Hacker News Reader

Comment by Scene_Cast2 | Hacker News Reader

Meta-comment: here are the typical arguments about consumer supersonic flight on HN.

1. It will be pricey. Counter-point - having the availability for the select few that need it is still a good thing; and perhaps it's not so expensive with new tech.

2. Environment. Counter-points - "if it were up to you, you'd ban air travel entirely"; let them purchase carbon credits or fund electric flight; is the marginal environmental impact that bad?

3. General comment about speed of innovation, regulations, where smart people these days are working, etc.

View on HN

4. "Call me when you've built an actual plane and not just a PowerPoint deck."

And in this case, I think this would be a valid complaint. This is just an announcement that some people might look into some things. It's also a company that has wanted to build a spaceport in Australia for 20 years, and... hasn't.

Yes, framing this as "Australia Joins..." is a bit misleading. It is by an Ukranian immigrant who is coming from USSR times. His idea seems to involve the Ukrainian MotorSich engine factory. He may get a lot of support from the current Ukrainian government - in my view it is a pretty progressive one which tries to pay attention to Ukraine industrial development, and the MotorSich is among the key objects of this attention.

For the space port venture they are planning to launch Ukraninan made Zenith rocket (which was used for Sea Launch back then). Looking into their top people - there are also Canadian based Ukraine immigrants, etc. One can see the pattern here. It is a pretty typical style of venture in immigrant communities with its natural advantages and disadvantages.

Wrt. SST to Australia - the best trajectory is ballistic, and Starship 1 hour flight LA to Sydney, 100 pax business or 500 cattle class is the future I think.

Does it make sense to distinguish between cattle- and bizniz-class in the context of hypothetical hypes like Starship?

With hypothetical hype I mean the assumption this will be used for ballistic pax transport.

What would be the differentiator, if the ballistics dictate a full seat/couch anyways? The cattle in a mesh net, the bizniks in full divan? Would it make sense when any conceivable trip would be three hours max? Not to mention constraints mandated by entities like FAA for ... I don't know ... spatial arrangement regarding speed of evacuation to the emergency chutes, whatever?

edit: Thinking about it, would they even bother? Or would it rather be something like one seat fits all, after the applicants have sworn their fealty to their elonzniak overlord by opting into NetJets style access card? Similar to how Starlink is 99 universal credits everywhere?

>Does it make sense to distinguish between cattle- and bizniz-class in the context of hypothetical hypes like Starship?

i believe in the almighty symmetry breaking power of the price differentiation (or like it was said in one Soviet movie "There is no goal when the society doesn't practice differentiation based on the color of one's pants")

>ballistics dictate a full seat/couch anyways?

technically you're right, and thus instead of 100 (i used 500/100 just based on ballpark comparison of Starship payload volume vs. 747) there would be more like 300+ business - good for SpaceX :)

>applicants have sworn their fealty to their elonzniak overlord by opting into NetJets style access card?

and 1000000 credits gets you around the Moon, couple 00 more - around the Mars. The future is bright. To some.

Out all things a supersonic aircraft needs, an engine is the roadblock bigger than everything else combined.

Uncounted supersonic aircraft startups went bust trying to make own engines (and that with making turbojets actually being easier than modern turbofans)

For everything else, it's sixties-seventies materials, and technology.

In fact, it's much easier for example to get steel, and aluminium alloys withstanding 200C°-300C° than in sixties.

Strong actuators for control surfaces are both better, and easier to make now because of aircraft electrification.

Internal structure can be made easier with composites today than with complex forged parts 60 years ago.

And of course, supersonic aerodynamics is now much easier with computers.

Modern non-military jet engines are designed with high pressure ratios around 50-60 to get good subsonic cruise efficiency.

For a supersonic jet, a lot of the compression is done by the intake, so the compression in the engine must be much lower, around 10-20. This is why off the shelf engines don't work very well for supersonic.

The concorde used a pressure ratio 11.3 from the engine, but combined with the intake it was 82 when at cruise. This actually made it very efficient at 43%. During taxi and climb-out however, the low pressure ratio made it a real gas guzzler.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolls-Royce/Snecma_Olympus_593

To get to the efficient supersonic mode asap they even used afterburner. Military engines are 20-30 so they would be most suitable COTS.

