No, this isn’t normal at all. Some optimism is expected but promising commercial operation a couple years out when they weren’t even close to anything like it is simply lying.
We shouldn’t be giving companies a pass for this stuff
Hm. Significant delays and missed timelines aren't normal you say? Let's see (aerospace only):
• all SpaceX projects so far (USA)
• Virgin Galactic's space tourism plans (USA)
• Boeing's 787 and 777X (USA)
• HAL's Sukhoi-30-, Jaguar Darin III-, and Tejas LCA projects and production (India)
• BAE Systems Plc/TAI TF-X project (UK/Turkey)
• EADS's MRH-90, Tiger, and A400M (EU)
• Airbus A380 (EU)
• Comac’s C919 project (China)
• ...
TBH, it'd be easier to list projects that actually finished on schedule and didn't face significant delays, such as the Airbus A350XWB.
And most of the companies listed aren't even money-starved start-ups that required investor attention and media hype. It's almost as if developing, testing, and certifying cutting edge aerospace projects is kind of hard and just as easy to predict and schedule as large software projects...
Boom Supersonic is obviously overly optimistic in their deadlines, but they at least aren't pretending that they're meeting them when they aren't.
They are a lot more similar that you like to admit though. Both of their hype descriptions are to support the hype culture that powers the environment they live in, namely silicon valley(even if they're not physically there).
It's just that at some point Theranos decide to resort to lying to keep the whole thing going. The scope that Theranos promised was actually physically infeasible, some subsection of it might have been possible. Boom will hopefully not do that.
But in terms of engineering, Boom also has yet to produce even a prototype of their plane. A test version is scheduled to testflight in 2021. We'll see about that, I don't think it will happen. Although 7 years for a supersonic jet from scratch would have been quite impressive.
Theranos could have chosen to build a bigger machine with a more limited amount of tests once they realized it's not possible, but they decided to tackle too many problems at once and double down on them. But what we conveniently like to ignore is that investors, politicians and media perpetuated the whole lie. It wasn't just Holmes, it was an entire culture of VC's and politicians that had a vested interest in perpetuating the lie and to some extent helped silence critics.
Besides the obvious scammy and blatant lies that Theranos leadership did(down the line). There was also the aspect of feature creep (i.e. 200 tests per tiny blood vial) and ignoring both leadership and biochemical specialists(i.e. sample size and machine size).
In the case of Boom I like to think that at least Josh Wilding seeing that he has been an Aerospace engineer for 20 years has mentioned the issues with the timeline, and was overruled probably by either his peers or VCs, but we won't really know for sure. But if the engineering cofounder is already not involved at this point, let's hope that other issues won't follow.
It's amazing that there are so many people willing to lie in order to make honestly good ideas viable, instead of everybody just being like Theranos.
Don't forget the KC-46 tanker. Even though they had a working KC-767 to start from.
It was authorized by the board in 2005, first flight was planned for 2008, entry into service was planned in 2010. First flight was 2013, it entered in service in 2018 (January, but still).
When you want to sell, you should be overly optimistic in your presentation.
When you have sold, you can now explain the real picture and explain that actually... everything will take 3 times longer than when you were trying to sell.
I hate super positve PR propaganda too, and a skeptical eye should always be applied. Fraud is still used when talking about Tesla, yet they clearly have developed products. Yes deadlines were missed. I'm willing to give Boom a bit of leeway.
Say I'm looking for a bike. Person A is selling one I like and promises to deliver after two weeks. Person B is selling one I like a bit less, but promises to deliver after one week. I might now choose to buy from person B, even if I like the bike a bit less.
If I buy from person B and they deliver after three weeks, there's a problem. Why did it take three times as long? Did they ever intend to deliver after one week? Should they have known they wouldn't be able deliver after one week? They got the order based on a feature they didn't deliver. If that was intentional, that's fraud.
You don't have to. It it not a government project. The only pass that matters is their ivestor's. And most of the time as long as the progress is made and the outcome overweights the delay, everyone will be happy to wait.
Same with cures and vaccines. Who cares if they are delayed? It is not on purpose. Would you rather have it delayed or never?
Which relies on the company's public statements being honest. Normalising unrealistic timeline announcements hurts everyone.