Rolls Royce Ends Boom Supersonic Partnership | Hacker News Reader

Rolls Royce Ends Boom Supersonic Partnership

airwaysmag.com

201 pointstheparanoid245 comments

In 2020 COVID decimated Rolls Royce given their concentration of revenue associated with selling & servicing existing aero engines.

They have yet to recover from that era which saw a ~10x decrease in enterprise value and record losses.

That said I would interpret this news as a "cut the $!@$! R&D bleeding in anything that won't be generating revenue in the next 4 quarters" vs a reflection on the feasibility or health of Boom's very early but very ambitious plans.

(1) https://www.barrons.com/market-data/stocks/rycey

(2) https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/rolls-...

(3) https://simpleflying.com/rolls-royce-record-loss/

That's not entirely true, in the industry it's sort of known Boom still has a lot of work to do to get an engine made for those planes.

Perhaps 's/get an engine made for those planes/get a plane made for those engines/' ?

My understanding is that the only profitable part of being a modern commercial jet engine manufacturer is service contracts - on actually-in-service jet engines. Vs. Boom Supersonic has never built a plane which actually managed to take off. And even their 1/3-scale "technology demonstrator" plane is 5+ years behind its original schedule. (And has yet to taxi along a runway, if I read Wikipedia right.)

My guess - Boom wanted RR to sign a new money-losing or zero-profit R&D deal. RR wasn't interested in the "maybe, eventually, there might be some actual profit for us" economics of that.

mmm, yes, the 'legacy business model' of demonstrably competent business decisions at the interest of shareholders that produce quantifiable return on investment and further industry growth through innovation strikes again.

Yes I liked that quip too. It's was 'mutually agreed' to which I infer it wasn't.

Which is to say: Boom is aimed at the wrong product. The High Tech part of efficient supersonic transport is the engines, not the airframe. If there was an off the shelf engine solution, they could just buy it on investor money. The dirty truth is that there isn't.

The engines are actually hard to design, though. Most startups (even hard tech ones) try to avoid doing the hard part.

Engine manufacturing is much more profitable, and seemingly challenging than airframe manufacturing. The engines they'll use are unlikely to be very different from those in other applications, so I'm not sure there's room for a new entrant. Keep in mind that the R&D and capital costs of becoming a turbine engine manufacturer are immense, and likely much higher than the costs to develop a new aircraft.

... which is tantamount to saying that efficient supersonic transport won't happen because the engine is too expensive to design, though. And maybe that's true. But even if it is true it's still on Boom to make that happen somehow. Not all startups succeed, but those that build the wrong product fail at a 100% rate.

I think Boom will likely design and build a working aircraft, but they don't have the money or expertise to design an engine. Both GE and P&W are capable of designing and building the engine, the question is which will make the business deal with Boom. I am guessing that Boom either wants a cut of the service revenue, or wants to do most of the engine service themself.

> Both GE and P&W are capable of designing and building the engine, the question is which will make the business deal with Boom.

I think the bigger question is whether either of them will make the business deal with Boom, or if they both deem it too risky and too expensive.

Paying a well established and experienced engine manufacturer to design the engine you need which is only one part of your product is much more economical than becoming an engine manufacturer yourself. By analogy, if an AI startup needs custom chips, that doesn't mean they need to nor should build their own fab and try to compete with TSMC.

That's just the "off the shelf" argument. Which has just fallen apart because RR doesn't have the product and doesn't want to build it. You're right, that if Boom could just buy their engine it would be better for Boom. Boom can't just buy their engine though, and now it looks like their company is going to fail because they decided to build the easy part and not the hard part.

There are very valid reasons why no ariframe manufacturer is building its own engines and vice versa.

And having a civilian suoersonic turbofan engine nobody needs or wants doesn't get a comoany anywhere.

Honda builds both the engines and airframes for the HondaJet.

That's a niche product.

Those are built by a joint venture between Honda and GE Aviation (an existing jet engine maker).

https://www.gehonda.com/

Off the shelf means buying something already available for sale. Paying someone to develop something for you is the opposite.

Going back to the analogy from before, you can go to companies which specialize in chip design and development, and you can pay them to design a chip that will meet your specifications and make it in small quantities. It is economical for these companies to keep the technical staff and equipment on hand for this highly specialized work, because they use them for more than just one AI startup's need.

Perhaps an easier analogy would be legal services: every startup needs them at some point or another, but it doesn't mean every startup needs to or should build up an internal legal team. You hire the pros when you need them, and since you're not their sole source of income they can maintain a much better legal staff than you could every support internally. Even for companies where legal expenses are frequent, if the legal services are merely enabling something else then you still shouldn't be a law firm.

Likewise, Rolls Royce has years of engine development experience, it has the tools to manufacture and test prototypes, and it has the facilities for mass production already, and it uses those same expertise and tools for many product lines serving a wide swath of the aviation market such that no one aircraft needs to pay for it all. For Boom to acquire this same capability would be orders of magnitude more expensive than paying RR to do it for them.

The deal has not fallen apart because the development can't be done or because RR doesn't have the capability to do it; the deal has fallen apart because boom is unwilling to pay whatever price RR has named for it providing this service. Boom didn't decide to build the wrong thing, they are just unwilling to pay a required business expense.

> The deal has not fallen apart because

We don't know why the deal has fallen apart. We just know that it has. There is no engine. No one is planning on developing it. No amount of argument here on HN will change that. Boom should have built the engine if they wanted the engine, instead they bet their startup on buying something not available for sale.

RR is not some contract designer. It is one of less than a handful of engine designer/manufacturers that could do it. This is more like asking some combination of Intel/AMD/Nvidia to design a custom chip and TSMC/Samsung to build it for you.

Sure RR would love to do preliminary investigation. But what is the opportunity cost for RR to design and manufacture these engines versus devoting those resources to engines for Boeing and Airbus? How many of each does it project it can sell? What harm would it do to RR if it were to fall behind P&W on jet engines for commercial jets?

> But what is the opportunity cost for RR to design and manufacture these engines versus devoting those resources to engines for Boeing and Airbus?

Less than what you offer to pay them to divert those resources, which is in turn less than what it would cost to acquire those resources by another means.

> This is more like asking some combination of Intel/AMD/Nvidia to design a custom chip and TSMC/Samsung to build it for you.

Exactly. You don't see Ford building their own fab to make the chips that go in their cars, they pay existing fabs like TSMC to make their chips.

The real money is in the service contracts.

Yes, but the key to getting service contracts is to have a product that people can put into service.

Rolls Royce, and most other engine makers on this level, are essentially metallurgical gods.

They rely on metallurgists, but they may not employ them directly. I know somebody who consulted on that sort of thing, and worked on developing alloys that would work at high temperatures and thus allow greater turbine efficiency, but the engine manufacturers mostly just knew the properties they needed, not how to get them.

Well all planes that haven't been developed yet are not in service, and development cycles for jet engines are always long. Investing in engine R&D is standard practice. While Boom doesn't have a fleet of aircraft at the moment, it didn't 2 years ago either, but it does have orders. While of course those orders don't mean much if Boom can't ultimately deliver and sunk cost is not a good reason to continue a venture, the fact that RR entered into the agreement in the first place suggests they believed at some point it made business sense.

Indeed, supersonic business jets are ideal for the service contract based market. Supersonic engines need much more frequent maintenance than subsonic engines, business jet owners are much less price sensitive than mass-market airlines, and its not like you can just swap in a different supersonic engine, operators are completely locked in.

Far more likely, RR wanted Boom to use one of the supersonic engines it already has developed with minimal modification but Boom needs either heavy modification or a clean slate design to reduce fuel consumption (the second biggest issue for commercial supersonic aviation).

It may be that they DO actually have some talented engineers and some interesting IP (such as a much better engine design) but were hoping to also generate additional revenue or get bought out by a bigger company. The fact that we are also seeing lots of companies come out with smaller turbojet engines (made for retrofitting older small planes that run on regular style ICE engines) makes me wonder if material science or other advancements have gotten us to the point where we are going to see some big improvements in turbojet and turbofans.

What are some of these lots of companies working on retrofitting older small planes with turbojet engines? (That seems like a terrible idea all around from a functional standpoint.)

Sadly Boom is doomed and it’s been a writing on the wall all along. They never had a good engine option. The military engines are not safe enough and developing a new civilian engine makes sense only if you make hundreds of them.