There was a B version on the drawing board which would have dropped the afterburner...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concorde#Range

And you're right, the ballpark fuel consumption for Concorde says your hourly rate is not that dissimilar in subsonic than in supersonic so you better fly fast quick...

It's also a lot more noise pollution than normal aircraft. I lived under the reentry path of the space shuttle back when it landed at Edwards Air Force base, and the sonic booms were loud as hell and shook the entire house, but only once every couple of months thankfully. We're not talking super close, either. Near middle of Los Angeles, almost 100 miles south.

I guess they could wait until they've very far away to actually go supersonic, though, and slow down while still really far from the landing strip, but if they're flying over populated regions at all supersonic, it's going to mini earthquake everyone underneath the flight path.

There's a lot of effort going into researching ways to make booms from SSTs quieter. NASA's has a low-boom research program trying to turn the booms into "gentle thumps" by changing the shape of plane's shockwaves [0]. Lockheed are building the X-59 for demonstration flights for the program.

[0] https://www.nasa.gov/X59

> the availability for the select few that need it is still a good thing

If you actually believe that, you might want to look deeper into the environmental impact of the lifestyle of the super-rich. A very large percentage of aircraft emissions comes from frequent flyers already and an even more disproportionate part is by charter flights and private aircraft.

Aircraft emissions come from the engines. Charge a carbon tax. If one set of people (specialist field engineers for example) are disproportionatly causing mroe emissions, they (or their company) will pay disproportionately pay more.

The general counter-argument to this position is that it assumes over-consumption to be ok. In other words, saying "X put Y tons of CO2 in the air, they must pay for carbon offsets" doesn't necessarily disincentivize the CO2 to be put out in the first place (meaning there's no downward pressure to reduce consumption of other ancillary resources, e.g. oil extraction, metal mines, etc)

Case in point: bottled water costs a fortune compared to the equivalent amount of tap water (despite being basically the same or worse quality in many cases) and yet people are more than happy to pay the premium. The CA surtax on plastic bottles is but a blip on the radar for most consumers there.

It's similar to the discussion about how one side says having recycling programs makes over-consumption forgivable, but in practice, everything breaks down because manufacturers meld different recyclable materials together in such a way that makes the package unrecycleable, or use plastic types that cannot be sold by recyclers due to low demand, or consumers contaminate their trash, etc, and we just end up trucking mountains and mountains of unusable bales of materials to landfills somewhere instead.

If the cost of carbon is the cost to rip it out of the air then everything works out let them fly as much as they want. We don't really care per say about reducing consumption just fixing the side effects of consumption (green house effects).

> If the cost of carbon is the cost to rip it out of the air then everything works out let them fly as much as they want

The "let people do whatever as long as someone else picks up the externalized costs" is exactly how we got to the situation where the US was exporting plastic waste to China only to realize we now have a microplastics clusterfuck in our hands. So you'll have to forgive me if I'm a bit skeptical about the assumption that carbon offsets work 100% efficiently by merely looking at the amount of money transferring hands.

We need to fix that problem - especially the apportionment of carbon output (both from physical goods and from things like bitcoin). Political capital is better spent on that than on creating trivial loopholes while charging MSF doctors a fortune because they fly a to a warzone dozen times a year

4. No-one has really solved "flying east"... I mean following the sun (aka flying west), you "gain" time as in you can land local time (@arrival) "before" you left local time (@departure). Going east is a totally different story so you might as well take the red-eye flight and catch a good night of sleep.

So the whole "business" argument of having a full work day flying east doesn't really work. Unless you can fly really really really fast which none of these planes do.

The only gain flying east is less flying time.

If you leave Tokyo in the morning via a suborbit you can get to San Francisco before the end of previous business day. So when it really needs to be there yesterday... fly east.

> having the availability for the select few that need it is still a good thing

In the days of Zoom and soon stuff like Starlink, what population groups is this the case for?

Not every meeting can or should be done via Zoom

How many of those need supersonic flight to attend?

