> The reference to a battery powered automatic insulin dispenser is painful. The technology to do this is trivial today but it's not really available due to onerous medical device regulations.
It is only 'trivial' in comparison with the challenges they would have trying to implement the same thing in 1950.
This is actually a hard problem. Although medical companies have solved it for the most part, and there are devices available. Still, regulations make sense, as our sensors, advanced as they are, can still provide erroneous readings. You can easily kill someone that way.
> 2 hours New York to San Francisco: we had planes for this in the 1970s but it was killed by regulatory hysteria.
That's oversimplifying. Yes, prohibiting supersonic flights over land had an effect of mostly allowing for intercontinental flights. Which makes the planes themselves less attractive and contributed to its demise. But by itself it wouldn't have killed it. There were multiple problems.
Some of the problems were:
1) Flights were _expensive_ . Supersonic flight is not that fuel-efficient, at least not as implemented by the Concorde. Takeoff (and sometimes climbing) was done on afterburners. It was capable of supercruise so fuel consumption was not much more than a 747 or the equivalent of a business jet (per passenger). It did not carry as many passengers though.
2) The aircraft itself was finicky and required a lot of training – for its 3 man crew. Yes, it still required a 'flight engineer'.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB106504293992222300
3) Environmental concerns (see 1). There were some discussions about Ozone layer depletion given its high flight altitude. Not sure how real those concerns were, but they existed.
4) The famous crash, and possibly 9/11 (it was scheduled to reenter service that year). Also increased regulations, meaning more time sitting at airports. 3.5h + 3.5h is already close to a full work day, add airport delays due to TSA and the like, and you can't cross the atlantic, have a meeting, and come back in the same day anymore. If it is going to take more than half a day each way, it makes more sense to take a normal flight.
5) Most airlines wanted aircraft that were more fuel efficient and carried more passengers. The Concorde was going exactly on the wrong direction.
The regulations just added insult to injury. Not may companies operating them, not many planes in service, not many routes. Any issues would then have an outsized effect. But even more importantly, it prevented development of successors.
Sonic booms can be mitigated to a large extent today. There are potentially better designs that would carry more people at higher efficiencies, including flying wings. We don't need miracles, we just need to make it worth it to business and first class travelers(at least, at first). Automation improvements means that we could have a two person crew, just like any other aircraft. And so on. But who is going to absorb that R&D with the Concorde gravestone around?
We'll have to be happy with subsonic aircraft for the time being. Unless SpaceX delivers. A suborbital flight probably makes more sense than the Concorde.