doesn't justify accelerating the damage it's doing by leaning further into it.

Aviation is small fish though. REALLY small fish. This type of aviation even more so. It accounts for only 1-2% of anthropomorphic CO2eq production. Benefits outweigh the bad. I'm not aware of climate scientists actually caring about supersonic travel.

I'm kinda surprised to see this kind of hostility. Same thing happens when nuclear is suggested even though the IPCC HIGHLY advocates its use. It is all about relative impact. Part of the problem with resolving climate change is that even the people who acknowledge it fight among themselves and don't push for both current technologies (which includes nuclear) and research for new technologies (fusion, batteries, and better solar/hydro/wind). We need to just listen to what the experts say, not what you read in some blog post or HN comment.

> I'm not aware of climate scientists actually caring about supersonic travel.

Because there isn't any. None. Zero. Why would you be aware of people worrying about something that currently doesn't exist?

> Why would you be aware of people worrying about something that currently doesn't exist?

I'm not sure how to break this to you, but scientists are generally aware about up and coming technologies. And we do think about potential future impact.

So let me rephrase

>>I'm not aware of climate scientists actually caring about potential future implementations of supersonic travel.

That’s because they’re more aware of the history of commercial supersonic transport than the investors at Boom, and therefore have no reason to worry.

Haters can't make up their minds...

You don’t expect to see an unvarnished historical perspective derided that way here, but I suppose you have a point. Can you tell me where I’ve changed my mind on this issue?

I'm not sure how to break this to you, but supersonic flight isn't an up and coming technology.

It's decades old, and it's failed for economic reasons.

Climate scientists worrying about the impacts of supersonic flight would be like Ornithologists looking to spot dinosaurs in the wild.

Internet experts, politicians, bureaucrats and intellectuals can argue until the end of time about which CO2-emitting products and services deserve to, or should, exist.

Just the same way the expertise of the most-brilliant central planners in the USSR and elsewhere allocated resources.

It doesn't work. There's a better way which is also consistent with democracy and individual choice. But people don't like the sound of it.

> There's a better way

You mean putting a price tag on emissions I assume?

Yes of course. Just tax carbon (and use the proceeds to give a flat rebate to everyone).

I’m not sure why you’re downvoted... this is 100% the best way to incentivize reduction in carbon emissions. And just keep upping the tax gradually as needed.

Is it? Flat carbon trading without any credit schemes is as good and has some pretty good precedent going for it (nox and sox markets)

It's the next-best solution. The only reasonable argument in favor that I've seen is that it is easier and more authoritarian (maybe be careful believing this is a good thing?) to set a hard cap. But a carbon tax can always be adjusted.

It's inferior in econonic efficiency and comprehensive coverage to a carbon tax.

And if implemented incorrectly, it becomes corporate welfare, and this has already happened. It has potential to be just another corporatist-cronyist scheme at taxpayer's expense.

And to date government and bureaucracy have been pretty horrible about solving climate change.

Carbon tax is a simple, elegant, efficient, effective solution. Most people just dont like the sound of it though.

If you edited your original post to add carbon tax, it would probably read a lot clearer. (I upvoted it, I agree)

How would you solve the trade component though? Because carbon production would just shift elsewhere unless:

* there was an international treaty where states each agreed to raise carbon taxes and cut other taxes or do a dividend, or

* import tariffs were levied in proportion to the carbon used in imports from countries that didn't have a similar tax

The latter would demand a large bureaucracy and have a lot of distortions.

I realized recently that a carbon tax isn't like an income tax. An income tax only occurs on profits, whereas a carbon tax is an input tax. This makes the jurisdiction shifting problem more acute.

A carbon tax is still my preferred solution, but was wondering if you had any ideas on how to get around this.

I dont really have a strong opinion or definitive answer.

What I know is that many other industries deal with somethint like this. Not just taxes, but costly regulation hurts domestic production. For example, countries which do not respect responsible fishing practices have a competitive advantage.

Part of the answer can be: just dont let those countries sell fish within the US. Others can be international treatise or laws.

If I were king, I'd need to spend more time to consider my options, but I guess a treatise is in order. I dont see how any climate change action within the US's 350M population will do anything meaningful to solve the problem if the other 6.5Billion are not cooperating.