Their net-zero emission claim is also bogus. Their pricing model doesn’t make much sense either unless they’re willing to lose money for a decade or so. There is not much innovation in aerodynamics and shock wave shaping either. Their only innovation compared to Concorde is the use of composite materials which is just not enough to hit their targets.

Could be that they were hoping to get bought out and had made some actual improvements though no?

I would imagine that a plane using new advances in material sciences for the outer skin (maybe something like Quasi Crystals) might have significant advantages over an older design like the Concorde. Heat must be a big issue at those speeds.

I don’t know much about their long term business strategy but what bothers me is that they’re vague about how they intend to achieve the flight mission objectives. This is very different than SpaceX which focused on reusable rockets and landing them.

As for materials, the main advantage of composites is the strength to weight ratio but they’re more challenging to work with compared to aluminum and titanium. Heat is one aspect but there are many more challenges. It’s been done though for example B787 and A350 are mostly composite. So Boom has a genuine advance here over Concorde. But supersonic flight is inherently fuel inefficient due to wave drag so the economy doesn’t make sense.

Luckily for Boom there is a supersonic engine startup in the YC S22 batch!

https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/velontra

Good luck to them but it sounds like an expensive solution. I’d be super excited to see a scramjet startup but scramjet is always decades away like the fusion reactor.

More than hundreds, perhaps thousands, or at least hundreds in a much shorter time frame than in previous eras. Rolls Royce's firm rejection of requests to develop a new engine is the most immediate reason the A380 was canceled. IIRC, Emirates and Airbus decided to kill the A380 within days of the Rolls Royce announcement, and in any event Emirates was clear that it was Rolls Royce's decision that forced their hand. Emirates alone would have guaranteed to purchase hundreds of such engines, considering there were 4 on each plane, but in the end Rolls Royce simply had no appetite for new development of any kind, though presumably they were entertaining the idea for quite some time beforehand.

According to Emirates and some other analysts, and contrary to popular narrative, the A380's biggest competitive handicap was the generation of engines, not the mere fact they had 4 instead of 2. The engines were nearly a full generation behind when the A380 debuted, and the gap only grew over time. Engines on a 4-engine plane are smaller, meaning less drag; have narrower power bands, running more optimally at all stages of flight; and have lower maintenance costs, even at twice the number, as they're both less stressed and subject to longer MTBF requirements--losing 1 of 4 engines is much less of a problem than 1 of 2. All considered a 4-engine configuration might still be nominally less fuel efficient, but the difference was negligible given these countering dynamics and in the opinion of some more than made up by other factors favoring the A380. The hub vs point-to-point model disfavored larger planes, but the air travel market was growing and in absolute terms so too was the potential A380 market. But the efficiency gap between engine generations was simply too large to overcome.

>Their only innovation compared to Concorde is the use of composite materials which is just not enough to hit their targets.

There’s been 50 years of commercial aviation development since the Concorde. Composite materials is only one thing on a list of differences between Concorde and boom.

Just last month they were saying they'd be manufacturing the first aircraft in 2024. This company just looks like another huge investor scam at the moment.

Think I remember lot of comments here criticizing Boom being downvoted and flagged. Is Boom part of YC by any chance?

YC '16 https://www.ycombinator.com/library/5Q-on-starting-and-scali...

That's a clever insinuation, and since you've had many HN accounts in the past, and used them to abuse the site in similar ways, I'm going to be a notch less charitable than usual and conclude that you meant this and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32771519 as an innocent-sounding smear.

For anyone worried about this kind of thing: what the commenter is insinuating is, in fact, just what we don't do. Here's tons of past explanation about this: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu....

In particular, we flagged zero comments in this thread and unkilled a bunch of comments that users had flagged.

> since you've had many HN accounts in the past

well aren't you the one now making big insinuations? I feel you are invading my privacy and making me feel unsafe so I guess I will use a VPN next time, thanks for making me aware.

I don't think I'm alone with my assessment. I've seen threads where comments were downvoted and flagged when they were critical of certain YC companies, and I can't recall 100% is why I suggested the likelihood of the same pattern. I didn't say YOU removed it but the people in that thread for whatever reason felt justified to censor those comments.

> we flagged zero comments in this thread and unkilled a bunch of comments that users had flagged.

Incorrect, you've removed my original comment which you completely took out of context and just assumed malice. This is a pretty aggressive stance, and it just reinforces what I've pointed out.

"hey i think theres censorship"

flagged and removed

to the outsider doesn't it seem pretty clear? you should at least allow some discussion around this, maybe I was wrong, maybe I'm not but claiming you removed zero comments is incorrect here. It only adds fuel to the suspicion.

Users have done the flagging. The only thing we did was unkill some of those comments.

Weird. This article states 2029 but their own site says 2024.

https://boomsupersonic.com/flyby/post/its-about-time-for-a-b...

> This article states 2029 but their own site says 2024.

The article says they intend to carry passengers in 2029, which isn't incompatible with going into production in 2024 (of course, they will do neither).

they've raised 250m, assuming they lose money at the current rate of 111m in H1, wouldn't they run out of money before then?

That loss if for Rolls Royce ...

The semi-snide comments from the Boom side is, as the kids would say, "sus".

haha right?

"Boom meanwhile added, “We are appreciative of Rolls-Royce’s work over the last few years but have mutually concluded their proposed engine design and legacy business model is not the best option for Overture’s future airline operators or passengers.”

ssssssnap!

They should partner with a jet engine startup that has produced nothing but renders to match their business model.

“Legacy business model” = ???

Making money

Specifically, making money by making products, rather than grifting investors.

Yeah everyone these days is saying

"OK, first we have very nice policies generous no-questions refunds, get a good word going. Then traction, then investment. Then, revenues, it's revenues all the way, growth man. And then you get a good multiplier on revenues because we can say we're tech for some fucked up reason. Like coupla degrees here n there some PhD's (this is why there's big-name university focus, there's better PhD's in Georgia Tech, but it's marketing) maybe then we can say it. Then...liquidity event. Then just juggle forever."

= Actually making engines?

Yeah that struck me as odd; it's unprofessional and weak; I think it's a very bad sign for the future of the company.

Wait... does anyone believe they have a future? How?

If this was doable and there was a market for it, what on earth would stop Boeing and Airbus from building one with 1000x more experience in designing and above all manufacturing airframes. (Airbus even has the inherited legacy of Concorde through Aerospatiale/Sud Aviation)

> If this was doable and there was a market for it, what on earth would stop Boeing and Airbus

Boing and Airbus have lots of things to choose from to focus their (large, but still limited) resources on. Even if they think it is doable and has a market, they'd probably also think that improving what they have is less risky and a bigger market.

I don't know, but it's certainly the first question every investor asked, so we can assume they have (or at least had) a pretty good answer, no?

I know some people involved in Boom. They simply have no understanding of the physical limitations of supersonic flight. Surprise, they’re all software engineers.

And supersonic flight is really a hardware / physics / materials science problem than a software one. (again: see Concorde)

Regarding Boom there are only two reasonable conclusions one can reach:

1. They are a Theranos-style operation

2. They are a Madoff-style operation

I, a lone aerospace engineer working out of my garage in my spare time, have a better chance of achieving supersonic flight than Boom does.

Even their technology demonstrator is an obvious scam. It demonstrates nothing. It does not demonstrate the ability to design, build, or maintain a supersonic passenger airplane, and it doesn't demonstrate any new technologies or materials.

The bloatiest of bloated old-school defense contractors can throw together a supersonic prototype for less than $100 million, in fewer than 7 years.

As an aerospace engineer do you know what kind of thrust they'd need and why they can't just use something like the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pratt_%26_Whitney_J58#Specific...? My guess would be that the military engines are not at all designed to be economical on either fuel or unit cost.

Those haven't been made for a long time and there's nothing presently in use like them. Also those were turbojets; Boom wanted to use turbofans for fuel efficiency.

> 1. They are a Theranos-style operation

If they were that, they'd be lying about having their own engine in development that is an order of magnitude better than the competitions but won't show it to anybody.

My angle was the "charismatic and overambitious leaders who think that gumption and sticktoitiveness can overcome any problem and who aren't afraid to start lying when they find out that solving science and engineering problems isn't like the scammy adware/SEO/social network they made their first chunk of money on" aspect.

I just can't believe people keep falling for it.

I'm willing to bet most of the $100m+ they've raised went right into executive compensation and that their engineers have been making do with peanuts since the beginning.

And I eagerly await the dueling Netflix/HBO documentaries to come.