Probably a greater percentage than of all meetings.

The kind of stuff you need to be in person for tends to be the stuff that doesn't give you the advance timing to plan travel.

That isn't my experience at all. International events, press tours, a series of customer meetings, etc. are the sort of thing that most benefits from in-person attendance and they're scheduled well in advance.

You're thinking way too positive. Lots of lawyers/technicians/consultants/reps have to be places on short notice for bad reasons.

That's mathematically vacuous. Any number except 0 is a greater percentage of any enumerable proper subset than of the entire set.

The corollary to #1 upthread is that, unless you can bring pricing roughly in line with very comfortable international first/business class, the number of people who will want/need to spend many thousands of dollars to save 12 hours is almost certainly not a lot.

Australia is pretty far from the rest of the world.

Singapore is 8h nonstop from Sydney. Tokyo is 9h. Los Angeles is 13h. Qantas was considering launching a 20h nonstop to London before COVID.

It‘s a much better value prop than halving transatlantic travel time, which is 6h, the smaller side of a reasonable sleep.

But the time in-flight isn't wasted anymore. Planes have wi-fi now, you can be doing other work or even attending other virtual meetings during the flight. Being on a plane for 13 hours doesn't mean 13 hours of thumb-twiddling anymore.

How is it? My understanding is that it's pretty pricey, I can't imagine it'd be very fast (certainly wouldn't be if everyone is using it).

I work at a place that doesn't pay for anything beyond basic economy for business travel, which isn't that uncommon of a cost-cutting measure. I'm definitely not going to be able to expense expensive in flight wifi. To say nothing of work productivity on a cramped tin tube.

If you're working in a place that only pays for basic economy, then you are certainly not a candidate for a supersonic flight at a typical ticket price of $16,000 transatlantic, no matter how important the meeting you need to get to is, just to avoid spending $100 on in-flight wifi.

The early days of jet travel were also very expensive. We didn't get to Ryanair-style low fares overnight, but through successive iterations.

At least one of the startups working on it has promised comparable or lower per-seat mile cost, and has orders on book: https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/36952/boom-rolls-out-i...

Meeting is just exchange of bytes. Exchange of bytes that requires movement of atoms thousands of miles is completely ineffecent and legacy tech.

Consider a meeting in which you are attempting to read the body language of an adversary. Video chat may not be sufficient. For a concrete example, consider poker. Note that I am taking a fairly broad definition of "meeting" here.

Australia has pretty bad national internet speeds.

There are also certain things done better in person, like vacations, visiting family, etc. And some types of business like sales also work better in person.

> Australia has pretty bad national internet speeds.

Which is why I mentioned Starlink.

> There are also certain things done better in person, like vacations, visiting family, etc.

I have family in Australia, and visit them without supersonic flight.

People visited Australia before commercial transoceanic flight too, I don't see why improvements have to stop now.

There's diminishing returns.

Going from weeks to a day - not to mention cheaper - makes a whole lot of sense. Going from a day to half a day at a higher price and likely a less cushy aircraft does not.

Transoceanic flight wasn't cheaper when it was first introduced[0], it took economies of scale to bring the price down.

Additionally, the fact that Australia is a day away and Europe is half a day away is a major factor in why I have visited Europe a number of times and never been to Aus/NZ. I am almost certainly not the only person like this.

[0] https://airwaysmag.com/today-in-aviation/the-first-trans-atl... $375 flight vs $159 first class by boat https://www.cruiselinehistory.com/1930s-sailing-to-france-fr...

Before the jet age NY-London was 19h. It is significantly better as a 6h flight, to the point where the route is so busy BA alone makes $1B of revenue.

Again, diminishing returns.

With things like airport security, weather delays, ground stops, etc., is going down to 3h worth several times the cost?

The Concorde found the answer is largely "not really".

Sure, but in the context of Australia, we are talking halving 9, 12+ hour flight times, which is a much larger improvement than the measly transatlantic flight.

I go to Australia a lot, would sure prefer supersonic if its faster

The same graduating class of environmentalists who complained about supersonic flight also complained about nuclear energy and also promised global cooling.

These people need to sit down and shut up for once.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com