> The only reasonable argument

Except for the fact that markets are a great way to manage rivalrous goods, dynamically balance economic need against cost without the need for a centralized authority to have high-touch meddling (which presents a corruption danger), oh and most importantly, ad I said, they work, empirically, as with the United States SOX and NOX markets

https://ec.europa.eu/clima/policies/transport/aviation_en

Aviation is currently a small fish because it's currently available to such small part of the population on a regular basis. For those that take part of it it's a major part of their footprint. Scaling it up to more people is very unsustainable. Therefore fossil fuel aviation is unsustainable in a world where more and more people get richer.

> Same thing happens when nuclear is suggested

It's not the "same thing". Nuclear has some sustainability benefits. Bringing back commercial hypersonic air travel seems to have no such benefits.

If we cut carbon out of everything else, the price of oil will drop, and aviation will be able to greatly expand.

Air travel is low now only because it's expensive. People world gladly take many, many more flights if they were cheaper.

Of course if we taxed carbon this problem would go away, and taxing international flights would probably be easier than a general carbon tax, if flights were all that was left.

Initial post wasn’t meant to be hostile at all and I’m still unsure of whether or not supersonic travel is a net positive or negative.

My issue was with the parent comment essentially suggesting that you can justify boosting emissions from flight travel because we still rely on fossil fuels, so might as well double down. Nobody was suggesting that we immediately cease all flight travel. I’m open to the possibility that supersonic travel is a net positive, but the argument needs to be around what we’re getting in return for the emissions and why that’s worth it.

>We need to just listen to what the experts say

People saying supersonic travel is a step in the wrong direction are listening to experts who agree that our use of fossil fuels is a threat to humanity and the environment. And what about when experts disagree? There has to be some level of independent thought to parse and apply what experts are putting forward.

By that standard you shouldnt be using the internet. The “damage” is questionable to say the least. There is a whole group of poor people who need access to fossil fuels to survive, but are you going to stop them from getting it in the mame of climate change? Are you goin to stop buying computers and other products build and distributed using the internatioal supply change? If not why expect others to do what you dont?

I don't understand this logic. How does one action with unfortunate side effects excuse another?

Sure perhaps we shouldn't be using the internet. Or perhaps we should do a lot more to make sure that the energy used for powering the internet is sustainable.

But our deficiency in that area doesn't make this activity any better.

Who are you to decide what is ok and what is not? How do you know that building a supersonic jet doesent open up for other technologies or methods that wil improve effectiveness of fuel consumtion? I dont understand with what logic you get to decide that your consumption is ok but other peoples use isnt.

I think slower flight might be best for long distance travel. Something like an airship. I don't know much about the technology, but my naive view is that the technology is undervalued. An airship has VTOL, is quieter, is more spacious, produces less carbon emissions, etc.

Weather issues are one problem for airships. Actual ships are an option for transatlantic routes but there is basically one limited alternative for that. People basically want cheap and fast. Once you get beyond driving that mostly means subsonic planes.

Thanks, I was not aware of the weather problems.

I'd be willing to take a slower option and I think at least some others would too as long as it's less cramped.

International airline travel can already be pretty much as roomy as a mass of people are willing to pay for on a route. And shifting to a slower mode of transportation that's equally or even more roomy tends to carry a big premium as well. Taking the train or a ship on a multi-thousand mile trip costs more than certainly economy flying does. You can generally travel in comfort. You just need to pay for it.

My wife and I took our then-infant daughter on a 2800km train ride about five years ago (Toronto to Saskatoon by VIA Rail). We paid extra to have sleeping berths with meals included vs regular seats, but overall it was pretty expensive and slow:

- You spend a lot (would estimate 30%+) of time waiting on sidings for freight trains to pass in the other direction because there's only a single track owned by the freight company, so their trains get priority.

- There's no back up plan, and only a few trips a week. Our train happened to run on time, but I had a family member try to take it a few years later and ended up having to cancel for refund and fly instead because the train was running 24h late and she needed to be home for something.

- It's priced and advertised as an "experience" comparable to going on a cruise. They serve you nice food, but obviously the cost of all that service is baked into the ticket— no one is pretending that you'd choose this option just to get to your destination.

- We got our fares for around 60% off, but it was still $450 per adult, I think, which was a lot more than our return flights were (we could afford neither the time nor money required to take the train in both directions). Getting these fares required weeks of monitoring for VIA's "discount Tuesday" promotions and then building our travel plans around the specific dates offered.

- No wifi or even cell reception for most of the route. The northern Ontario section of the route is extremely remote and not at all scenic— just mile after mile of unremarkable forest.