> My angle was the "charismatic and overambitious leaders who think that gumption and sticktoitiveness can overcome any problem and who aren't afraid to start lying when they find out that solving science and engineering problems isn't like the scammy adware/SEO/social network they made their first chunk of money on" aspect.

Are you talking about SpaceX?

No comment.

edit: Ok comment. perhaps spacex is not the best comparison though. SpaceX had tremendous necessity driving it. The need for launch vehicles for commercial, scientific, and military purposes.

There is no similar necessity for supersonic commercial aviation.

A Boom customer isn't going to watch 14 test failures and say "well we have no other choice we gotta get people from ny to london in 2 hours" but there was a "we MUST be able to launch people and things into orbit on a US rocket" driving spacex.

Not certain about "tremendous necessity driving" SpaceX. At the time few would have bet that SLS and Starliner would become the duds they are. Maybe Atlas and Ariane incrementing without re-usability and costly Starliner would be viewed positively since there wouldn't be an alternative story (unless BO did better).

Falcon 9 flies very regularly, and the Raptor engines for Starship are in an advanced stage of development. The engines Boom needs don't exist.

You're right about some of the rest of that though. Particularly the personality matter.

Sure, but that's underselling Theranos' scam. For Boom to work they would need engines that could exist, but don't, and they weren't lying about the engines existing. Theranos was claiming they already had technology that couldn't exist.

What lie are they telling...?

That would not be a credible lie - it is too widely known how very difficult & expensive the technology needed to produce any such engine is.

Theranos' lie wasn't credible to people in the biomedical technology industry. That's why Theranos had to get investors who knew nothing about it.

If Boom's lies(or wishful thinking?) were as egregious as Theranos, they never would have gotten their foot in the door at Rolls-Royce.

They had money, those engines seemed technically possible given RRs history and RR delivered tests and whtnot. And Boom paid RR for it.

Theranos could have easily found a medical lab equipment manufacturer to conduct some similar testing and early stage development.

> Theranos could have easily found a medical lab equipment manufacturer to conduct some similar testing and early stage development.

I don't think they could have. Siemens/etc would have already known that Holmes' idea of running that wide array of blood tests from a single drop of fingertip blood wouldn't have worked. One of Holmes' professors, Phyllis Gardner, told Holmes it wouldn't work before the whole scam even began. Siemens or other lab equipment manufacturers surely would have known it too, since they know what it takes to make blood testing equipment.

Agreed. I know nothing about aerospace engineering or aircraft design, but the hype around Boom always puzzled me. If this start up can all of a sudden make an economical supersonic jet, then surely the existing plane manufacturers could do it quicker and cheaper. Boeing, Lockheed, Airbus, etc... already have existing designs from decades past that they could at least use as a base. They have experts in material science, airplane design, and actual resources/contracts to actually build one. If it made sense.

I agree with you, but to play devil's advocate, what if I changed your comment to:

Agreed. I know nothing about automotive engineering or car design, but the hype around Tesla always puzzled me. If this start up can all of a sudden make an economical electric car, then surely the existing automotive manufacturers could do it quicker and cheaper. Toyota, Mercedes, Ford, etc... already have existing designs from decades past that they could at least use as a base. They have experts in material science, car design, and actual resources/contracts to actually build one. If it made sense.

Sometimes the incumbents are just too entrenched in what they are doing to make what out an outsider sees as an obvious move.

you read my mind :)

One can certainly argue that Tesla is overhyped.

Sure, but no one could argue that Tesla is a Theranos-like operation. Arguments can be made about whether Tesla's valuation is reasonable, but it's certainly a legitimate car manufacturer.

What about the times when they announced different types of car models, promised delivery in a year, took pre-orders, and then didn't deliver (and still haven't)? That's pretty Theranos-y behavior.

Delays in the car industry are pretty normal and you can get your reservation money back if you cancel.

Tesla certainly delivers cars. But there are parts of it that are quite Theranesque, especially the self driving:

* Re-sell third party products for a while ("Until our own offering is ready"). If the recently posted self parking video is to be believed, the in-house products are still not on par with the third party predecessors: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsb2XBAIWyA

* Pre-sell your product years before it's ready.

* Aggressively suppress internal and external criticism.

* Avoid objective evaluations of your product.

You forgot "engage in lots of dubiously legal union busting"

That's pretty normal for all new firms, regardless of whether or not their promises have much to do with their deliveries.

Tesla has literally opened up its FSD Beta an allowed people to film it. We have more insight into its behavior in a huge range of different driving conditions then we have for anything else.

They have even change the terms&conditions to make it clear that beta testers were allowed to share.

Beta testers have shared lots of not-flattering things and Tesla has not 'aggressively suppressed' them.

They have asked for the outright fraud and slander campaign conduct by a competitor to be removed.

> * Avoid objective evaluations of your product.

Like what?

Tesla Vision (no radar/no lidar) has just been objectively tested:

https://www.tesla.com/blog/model-y-earns-5-star-safety-ratin...

There are no objective evaluations for FSD as nobody has actually made general full sell driving work.

But you can get the Beta and do any kind of 'objective evaluations' you want. You can even publish all the details, amount of interventions and so on of all your drives.

I'd say tesla's "full self driving" and "autopilot" claims are pretty theranos like.

There's zero way they don't KNOW internally that asking an inattentive driver to take over with no warning doesn't work, and that they aren't as safe as they are trying to spin.

Unpopular opinion but wasn't Tesla subsidised and missed the cost goals anyway? My impression is that Tesla succeeded thanks to Musks personality that made the customers forgive unfulfilled promises that they paid thousands of dollars for.

Almost as if Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos imitated Musk instead of Steve Jobs and kicked the can down the road and delivered traditional but improved blood test machines and kept promising stuff down the road by collecting money and be edgy on Twitter, she could have been a hero by now.

I mean, Tesla still delivered stuff that people value. Just not the promised ones.

Tesla makes the best computerised vehicles out there and has built a valuable charging network, not the stated goals but valuable anyway.

I wish Tesla would cut it out with the computerized car bullshit and focus on making the best battery cars instead. They shouldn't need bullshit like "it will be fiscally irresponsible to not buy our cars because it will be a robotaxi that pays for itself"; it imperils the long-term success of the company for a short-term boost in sales. And it alienates anybody with a modicum of critical thinking.

Okay but the genius of Musk was this computerised car stuff and it's exactly where the traditional car manufacturers fail. Just recently the CEO of VW changed and the important part of the failure of the previous CEO was their shit software on their electric cars.

It's not like Tesla managed to make cheap electric cars? They managed to make cars with good computers and this is something that people actually want.

Essentially, Tesla made the first usable as daily driver electric car by promising stuff that people believed they want(but very hard to make) so they can collect money and make sales but doing stuff that people actually needed(within the reach of the current technology) to live with electric cars.

Actually, I desperately want the software world to stay as far away from cars as possible. Even in a VW, I know I will go 100k miles with zero issues with most of the stuff. Someone somewhere wants to put javascript between me and that, and I hope they have a bad life.

I suspect you are thinking of touchscreens, not necessarily the computerised cars?

No, as soon as we allow average devs (instead of people working on much more limited ECU software) there will be someone insisting they should put node into it, and run some part of the car on some stack that involves 3 gb of js dependencies, and will inevitably only work half the time, outside of their extremely limited testing.

Car software will only be reliable as long as it doesn't seem prestigious to write software for cars.

Furthermore, before they put cell radios in cars, you could count on the software buried deep in your car working in a consistent manner. Now with over-the-air updates, your car can suffer a software regression at any time.

Musk didn't even contribute to the automotive technology, at all. It's the result of an acquisition of a company called "AC Propulsion".

The narrative about Musk being some genius exploiter of subsidies playing 4D chess with all kinds of financial and marketing trickery is total nonsense if you actually look into it.

In terms of subsidies, Tesla wasn't actually subsidies that much. The received a 400M loan from the DoD for advanced vehicle manufacture. At that point however, even without the DoD they could have raised that money. Tesla payed that lone back early and with interest. DoD also gave much larger loans to GM and Ford, neither have fully paid back their loan yet.

The tax subsidies only started years later and Tesla profited from the 7500k tax credit. However this was limited to 250k vehicles and Tesla blew threw that very fast and have since operated without a tax credit and had to compete against vehicles coming in from all the global car companies that all got this tax credit. GM also used that tax credit. So did Tesla get a subsidy that helped them, I would say yes but this was open to all car companies and a number of them took advantage of it.

Tesla also gets the same tax reductions as any large company that makes large investments in particular regions.

