2. But more modern and fuel-efficient
3. And air travel is just plain a bigger market these days than it was in the 1970s
4. As it's made by an American company, they hope to avoid the US protectionism Concorde was subject to.
Concorde failed because there wasn't enough of these people.
Eventually you run out of people willing to pay $10k a seat for this type of travel. Which is what happened to Concorde - after the novelty wore off, all you had was an extremely expensive seat.
I think British Airways could have kept the Concorde flying longer than they did if it were not for this incident:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_4590
which happened at a lower passenger*mile count than the 737 MAX accidents and would have required a Space Shuttle style shutdown-and-reform phase. Concorde's avionics and cockpit were completely out of date and fixing that would have been expensive.
It remains to be seen whether post-COVID wealthy travellers will subsidise BOOM development costs as opposed to not flying or continuing with smaller private jets as at present. Although Boom is “designing Overture to be the first post-pandemic airplane", they will need a massive investment to scale from the single-seat prototype (still to fly) to an operationally profitable vehicle.
If the noise issue is solved you could meet private, and high-end commercial flight demands. Where the customer isn't concerned with an order of magnitude increase in flight costs. If you can make a big dent in the former using new materials, improved aerodynamics, or higher altitude flight then there is an opportunity to chase commercial customers.
People sometimes took the Concorde London->NYC to attend meetings and then returned to London the same day. I've done London->Dulles for meetings and then back on a regular boring jet, but it was exhausting and if there had been options to halve that flight time it'd have been fantastic.
At least a couple business class-only airlines didn't last long. The only current route I'm aware of is the BA London City to NYC route. Though there may well be others in the Middle East, etc.
So less wonderful than you'd hope: the Pacific is darned big.
Perhaps the supersonic range issue is just a really tough nut to crack?
Almost certainly.
You're right that trans-Pacific would be more compelling. Even with decent food, nice drink, and lie-flat seating, a trans-Pacific flight is still a long time to stay mostly sitting. (Though airlines could have lounges like the old first class lounge in the hump of 747s; people just don't want to pay for the space.)
Honestly, transatlantic is really not a big deal. Very few people are interested in flying back and forth in a day. And if you're going to stay overnight, NY to London, say, is really not a bad trip in business and you don't even need to do it as a red-eye.
I'd add that, if it weren't already the case relative to when the Concorde flew, I suspect that this period will permanently damp flying across the ocean just to sign a deal or do a quick meet and greet. (Which was certainly part of the market for Concordes).
Similar to the history of regular air travel, it will be the wealthy that indulge in the convenience of those time savings at first, and then as economies of scale and efficiency improve, it can become the norm.
There's a reason why the term "jet-setters" came about in the 50s-60s to mean wealthy people. Nowadays flying somewhere on a jet is accessible to anyone in the lower middle class and up.
That was the theory behind Concorde half a century ago.
Flying somewhere on a jet is accessible to anyone in the lower middle class and up because the industry learned from the lack of demand for Concorde and optimised for fuel efficiency instead of speed
What?
Jets carry hundreds of thousands of pounds of payload - a 747 can carry nearly 250,000lbs of payload.
Rockets carry payloads in the range of thousands pounds at most. Simply making your rocket bigger isn't an easy solution, and you start burning a ton more fuel for marginal payload gains.
It also doesn't cost $90 Million to fly a 747 every time it takes off...
$90 Million is the current cost of a reusable Falcon Heavy[1].
Even if you cut that in half, that's still 10's of millions more expensive than flying a 747 between two destinations.
For comparison, it costs - on the high end - $27,000 per hour of flight to operate a 747[2]. For a 12 hour flight, that's ~$324,000 of cost, or about 0.72% of the fictitious $45 Million-Per-Launch "Starship".
There is no reality where flying a rocket is cheaper than an airplane.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_Heavy
[2] https://www.opshots.net/2015/04/aircraft-operating-series-ai....
[1]https://www.space.com/spacex-starship-flight-passenger-cost-...
For starters, even at these fantasy numbers, that's still $20,000 per seat. Who needs and/or wants that? Very few people, as Concorde found out, and as Boom will soon learn the same.
Rockets are also tremendously more dangerous and volatile than an airplane. If 1 out of 10,000 launches results in a total loss of the vehicle, and all passengers on board - we're not going to do it. Rockets are simply not a safe mode of transportation - particularly when compared to aviation.
Not to mention, you cannot launch with bad weather - or the possibility of bad weather... if it's too hot, or too cold, etc.
It's just not a realistic option.
A lot of people are willing to pay $250k for a minor sub-orbit hop in the Virgin spacecraft. I bet there are millions of people who would pay, at least once, to fly on one of these flights in conjunction with a trip from New York to Beijing or London to Australia. $20k is not much more than a two week luxury safari.
The comparison of the risk of rocket travel to the risk of helicopter travel is more realistic. That is the level of risk many wealthy people are willing to take to save time.
How many people will actually pay $250k for a spaceship ride? I know everyone says they would, but who actually has the means to do so?
How many people will actually pay $20k for this fictitious rocket travel ride? That's the eqivilent of a decent brand new car.
The reality is there's a finite amount of people who have the means to do actual space tourism. You run out of these people after a short while... and then you go bankrupt.
And no, you cannot compare rockets with helicopter safety. It's well known helicopters aren't the most safe mode of transportation - but they do not spontaneously explode either. They are far safer than a rocket - arguing otherwise is disingenuous.
SpaceX was founded in 2002 to start advancing rocket tech again and has made amazing advances so far. I agree that the West's safety first environment of today that rocket travel seems way too unsafe for most, but there still plenty of people that don't have that mind set. I would say too each their own, but would you advocate that no one should even try?
This transportation idea with rockets is also just a side business opportunity for the Starship. If the Earth flights work out then many more of them can be sold and launched, bringing down cost and increasing the rate of improvements. The main reason for building it is to dramatically reduce the cost of putting things into space and traveling to and from Mars.