Maybe there's room for an option that's slightly more comfortable and slightly slower, if that's what an airship would offer? But as far as the train goes, it's lots more comfortable and many times slower, but there's just no way to make the cost comparable to flying when you need to pay for all those hours of staff and equipment.

Air ships were already obsolete before the Hindenberg disaster. Being by over twice as much the most expensive mode to travel in, having to take a trickle shower, share a dry toilet with 20 other people, and sleep in a bunkbed (all to save weight) is an extremely lousy deal.

Edit: Why are people downvoting this? I just googled it and confirmed what I posted here.

An airship has far lower payload capacity and is SLOW. VERY SLOW. A car on the interstate would outpace one.

Could we at least use them for bulk transport of non-perishable goods? Container ships are slow too, and we're fine with that.

No. The payload fraction is just too poor. For instance, the Hindenburg, which was the largest, most advanced Zeppelin ever built, had a payload capacity of only 21,000lbs. That's using hydrogen, which, is, obviously not real safe. If it had used helium instead, it would have had a payload capacity of -34,000lbs.

For comparison, a single 40' standard container has a maximum load of 57,000lbs, and a large cargo ship can carry thousands of those.

Thanks for posting. These are interesting figures that show airships are not as good as I suspected.

What was the mass of the Hindenburg without the lift gas? Doubtless modern composites could significantly reduce that mass, which could go directly into increased payload.

Alternatively, an airship of the same mass of the Hindenburg could be made significantly larger, and since payload scales with the lifting gas volume, payload would also increase.

Oh, and throw the Hindenburg's aluminum piano over the side.

I note with interest that you say the Hindenburg would have had a greater payload with Helium rather than Hydrogen. Why do you say that?

> I note with interest that you say the Hindenburg would have had a greater payload with Helium rather than Hydrogen. Why do you say that?

I did not say that. Note the negative.

I saw the dash, but didn't understand it. If the payload with hydrogen is 21,000lbs and it is -34,000 pounds with helium, then it seems like it wouldn't even get off the ground. But clearly, it did get off the ground with passengers using helium, it was designed to fly with helium.

No it wasn't. The German Zeppelin's always run hydrogen. At the time the US had the only real supply of helium and they wouldn't sell to Germany.

Okay, I stand corrected about it flying on helium, thank you for correcting me, +1. However, the Hindenburg was designed to fly using helium as the lift gas.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindenburg-class_airship#Lift_...

The article goes on to say the difference in lift between hydrogen and helium is only 8%.

Edit: drop the apostrophe on zeppelins

8% of 500,000lbs is....

I don't agree. While electric plains maybe in the future, carbon based fuels will continue to be a requirement for a long time.

Eventually we can move to produced carbon based fuel but that will take a while.

Until then, the old green idea of 'lets just not do it' is simply not viable to reduce carbon usage.

If not having commercial supersonic flight isn't viable, quodlibet.

Its not viable to stop the world from using technology and use it just because it goes against your personal preference.

Until we have better technology we have to scale down or reliance on unsustainable tech. The alternative is adverse degradation of our most sophisticated technology available - the biosphere.

Yeah, see, saying “let’s all stop doing this thing” where the thing has diffuse long term bad effects for everyone but short term benefits for the person that does it generally doesn’t work. People have been trying that for a long time. It has to be written into law, or the benefits (economic or otherwise) need to be tilted toward doing the right thing.

I think a large carbon tax is the only shot of getting everyone on track with reducing impact.

Yes. No disagreement here. We absolutely need to put it into law. Although, making such legislation happen doesn't seem to work either. But we need to make it so.

> lets just not do it

I don't see why this is any less viable than the other alternatives. It's the only option that we've already tried. Before invention of air travel.

I mean of course I see that people don't change. But that's the very thing we absolutely need to fix. We have to stay within our means. Not doing the thing that brings cost seems like a simple enough solution.

Nonsense. It's less than 1% of our carbon emissions iirc. In theory we could convert that over to biofuels and/or hydrocarbons produced using CO2 from the atmosphere, at which point it would be carbon neutral. It may be the only reasonable way to get the energy density we need for practical air travel in the near term.

“The global aviation industry produces around 2% of all human-induced carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. Aviation is responsible for 12% of CO2 emissions from all transports sources, compared to 74% from road transport.”

But that’s with current aircraft supper sonic is less efficient and enables longer flights having a very outsized impact for minimal gain. You can both sleep and use high speed internet from modern jets, going 2-3x as fast adds little productivity.

On top of that emerging markets are just as happy to start flying as start driving which is pushing up flying’s impact every year.