> My impression is that Tesla succeeded thanks to Musks personality that made the customers forgive unfulfilled promises that they paid thousands of dollars for.

Not sure what this is based off. You don't build a company the size of Tesla based on forgiving costumers.

Yes, sure some costumers waited a while for their model 3 because of production issues, but this isn't really unique to Tesla. Car production often gets delayed. And costumers did not 'forgive' this universally, many canceled their order and bought something else.

But here is the thing, the demand for Tesla electric cars was so high that it didn't matter.

Tesla was successful because they had a product that a huge amount of people desperately wanted, and after some initial delay they got it to those costumers in very large numbers with very good unit margin.

In fact, Tesla often increased the spec of the delivered product compared to the one that was initially ordered.

And the money from reservation undelivered vehicle and FSD is certainty not why Tesla is successful.

Tesla is successful because they sell a 1 million+ vehicles a year with an automotive margin of 30%.

> I mean, Tesla still delivered stuff that people value. Just not the promised ones.

Can you explain what you mean? What did they not deliver on?

Some people (a minority of costumers) didn't get the FSD but that certainly not most costumers.

This comment itself is an example of forgiving customers.

If we agree to not make it a big deal of people not receiving the products they paid for and if we agree not to make it a big deal for delays and low quality then sure, Tesla is just as any other company.

If people didn't make it a big deal that Theranos runs its test on Siemens machines we wouldn't have had a Theranos scandal too!

If we not make it a big deal for Tesla missing the targets for making the cars cheap and collecting pre-order money for products that not deliver(or deliver late if you kick the can down the road long enough) we can say the exact same thing about Theranos. Let's not make a big deal on how much blood is actually required to run the tests today, it would be 1 drop next year(update the next year every year)!

If you choose to put the threshold of "subsidy received" above what Tesla received, you can claim that Tesla did not receive subsidies. I think TicTac sweets had some trick like that, i.e. if you define 1 TicTac as one serving and if the calories of 1 serving is below the threshold to report you have 0 calories per serving and as a result you can claim the whole box is calorie free!

It really depends on what you choose to forgive or not, I guess.

I have never spent a single $ on a Tesla product so I have nothing to forgive.

People should be able to get their money back for the FSD package, I totally agree. I don't know what the status of that is. In my opinion that it should legally clear that you can get your money back as it clearly does not does what it said on sale but I have not read the contract.

As a costumer that would piss me off if I couldn't get my money back on that and law suite would make sense.

Given the absurdly high demand for second hand Tesla and your ability to resell the FSD package while there are lots of people who pay extra for that package, it isn't nearly on the same scale as what Theranos did. In fact since many bought it of much less then it is now, you might have a change of making money.

And FSD sales are a tiny % of Tesla overall business. That makes it very different from Theranos. What makes it also very different is that Tesla has a reasonable chance at delivering and is continually investing and improving towards that goal. They have the capital to continue to work on that, they are not just burning investor money.

Theranos had no realist hope of ever making money and no capital to continue research.

> If we not make it a big deal for Tesla missing the targets for making the cars cheap and collecting pre-order money for products that not deliver(or deliver late if you kick the can down the road long enough) we can say the exact same thing about Theranos.

No we can't. That's an absurd claim. You reserve a product and you can get your money back if you don't get it, that is no different then many other reservations and is totally common practice in the industry.

And no idea what 'making the cars cheap' is supposed to mean.

> If you choose to put the threshold of "subsidy received" above what Tesla received, you can claim that Tesla did not receive subsidies.

Every large industrial company receives subsidies of various kinds. This is simply the world we live in. But some how it gets brought up far more often with Tesla then with other car companies while Tesla actually received less and they absolutely for certain did not receive enough subsidies to somehow claim Tesla was bootstrapped by the state or had some sort of unfair advantage.

So its really just used to downplay what they achieved, "Oh look they had X subsidy therefore XYZ". The reality is the car and road transport are subsidized and Tesla is part of that market.

I would prefer much of that money being spent on trains but I'm not gone shit on Telsa for existing in reality.

Sure, if you forgive every wrongdoing and if you omit every action of Musk that does not fit the narrative what is left is a honest cars manufacturer that succeeded purely on its own merits.

I can't really argue against that.

Receiving money from the government is not a wrong doing. Taking reservation is not a wrong doing.

Literally the only point you have is that FSD does not grantee money back and I don't actually know if that is true as I don't know the details of the sales contract.

The existing automakers are making EVs faster and cheaper than Tesla did, and the EVs they are making have substantially greater build quality than Tesla's vehicles.

Tesla’s profit margin is higher than most of automakers. So no, EVs made by traditional automakers are not cheaper. If anything that means Tesla’s cars are more desirable because they can command a premium.

Faster? What is that supposed to mean? Tesla is the largest EV maker by volume (not sure if I miss any Chinese ones).

Substantial better build quality? Define substantial. Who decide that? Certainly not the consumers, because they can’t get enough of Tesla cars.

They can easily make a better interior on usability.

Or better QC.

It's easy to goose profit margins when you don't use automotive grade parts and skip quality control.

Consumer Reports stopped recommending Teslas because of the abysmal quality of their vehicles. And every Tesla owner I personally know has said their first Tesla will also be their last.

This is just complete nonsense. Go look at the tear-downs of Tesla where actual engineers with automotive analyses each part. The reality is Tesla is ahead in a whole number of areas and have better quality in many areas.

Tesla have top ranks in safety, the best most performant interior board computer, their glass roofs are pretty amazing, their internal heating/cooling system is the best in the industry by far. The reliability of their engines and battery packs is actually extremely good. Their structural engineering with their castings is ahead of anybody in the industry. The Model S is literally the fastest production car in the world. They have the largest global fast charging system and the single best integration of cars and charging.

If Tesla gets criticized for quality control most of the times its fit and finish something a lot of people don't actually car that much about. The majority of Tesla cars are produced in China and those cars have an excellent reputation for quality.

> I personally know has said their first Tesla will also be their last.

Tesla has the highest consumer satisfaction ratio and the highest costumer retention ratio in the industry.

But I'm sure your personal experience is what is most important in this discussion.

Ah you mean Munro, who owns a ton of Tesla stock and has a commercial interest in promoting the "quality" of Tesla vehicles?

Because, objectively speaking, Consumer Reports, Car and Driver, and thousands of actual Tesla owners think that the build quality of their cars is crap. Literal 90's era Kia crap. And notably, unlike Munro, CR and C&D buy their cars anonymously so that Tesla can't goose the reviews.

Tesla has the highest consumer satisfaction ratio and the highest costumer retention ratio in the industry.

Objectively false, and indeed Tesla's abysmal customer satisfaction (nearly the industry lowest) is one of the reasons why CR stopped recommending Teslas.

Tesla have top ranks in safety

As does every other EV with a frunk. And a number of ICE vehicles like Subarus. The safety review tests rank cars collectively, so Tesla are in the top rank but are not the top-ranked, because that's not how the safety reviews are scored. And to claim otherwise is just another example of Tesla's deceptive marketing.

Their structural engineering with their castings is ahead of anybody in the industry.

Yes, it's so good that the Cybertruck has been delayed another year because Tesla discovered that they don't actually understand how structural engineering works. (Here's a hint: car panels are shaped and curved because it provides additional strength; creased flat panels are actually the weakest design you can use for automotive purposes on the basis of mass and need tons of reinforcement.)

They have the largest global fast charging system and the single best integration of cars and charging.

This is the only true statement in your comment. It's too bad (for Tesla) that they're planning to eliminate their only competitive advantage by opening it up to everyone. (Literally the only reason the several dozen Tesla owners I know still own Teslas instead of better EVs is because the Supercharger network is 10000x better than the alternatives. They're willing to put up with the shoddy build quality of the car and the absolutely horrific customer service because the charging experience dominates.)

Munro personally bought some Tesla stock AFTER he was critical of the company for 2 years and saw continues improvement in quality. And the company that does the breakdown does not have stock as far as we know and in fact have a far larger stack in selling honest detail reports.

Plus you can actually literally just look at the videos and look at the items themselves and compare it to other cars that are being teared down. The idea that Tesla has some uniformly inferior quality is backed up by LITERALLY NOTHING.

But I guess when you live in fantasy land where everything is some 4D stock manipulation chess

> As does every other EV with a frunk.

Facts ...

https://www.tesla.com/en_EU/blog/model-y-earns-5-star-safety...

> Tesla's abysmal customer satisfaction

Facts ...

https://electrek.co/2022/06/15/tesla-tops-list-most-satisfie...

> Yes, it's so good that the Cybertruck has been delayed ....

This paragraph literally just shows that you are utterly clueless on the topic. And what even sadder is that instead of responding to what I actually wrote you want on some uninformed rant.

> their only competitive advantage by opening it up to everyone.

Yeah because they will just give it away for free and they are totally unable to do cost-benefit calculation on that.

The difference there is that the traditional car manufacturers didn't want to push EVs because that would have canabalized their ICE business and their competitive advantage (electric motors are really easy to build in comparison to an ICE). That's how Tesla could just zoom past them, they did not want EVs to be successful.

The situation with supersonic flight is very different, the requirements and skills are very similar the ones of traditional plane manufacturers and supersonic flight wouldn't really canabalize their traditional business. I think they simply see that it doesn't make sense. I mean boom can't really explain what has fundamentally changed since tge concorde that supersonic flight is now economically viable.

Yeah, I hate this kind of weakly justified pessimism. Sure, if you just assume every new idea will fail you'll be right 95% of the time. But if everyone did that we'd be stuck in the dark ages.

I applaud people and organizations that take that chance, innovating and trying new things even when there's a high chance of failure. Worst-case, they fail and other people can learn from their mistakes and hopefully do better next time. Best case, they change the world.

I wasn't trying to be pessimistic, just trying not the fall for the "too good to be true" hype machine common in tech (e.g. new batteries with 100x the capacity are right around the corner, carbon nanotubes uses, etc...).

Is this a new idea, though? It's not like supersonic commercial jets are a new thing and they haven't been built. The economics of building a commercially viable production supersonic plane is much more difficult to do than building a car or writing a new website to disrupt Facebook or Google.

I 100% agree that people need to be exploring this stuff. That being said, I'll believe it when I see it.

I also know nothing about the subject, but just to play devil's advocate here, doesn't SpaceX show that a startup could potentially solve hard physical engineering problems more effectively than established incumbents?

Yes, definitely. BUT - there is a very wide and thinly-populated gulf between the folks who only talk about doing that, and those who actually deliver viable, working systems.

SpaceX went from founding the company to their first orbital launch attempt in 4 years, was obviously d*mn close to successful orbit 1 year later, and actually made orbit another 18 months after that.

Vs. Boom Supersonic, not having had to design nor build its own jet engines, is already 5+ years behind on their 1/3-scale, zero-passenger technology demonstrator even trying to taxi down the runway.

It does, but a supersonic personal jet is a much bigger feat of engineering than a rocket that lands. Most people don't appreciate that. We had landing rockets in the 80's, but Boom was trying to do several things that are completely new. SpaceX's real technology is about launching the rockets cheaply, not re-using them (which is only part of the problem).

And SpaceX started with engineers who knew a lot about the domain of the actual problem (rocket engines). Boom has never designed an engine.

Starlink satellites are a great example of SpaceX solving engineering problems that an incumbent couldn't, but SpaceX was a pretty large company at the time the effort started.

Boom isn’t trying to do something completely new. Concord was in commercial services for many years. Benefits and shortcomings are well known.

OTOTH, there was never a rocket that could land, only suborbital prototypes. Shuttle doesn’t count since it’s reusable in name only, as it still cost substantial amount of money and time for refurbishing. In fact there are still no other reusable rockets, seven years after SpaceX did it for the 1st time.

I didn't realize that the Concorde was a private jet. Also, I'm not so sure that SpaceX has managed to achieve reusability (launch turnaround cost) better than end-of-life space shuttle yet. The space shuttle did take a lot longer to work out the kinks than falcon 9, but it was also a much more complicated vehicle.

> We had landing rockets in the 80's, but Boom was trying to do several things that are completely new. SpaceX's real technology is about launching the rockets cheaply, not re-using them (which is only part of the problem).

And we had supersonic passenger jets in the 60's. But they weren't economically viable. I'd argue that Boom is trying to do exactly what SpaceX is doing for rockets, which is to make supersonic air travel make economic sense. Any engineering that they need to do is really towards that goal.

This argument could be made about any big SV company the past 30 years.

- Anyone of IBM, Microsoft or Yahoo could build a better (quicker and cheaper) search engine than what a bunch of new grads from Stanford can (Google)

- Anyone of the car manufacturer can build a better (quicker and cheaper) electric car than a software millionaire (Tesla)

I don't agree with the statement, I think there are numerous reason people embark on ambitious project that incumbents "could" do, but are not doing;

- An unexpected insights,

- A new research breakthrough from some other field

- Collecting a bunch of the most bright people coming up at the same time in the field (Mueller for SpaceX comes to mind for instance) etc.

But most of the time it's just that it's not really in their business to do a 100 million dollar - 1 billion bet on something that risky, they are in the business of returning like 7 - 10% a year to their shareholder, not producing 5x returns (like the VC/startup business).

Except costs for prototyping and building a plane are (no kidding) 100x the costs of prototyping and building a car

And that's for "easy" stuff like electric cars. Not a supersonic plane (which has a full bag of hurt to go with)

If you don't believe me just look at the price tag of a brand new Cessna (which is old/proven/boring technology)

Eh, I figured I would get this response but writing software e.g. your IBM, Yahoo, and Microsoft example is much easier and faster to do than building a cutting edge, physical, supersonic commercial jet. To build Google, all you needed was a computer, and a new approach/algorithm to solving web search. Software companies are much easier to disrupt than physical product companies.

As others have pointed out the Tesla isn't a great example either because building a car is still 100x easier to do than building aircraft, let alone supersonic planes.

"Unexpected Insights" and "A new research breakthrough from some other field" seems to be handy wavy. A supersonic jet breakthrough is not something that can be discovered in a dorm room. It requires millions in research and expensive materials to build and test against.

I did include SpaceX as well, and I'm not sure one can find a better example than that, but there are others as well:

- Cruise + other self driving car companies (obv also a bunch of software, maybe even software focused, but looking at Waymo, they developed all their own hardware, LIDAR tech etc.)

- Commonwealth Fusion + a bunch of other fusion startups (obv they haven't really gotten to a product yet one could argue, but a bunch of breakthroughs in high powered electro-magnets has been made)

- Heart aerospace - electric planes

- Canvas construction - robotic plastering and painting for construction.

While supersonic flight has been proven, albeit not economically viable, it's still something that has been done, and done like 40+ years ago. It's not really on the "fusion power"-levels of difficult. But sure, I guess on could argue both sides equally well :)

In regards to research breakthrough, sure they were handwavy at least as it relates to jet engines capable to support supersonic flights. I don't have any sources but I have little doubt that jet engine / material breakthroughs has been made since the 80:s.

SpaceX, yes. But I think some of these other examples work against your point. Yes, some of them have raised lots of money (or even sold for lots of money), but revenue for Cruise + Commonwealth Fusion + Heart combined (I haven't heard of Canvas) is about $0 so far. It's yet to be seen if any are viable businesses even if they have already invented cool shit. To your point above, Boeing is not in the venture capital business. Their investors most likely want dividends and stock buybacks, not capital intensive moonshot bets.

I mostly agree with you. I think Heart will manage it, doing an short range electric plane is not comparable to a supersonic jet liner. And the short range electric plane has a pretty clear market fit and very little technology risk unlike the supersonic jet.

I would say that a brand-new rocket company making a rocket which can land itself would sound more implausible than what you're describing, if we didn't all know that it in fact has happened.

That doesn't mean Boom is that, however.

Landing rocket boosters happened in the 70s already, and said rocket company benefited heavily from NASA, government and defence contracts and research. If Boom would have had access to supersonic jet research from the government, along with government contracts, development or production doesn't matter, RR wouldn't have stopped the cooperation.

Edit: Reusable or VTOL rocket were tested, successfully landing, in the early 90s by McDonnel Douglas under the DC-X program. No idea where the 70s thing came from...

Which rockets landed in the 70s?

Note that SpaceX didn’t get any meaningful defense contract until they’ve proved themselves with Falcon 9.

He must either be talking about the Apollo Lunar Module which first landed on the Moon in the 60s (but was not "landing a booster", much less on earth.), or more likely he's talking about the Delta Clipper which was in the 90s (and also not a rocket booster.)

Probably the latter, because there are some low-brow skeptics on reddit and youtube who inexplicably seem to think the Falcon 9 is a stolen Delta Clipper with a new paint job.