> You can both sleep and use high speed internet from modern jets

Speak for yourself — I can't sleep on planes. Nor is airplane internet anything close to high speed by any standard. It's expensive as hell and doesn't exist over oceans. At the same ticket price, for long-haul international, I'd greatly prefer an economy-sized seat in a 2.5x shorter flight to a biz-class seat in a traditional flight.

The cost of these things are well into first class territory* which I find much easier to sleep in vs business class. Turbulence can still occasionally be a thing, but it’s less frequent on long haul flights because they have more options.

As to internet over the ocean, Gogo has quality high speed internet via satellite. If you have not flown on one of these flights or a competent competitor you will notice a real difference.

*At least until a large number of aircraft are in service. Airlines make the most money per square foot with business class, but first class is still a critical revenue stream. Free up first class space via these and run fewer large aircraft with a higher percentage of business class is going to be most efficient. This also means you end up with either fewer economy seats or more expensive ones as currently first class and business class subsidizes economy.

Much as you wish it were the case electric battery power does not have enough power density for mass aircraft transit yet. They're much too heavy. We're getting there but we're still a good decade away. You're certainly not going to get supersonic airliners with electric aircraft. (Elon Musk keeps talking about it but even he states that the energy density isn't there yet.) People need to realize the difference between fiction and reality.

How much do nuclear submarine power plants weigh? :-) Looks like on the order of 600 tons; also looks like 787s carry over 100 ton just in fuel fully loaded. So it is plausible that a scaled down nuclear sub reactor should supply plenty of energy at reasonable weight budget. Obviously you'd want it to be somewhat robust and maybe eject + parachute it for catastrophic scenarios, rather than irradiating whatever the plane runs into.

The energy requirements of moving in the water and the air are completely different so its not a good comparison point. And subs use nuclear power I am pretty sure nobody wants to have planes flying with nuclear reactors over their heads.

It wasn't intended to be a comparison of subs and planes; subs just have the smallest production nuclear power plants that I know of.

It's been tried, back in the 50s and 60s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aircraft_Nuclear_Propulsion

Never went anywhere then but I'd be interested to see whether modern tech could make it feasible.

The problem is shielding all of the people. When you land the plane all of that ionizing radiation bounces back at the people inside giving bathing them in fatal or near fatal levels. The shielding is just too heavy and the physics of shielding make it very unlikely we can develop anything lighter.

Also should the plane have an accident you now have radioactive material spread over miles. Which is also not an easily solved problem.

> When you land the plane all of that ionizing radiation bounces back at the people inside giving bathing them in fatal or near fatal levels

Can you elaborate on what specifically about landing causes that?

Long term you could switch to biofuel or similar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_biofuel

"Yikes, when did HN become so full of haters?"

When it became clear that there was absolutely no way this could work for more than a token number of flights without absolutely devastating consequences to the planet we live on.

You can’t disrupt physics. It is the most unforgiving regulator.

The earth is not as fragile as you've been led to believe.

Not to mention that many of us have a "better" idea what to do with 100 million dollars and would gladly trade some our founder's equity for the opportunity!

> and the weapon engineer who had to relocate back to HK to raise kids near family can often be the difference between a breakthrough we all benefit from and nothing at all

Bad example.

> "It would be a game changer for so many people living in Europe and Asia who would love to live outside the US and commute to the US regularly for work."

What is the environmental impact of "regularly" commuting on an intercontinental supersonic jet, compared to simply using video conferencing?

Humanity doesn't need a new Concorde. The only real upside I could possibly see is faster transport for organ transplants, and how often is that actually going to happen?

> What is the environmental impact of "regularly" commuting on an intercontinental supersonic jet, compared to simply using video conferencing?

For any serious discussions, video conferencing is a garbage replacement for in-person meetings. If anything, the latter is becoming more impactful as lower-level functions get clearly displaced to the former. As others have mentioned, jet fuel doesn’t have to be carbon additive.

> Humanity doesn't need a new Concorde

I think you have a typo - you don’t need a new Concorde.

I think you are underestimating the impact, especially over a long period of time, of constant 5-hour time shifts.

Flying faster doesn't reduce the effects of jet lag.

Note the key difference between Space X and Boom. Space X took well-understood rocket engine technology and made it cheaper. It didn’t try to fight fundamental physics. Boom is entering an area where the large incumbents have failed because the physics doesn’t work with the economics. And there hasn’t been fundamental changes in the physics since those prior efforts. It’s a different bet.

> Space X took well-understood rocket engine technology and made it cheaper.