I kind of take ofense with the low-brow reddit sceptic :-) Obviously, a Falcon 9 is not a reused DC-X. The technologyvto land a booster was already there before, it wasn't invented by SpaceX and was discussed as far back as the 60s. SpaceX made it possible, which in itself is quite an achievement. That nobody else tried so is due to the fact that there were not enough launches to make it economically viable (I found a ESA study on that topic a couple of years ago and subsequently lost it again, Google and DDG fail to dig it up again ever since). And whether or not reusable booster do make econommic sense or not, and just how many launches are needed to break even, is impossible to tell without SpaceX financials, they are the only ones doing it right now, which we don't have.

But you are underestimating the challenge here. There is a difference between the landing and getting an orbital rocket first stage into a position to even attempt a landing.

The actual landing with propulsion is actually the easier challenge if you have an engine that can hover.

However SpaceX had to figure out how to get do supersonic retro-propulsion and basically making a heat-shield out of fire to protect the rocket on its way down, then navigate a terrible air-frame at high speeds and then do a never before tried hover-slam maneuver with an overpowered rocket engine.

That is very, very different from a DC-X that just goes up a bit comes straight down and then can do a slow landing.

I know some of the old space companies did some studies, you can also find a very long detailed post by Tori Bruno on the topic. The problem is, these studies and opinions are no necessary correct and in fact we know that they were very much incorrect. The assumptions both technical and economical these companies were making were simply not correct, at least not with the right engineering and investment behind it.

The study that you are talking about was from the 2010ish time right, not the 90s or something like that?

Arianespace/ESA totally fucked up with Ariane 5, instead of designing a booster that can dominate the launch market they designed a very niche booster and were forced to relay on Soyuz and couldn't beat Proton in many markets.

Partly this was because of Hermes and as they design Hermes it became bigger and bigger and so did Ariane 5. And then Hermes was canceled and Ariane 5 remained oversized.

Agreed, SpaceX has no chance against ULA /s

The reason why startups continue to make things that big companies don't is because your assumption that big companies *can* do it is wrong. They cannot due largely to organizational challenges and inertia in one direction or another. It is very rare that a large company successfully continues to innovate indefinitely.

Also known as Innovator's Dilemma https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma

Most established players don't want to cannibalize their existing market by launching a product in a niche segment. Sales and Marketing $$$ eat into the profits which is not easy to justify when you are profitable. If you are fighting for your survival then it's easy to reallocate resources to fight.

"surely the existing plane manufacturers could do it quicker and cheaper"

How could you possibly think that?

Isn't there a third kind of operation, maybe a Magic Leap-style operation, where employees are earnestly developing against a goal which is fanciful but appealing to VCs? And in that case, what's the difference between that and the "usual" VC funded company?

I don't really think Boom are a Theranos style operation, because they aren't claiming to have an operational product when no such item exists. A Theranos style scam would be flying a known-unsafe airframe, or parading their demonstrator around claiming "it totally has engines and is ready to fly lol! we just haven't tested it yet." But so far, Boom have just honestly said "we're delayed" instead.

It's surely not a Madoff style operation as they employ staff who are earnestly working towards their goal, however fanciful it may be.

Wasn't Theranos sending lab tests to other vendor and passing it off as their results? That would be difficult for Boom to pull off--send someone blindfolded on a regular commercial flight, reset the time on their watch and pretend supersonic happened.

As an aside Madoff Industries did employ people who earnestly worked outside the Ponzi scheme. I know because I met a few of them when I worked on a database architecture audit for them around 2008.

"Database architecture audit for Madoff Industries" is a pretty good conversation starter as a resume item!

This is a good point, and something that occurred to me after I posted - there's also a type of scam company where honest employees are hired to do something real, but the executive staff are skimming inordinate compensation for themselves or hiding a more nefarious project underneath, like a Ponzi scheme, simple money laundering, or self-dealing / kickback style schemes.

I suppose it's possible that Boom could be one of these, and I don't really have enough data to say whether it is or not.

My personal take on Boom is that it's your typical amateur, marketing-savvy CEO with a lofty dream who managed to collect funding for a project they can't execute on. Whether this kind of thing is a net "good" or not, I'm not sure, but I really don't think it's a "scam" in a mal-intent sort of way.

If I were a VC, I wouldn't invest in an aerospace founder with no aerospace background, but plenty chose to, and their funds are at least being redistributed towards employees and suppliers. The whole idea of Silicon Valley style "innovation" VC is supposedly that their moonshot upsides can patch over their moonshot downsides, no?

Lol you're too harsh. I was an aerospace engineer at an aviation startup you've probably heard of. We built a jet and received a type certificate, and sold ships. The company still went bankrupt. Boom is trying something harder, but it's not Theranos, or cold fusion. It's still just an engineering problem. They have aerospace engineers and facilities. It doesn't look more like a scam than SpaceX did in its early days when they were constantly blowing up rockets. It's just they're trying something very hard stretching what any manufacturing startup could do.

3. They're a startup in a manufacturing-oriented, highly regulated industry and dramatically underestimated capital needed.

Eclipse?

Engineering and economics problem--although properly speaking the former should imply the latter. Given that engineering isn't "We can build something that costs $X to build and operate but there's only a market for $X/5." That's still an engineering failure even if it works outside of cost constraints.

Unless some government(s) steps in and dumps a ton of money into SST development and production nothing is going to happen.

The Concord showed this by shouldering the burden of research, development, prototyping, and then production. Turns out SS's don't have the load factor & associated economics to make it a viable mode. That revelation was before environmental and political challenges made those economics worse.

Unless unobtanium can me mined, tooled, and manufactured cheaply into airframe parts and power such as scram-jet or super cruising turbofans can push a plane at Mach 2 with 200+ seats behind the pilot, methinks its just a pretty artist's conception on a Pop Mechanics or Science magazine cover.

Well, the problem was never technological to start with. The problem with supersonic transports was and will always be economic. There's a reason that there were only two SSTs in the 20th century instead of the five or six that were planned, and it's because the bean counters at Boeing, McDonnel-Douglas, and Lockheed-Martin wouldn't let their companies bankrupt themselves over a vanity project.

So, you take that and couple it with 21st century VC-appeal and you have a fantastic money-losing-machine whether it works or not. Hell, it probably does work with enough R&D, but that was never the problem in the first place.

To be technical, I'd actually argue there were four. The first Concorde reached production & was later redesigned to include an afterburner (or reheat). Why I forget, but it apparently did actually save some fuel since it was used while accelerating to supersonic then shut off.

The Tu-144 went the opposite direction. Introduce with military engines which require full time afterburner. Later it was redesigned and re-engined with a non-military engine not needing afterburner all the time.

So two airframes, but with four distinct airplanes produced as a result.

None of these were particularly economical, to your point.

Huh? The Concorde was designed with afterburners right from the start. It certainly did not enter service without them.

Yes; the Olympus engines used were derivatives of an existing military turbojet and had reheat from the beginning. It was used for takeoff and then to get through the high-drag transonic regime as quickly as possible to minimise fuel use. Once at cruising speed the engines operated 'dry'.

There was a longer-range 'Concorde B' designed, which was intended to have larger engines with no reheat at all (as well as larger wings and some other changes) but this was cancelled when it became apparent that it would never be profitable.

OK, I think I got it wrong. You're correct it always had afterburners. It could supercruise, which is flying without the afterburner at supersonic speeds. So I guess that would bring the actual number to 3.

The reheat is needed to get past the transonic region and onward to supersonic. Once you've gone supersonic the drag actually drops a lot. So you want to get through the transonic region as quickly as possible and reheat is a good way to do it. After that the Concorde just supercruised.

> Once you've gone supersonic the drag actually drops a lot.

Certainly the drag coefficient drops, does it actually drop fast enough to counter the v^2 and see total drag drop as velocity increases?

I think so, many planes are like this: the transonic regime has the highest drag. It's not as simple as v^2, you have to consider the compressibility effects (wave drag where the pressure wave moves along with the plane, like a bow wave on a ship). Flying faster also means you can fly higher in lower density air, so the indicated airspeed (proportional to density * v^2) is reduced.

> It's not as simple as v^2, you have to consider the compressibility effects (wave drag where the pressure wave moves along with the plane, like a bow wave on a ship).

I think it is that simple. Those effects are the reason the drag coefficient is changing, you don't need to account for that twice.

John Michael Greer summarized it wonderfully in the book 'Dark Age America'. Don't confuse technical capabilities with economic realities. Argued that Boeing never getting the SST off the ground was probably one of the better disasters to befall them.