That was one part of their strategy, but the ultimate goal was always to make it cheaper through reuse and not through cheaper production.

> It didn’t try to fight fundamental physics.

Tell that to all the people who claimed that the way SpaceX does the landing of their rockets would never work out because of the "fuel economics", "the way the engine is designed", etc..

Before SpaceX actually achieved it, there were a lot of people out there who doubted that their approach is feasible.

Did SpaceX actually proved that their economics work? We do know that they sell them much cheaper than competition, but do we know when/if VC money stopped paying for the difference?

> Note the key difference between Space X and Boom. Space X took well-understood rocket engine technology and made it cheaper. It didn’t try to fight fundamental physics.

That's quite a revisionist characterization of SpaceX's 15-year toil, which many had described as impossible. Elon Musk said it best in March 2017 [0][1] when they achieved the revolutionary feat of successfully landing a reused rocket:

“It’s the difference between having airplanes that you threw away after every flight, verses reusing them multiple times."

“It’s been 15 years to get to this point, I’m sort of at a loss for words. This is a great day, not just for SpaceX but for the space industry as a whole, in proving that something could be done that many people said was impossible.”

I certainly wouldn't call something that had never been done before by anyone a well-understood technology.

> And there hasn’t been fundamental changes in the physics since those prior efforts. It’s a different bet.

You may be correct on the physics, but you are ignoring other dimensions that could make this endeavor feasible. The first Concorde flew 50 years ago. Our understanding of CFD, materials science, manufacturing techniques etc has progressed significantly from what they were 50 years ago.

[0]: https://www.recode.net/2017/3/30/15131514/spacex-space-histo...

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1800&v=xsZSXav4w...

{deleted} - largely due to me misreading "mid 2020s" as "mid 2020" for delivery of new planes and being highly skeptical of the ability to go from 0 to airliner in 5-6 years.

SpaceX spent less than 100mm year until 2012, and delivered something that cost others billions to create. As mentioned elsewhere, there is a lot of inertia in older/larger corporations.

SpaceX retrofitted used rockets. That’s a big distinction from building new aircraft from scratch.

Um... what? The Falcon 1 and 9 were built from scratch, at least as much as anything is. They developed their own rocket engines and most of the components as usual aerospace components were too expensive to hit the price they were targeting.

Boom is certainly an extremely risky startup (as was SpaceX)... but isn't that what venture capital is for?

You might be thinking of Orbital, which uses retrofitted cores, or ULA, which uses Russian engines.

Are you just completely bonkers? If we start considering Atlantic flights normal and pleasant for commuting than we can completely give up on ever saving the planet. Regular aviation is already extremely pressing on our CO2 output, supersonic flight is way way worse!!

CO2 emissions from international flights will be capped at 2020 levels by international agreement so supersonic flight will have no net effect on emissions.

https://www.icao.int/environmental-protection/Pages/A39_CORS...

Please edit out personal swipes and name calling from your posts here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> Yikes, when did HN become so full of haters?

Since at least 2007. I'm sure we all remember the warm reception the Dropbox Show HN[0] got?

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

> "The fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown." - Carl Sagan

s/laughed/jeered/

I was one of the idiots who didn't understand the Dropbox monetization strategy. Until recently, I thought the strategy was "whales" like in a casino would pay for everyone. I think I couldn't get past the idea that they were giving something that keeps costing them money away for free forever. What I didn't realize is how "sticky" something like Dropbox can be. I don't think I can get most people who use Dropbox and pay $80 a year to switch to Google drive and pay $50 a year. They have a workflow there.

I guess I'm trying to justify my reaction to Dropbox. Frankly, I still don't understand why Dropbox turned down acquisition offer from Apple. I still don't get it.

I don't remember laughing at Dropbox though. It was more bewilderment than anything.

It's a little weird that he includes Columbus there. Columbus was many things and genius wasn't one of them. Persistent, egomaniacal, outrageously cruel to the point that the Spanish crown threw him in prison, extremely bad at basic arithmetic -- but not genius.

More importantly though, who is Fulton?

presumably https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Fulton

Wow, what a bunch of nonsense. We are facing an environmental crisis due to fossil fuels consumption and here you are flippantly offering intercontinental commuting for work. For some reason, you think people who work in America can't find space in its giant, mostly empty landmass and instead need to commute on supersonic jets from Asia. Wtf?

I'm with you!

We've basically wrecked the planet already. At least let these super-rich dudes have some fun while it lasts.

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