Vaclav Smil was right in pointing out that passenger jets have gotten much more fuel efficient since 1967 but they travel no faster. The fuel savings were passed onto passengers and that made flight more appealing. Economics ultimately rule over what lasts long term.

Super sonic flight is a marvel of engineering but an economic nightmare. It is this lens by which a lot of technologies should be judged long term.

I have very simple way of figuring if something will succeed ir it is a scam.

If CEO have some experience in the field then it might succeed (workday, salesforce, okta, etc.) If not, then it is probably a scam.

Of course, there are exceptions but these exceptions prove the rule.

Harsh! I think Boom is trying to be SpaceX. A technology that is definitely possible, but pretty difficult to pull off as a start-up. But saying they are Theranos or Madoff is unfair. If they succeed to make the technology work and then succeed to make it profitable is of course not obvious at this point.

I'd argue there's a significant market for the pre-SpaceX rockets--which are still used today. There's just a much larger potential market for significantly cheaper rockets given sufficient reliability as well.

There is on the other hand no apparent market for commercial supersonic passenger flight given the economics. That doesn't mean that some people wouldn't pay the freight but that there hasn't been enough apparent market to build an airplane program around that.

Are any of your comments defensible?

Is it possible they had some insider knowledge of engines being developed at one of the big manufacturers?

Thinking out loud here - lets say you have a few senior engineers that know that GE or Boeing or RR or something is currently working on a smaller supersonic engine. You know you cannot yourselves design such an engine but if it is released maybe it would make sense to get a head start designing a product to take advantage of it?

There are perhaps 3 companies on Earth that could conceivably provide engines for this application. RR was one of them. Where to now?

Couldn't SpaceX or Rocket Lab's engine be repurposed for this task?

Those aren’t jet engines.

It's a pity there aren't more jet engine providers.

The last thing you want in your turbofans is a lot of variety. That's why everyone relies on a handful of producers.

Consolidation is inevitable in industries where huge capital investments are necessary to build a viable product. The only way a new manufacturer will appear is if a major government decides to finance it for strategic reasons regardless of economics.

I can think of three occasions where this happened: Eurofighter with the RR based Eurojet engine, Rafale with an engine from Snecma and the A400M with a specifically designed turboprop. None of these manufacturers rose to challenge GE, RR or Pratt and Whitney when it comes to mass produced turbojet or fans.

SpaceX engines can clearly get you to supersonic speeds, but they're not "jets" and are much more expensive to run.

No.

Jets vs rockets:

Jets breathe atmospheric air for combustion because they operate in an atmosphere where oxygen is readily available for combustion. They have an air intake nozzle.

Rockets carry their own oxidizer because they must. They only have an exhaust nozzle.

Boom is a competitor of SpaceX. Both plan supersonic international travel.

As much of a fan of SpaceX's vision as I am, the only ballistic point to point passengers I can envisage any time soon would be military operatives in a dire emergency.

I just can't see the likelihood of ballistic weapo..er.. projecti..er.. vehicles being allowed anywhere near major population centres, by tens of decamiles, therefore mooting the purpose of such extreme point to point passenger journeys.

Never mind the sonic booms and general noise. Even having regular scheduled passenger landings on water seems ... not entirely environmentally friendly.

The answer is in the article... the remaining contenders are General Electric and Pratt & Whitney

Yeah, that's the other two.

Supersonic jet engines are a rarified field. There are Russian "companies"... good luck getting that certified for Western commercial aviation.

Dude when the sanctions end the sanctions will really really end.

Russia couldn't get any of their civil aviation jets certified before the sanctions.

Russia got the Sukhoi Superjet 100 regional airliner certified in Europe in 2012 (before the sanctions).

https://www.easa.europa.eu/en/newsroom-and-events/press-rele...

SSJ 100 was certified to operate in Europe in 2012. How much of SSJ 100 is Russian is another question.

Irkut MC-21 had its first flight in 2017 and was supposed to get certified somewhere around 2025, which is pretty normal period, I think? Obviously, not going to happen now.

What about CFM or Safran?

CFM hasn't ever developed a supersonic engine. Safran's one military turbofan is an 80's non-supercruise design. It would be a long way to go for either of these outfits to produce an entirely new supercruise turbofan.

Safran could probably make an engine for this as well.

Eh. Maybe. They haven't developed a clean sheet supersonic turbofan since the 80's. This Boom "Overture" thing is going to need an entirely new design for long duration super-cruise; Boom needs engine people with a lot of depth.

Safran's M88 should be sufficient for Boom's 1/3rd scale demonstrator I think? Then at least they'd have something to show other manufacturers and investors.

At least as of last public discussion, the plan was to use off-the-shelf GE J85s for the demonstrator.

We are talking about economic war, FCPA, not "French cheese eating surrender monkeys".

Can they use for test demonstrator something like Mig-29 engines - those used planes are available including in US just for few millions. Once they are flying, GE or RR will probably be more interested.

It's true that a lot of aircraft development has occurred using substitute engines while the final engines where still being developed. The problem for Boom isn't getting airborne. It's convincing one of the few outfits capable of this to put billions of dollars into a clean sheet engine design.

Klimov RD-33's (the Mig-29 engine) are not super-cruise engines and aren't capable of demonstrating the intent of the Boom design. And frankly I think even a retrofit like that is beyond Boom's means.

With correct inlet design those high power military engines I think can be made into super cruise - it is just that the inlet and the compressor will not work for long in that regime due to heat. Again for tests/demo should probably be fine. Not having chops for retrofits like this would definitely be a total disqualifier in that business though.

It's not like GE and P&W are bad choices given the fact that they made some of the best military jet engines in this world. While comparing fighter jet with large aircraft might not be fair, I think B-1B Lancer will be a good analogy in this case (similar size, 4-engine layout, and twice the takeoff weight). And B-1B Lancer use engines from GE.

They're not bad choices at all, and I'm sure Boom would love to work with either of them. But the question is whether or not GE or P&W are interested in working with this vaporware company.

I have recently toured the GE plants where the engines are assembled and developed. I have worked in the same office with the engineers who design and service the engines. No way in hell GE can do this given the amount of resources for this project. And I highly doubt Boom would like working with them at all.

GE gets skittish about a project when the government has already given them billions to develop it.

There is no engine that will make economic sense for either the engine manufacturer or the airline operator based on the technology we have.

This was always a fools errand.

I know. No one that understands turbofans would imagine otherwise. This sort of thing need sovereign government budgets.

No engine product ready for purchase or no engine that could ever be built? If the former, whatever tell R&D to go do their job. If the latter, maybe it was a scam.

Which is it?

Unless Boom can get some government to write off the billions needed to develop engines then it's all fiction.

Wishful thinking, delusion or scam.

There are so many foundational issues with low supersonic flight from a usability perspective as well (time zones are not your friend for some of it), that lots of routes can only command a premium in one direction.

You have to make so many rosy assumptions to even believe this makes sense if someone was willing to pour billions into engine tech - and still maybe have no options that are commercially viable. It’s also a nightmare from an environmental perspective.

Mentioned this elsewhere, but it belongs better here: If there's a market for a product that existing suppliers don't want to provide, that sounds like exactly what a startup should be doing.

Boom is wasting their time building an airframe but what they really need to win is an engine. They should have built the engine first.

This is the main way you distinguish the grifters from the movers.

The grifters work on the final product, the movers work on the first step, having a plan to make that profitable, so they can build toward the final product. SpaceX is probably the example that comes to mind, even if they did borrow engines.

FYI, SpaceX developed all of their engines in-house[1]. Other American rocket companies use Russian engines and Congress's bill forbidding that going forward has put ULA in a very bad place because Blue Origin's BE-4 engine still is not ready after more than a decade of development.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_rocket_engines

Ah, then it fits even better. I could have sworn someone had been launching on borrowed Russian engines, but maybe that was Boeing.

I think the story is that Elon wanted russian engines and they snubbed him so he got vindictive, like he does, but this time in a good way.

He wanted to buy some Russian rockets to send a greenhouse to Mars, but they did not take him very seriously and quoted very high prices. After that is when he got serious about starting SpaceX.

ULA's (Boeing/Lockheed) Atlas V has been using Russian RD-180 engines, and Orbital Science's Antares has used Russian NK-33 and RD-191 engines.

None of these were borrowed though, since they're all single-use only. Only SpaceX lands and reuses their first stage boosters.

> grifters work on the final product, the movers work on the first step, having a plan to make that profitable, so they can build toward the final product. SpaceX is probably the example that comes to mind

For me, it's Virgin Galactic showcasing the seats before they'd made it to space versus SpaceX building its engines and only much later unveiling spacesuit designs.

Spot on. If you build a more efficient engine P&W, GE, Honeywell, and a few other companies would be clawing eachothers' eyes for the chance to buy you out.

Boeing and other airframe mfgs would throw you a huge contract immediately if they thought you could actually build the engines and deliver them.

>If you build a more efficient engine

Even if you just build an engine on-par with everybody else. Or even just a bit sub-par. Not everybody wants or able or have use case for those large top of the line very efficient and very expensive engines from the top manufacturers. You can check out the global international drama during the last few years around Ukrainian Motor-Sich engine manufacturer - one of the main engine manufacturers from the USSR times. There are just too few of those engine manufacturers, even if sub-par, around for the current world demand. Anybody wanna make a startup for the engines, initially for UAS market? It is going to blow up after the war as drones have been showing their future dominance. And just look at that beauty (uses the Motor-Sich engines as Turkey don't have their own) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baykar_Bayraktar_Ak%C4%B1nc%C4... .

I'm rooting for you, Boom. The world needs supersonic planes and you're so close. Good luck.

I want it to work but, the hard part is the engines and without a partnership it's going to be difficult to get off the ground.

Genuinely asking: Of all the possible efforts that the aeronautic industry can make in 2022, do you think supersonic planes is making the top of the list of what the world need? If so, why?

Not OP but I think advancements are not exclusive.

Going faster is one of the big advancements, but probably not the biggest.

Going 2x faster is obviously a good thing, everything else being equal. Costs can potentially go down as you can run 2x the flights per day. People enjoy flights more. The difference between a 2.5 hour and 5 hours flight is a lot. A 6 hour and 12 hour flight, a lot.

Making flights cheaper is something people consistently prefer. The main flight costs are fuel, pilots, staff, and airport capacity. Electric flights are interesting for short hauls but are a long way away from long haul use (much further away than supersonic). Automating away pilots is something that technically is easier than driverless cars, but hasn't seemed to be a priority yet. Progress there would be helpful. Removing staff on planes is a legal requirement and seems harder to do for larger flights for human reasons. Airport capacity is probably best helped by increasing turn time.

Honestly, the easiest way to improve the flight experience is to (effectively) get rid of all security on flights. Once planes can't be made into missiles (door locks were a good post 9-11 change), they are no higher risk than many other enclosed spaces that have no security. This would help speed of travel AND cost, and really means "just do less". But it's a political issue.

>Going 2x faster is obviously a good thing, everything else being equal. Costs can potentially go down as you can run 2x the flights per day. People enjoy flights more.

Unfortunately due to where you can fly supersonic, you're pretty much limited to over water routes. NYC-LON is probably the most financially viable route - but a 3.5-4hr flying time, you can't actually really fly a decent red eye. Ask anyone who has done DEN-NYC. It's a pretty brutal experience.

You leave NYC at midnight, get in at 8:30AM local with a 5 hour time change. You might have gotten an hour of sleep. Sure, some people might pay it, but most would happily leave at 8:30PM and hopefully get 4 hours of sleep.

This was the same problem with Concorde - how do you justify 3-5x the ticket price to arrive less well rested? Who's 4 hours are worth that? It's a pretty small club.

There's a limited amount of daytime flights you can run, but you're going to wind up either running aircraft turns unprofitably to position the plane for your profitable times or having more aircraft than you want sitting on the ground.

Ultimately, it just doesn't really make economic sense. Yes, people value frequency, but they also value money. On NY-LON there's probably 15+ flights a day anyway.

>The difference between a 2.5 hour and 5 hours flight is a lot. A 6 hour and 12 hour flight, a lot.

Unfortunately there's a devil in these details - the plane can't fly a 6 hour supersonic flight. Their rosiest projections are 4,250nm - that puts FCO (Rome) out of reach). That flight is blocked at 8h20m. Of that, especially in NY, 1.5 hours is probably taxiing/climb out/descent. Boom can't do anything about that (except flying out of undesirable airports...)

On shorter flights, that becomes a large percentage of the flying time. I.e. NY-MIA that you could conceivably detour over the water to fly supersonic on, and maybe trim 30 minutes off the total flying time.

Ultimately, the airports where you can fly supersonic to for the majority of the flight are very limited even if you solved the economic challenges.

I still remember hearing the sonic booms from Concorde out on long island - no way frequent supersonic flights get tolerated when they're not well overwater.

I would like to travel like this, assuming they have wifi and tickets are affordable:

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/jun/15/eco-airship...

Maybe they could fly fully autonomous when used as freighters.

Supersonic freight is not economical. You can get air freight from any airport to any other airport in the world in max. 24 hours flight time. Customs clearance on either end alone takes longer than that.

somehow I don't think they plan for their airships to be supersonic.

The more references to 'green' and 'eco' a tech startup has in their proposal, the more likely it is to be smoke and mirrors. Not because green and ecological aren't laudable, but rather because they are. Proudly announcing such laudable goals and motivations is a cheap and easy way to build up wishful thinking and suspension of disbelief. It also makes people who see your bullshit hesitant to call you out, for fear of 'diluting the message.'

> The world needs supersonic planes

Yeah idk about that part, I doubt we need more of anything that enables more pollution

How surprising... Developing a specific supersonic jet engine for this kind of plane would not be cost effective anyway, the fleet would be too small to worth the investment. Even starting from a military jet engine, the way they are run and maintained is very different from civilian jet engines.

On the maintenance side it's night and day, I used to work upstairs in the hanger building but not on the floor of a base with f-22's and before that f-16's and they rebuild those engines like clock-work there is always at least one being rebuilt if not a few.

Also good luck getting government approval for using a military engine derivate for commercial flight to Asia, or basically any country other than the origin of said engines. And even that will be difficult. Export control can be a bitch.

This article says that they are also partnering with Northrup Gruman to develop a "special missions" version for the government. So they very well could be getting a big government investment that so many here are saying would be necessary to pull this off.

https://airwaysmag.com/boom-supersonic-refined-overture-desi...

I think we will have supersonic planes, but they will be electric.

But to get there we first need normal conservative electric planes to make electric planes more normal. Battery have to be getting better for this to happen but I think we will get there, some people overestimate how large battery improvements we need by basically thinking they need to match chat fuel.

If you look at how far the currently in development electric plans can go you can see lots of improvements that can be made to increase that range considerably.

You can also build your air-frame out of batteries. The batteries themselves need to become structural members in the air-frame. Some manufactures are doing that already for cars but for plans it will be even more important.

Things like using a PRANDTL Wing and prop blade would make a large difference for example.

See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bCwtcDNB15E

It of course makes sense for startups like Heart Aerospace not to try these things but I think eventually people will. Electric planes will be so operational efficient that there will be huge demand to increase the range.

To put this in perspective, developing a modern high-efficiency supersonic engine requires an order-of-magnitude more money than the airframe itself.

At this point I'm convinced the only way industry can actually produce something game-changing is if the government spends a huge amount of R&D on it first.

On the other hand, scrappy SaaS startup could parse your logs and send alerts for cheaper, yes.

> is if the government spends a huge amount of R&D on it first.

This is how it has always worked.

Only for a few industries, mostly the ones that took off around WWII.

Uh…

DARPA, In-Q-Tel, etc…

Even things like semiconductors benefitted massively from government research and funding. They’ve certainly taken off from there, though.

I’m trying to think of what industries this might not be the case for. Research thin industries like entertainment and media? Has the development of things like OLED mostly been by private companies? I guess finance? Seemingly if it involves engineering the government at least made the seed investment.

Not sure I'd call OLED game changing in the same way the Internet or Jet Engines are.

Just because the government has at some point invested in something doesn't mean it had to for it to take off. Once something is already going strong, it's to be expected that everyone who might stand to benefit will want to hop on the bandwagon, especially once the utility is proven. For example the government was not particularly involved with aircraft development until WW1 when it proved to be of considerable military importance.

It's also worth noting that many developments are unintended spillover from other efforts. For example a lot of US government money went into producing high purity germanium, which would ultimately enable the development of the solid state transistor, but the government wasn't directly trying to produce solid state transistors, they instead were concerned with producing diodes for radars.

In either case, I would not describe it as seed investment.

Government funded research being basically throwing money into the ether and hoping some entire brand new world of chemistry or physics or communications or anything like that is the whole point of government investment. Research into one area providing gains in other unexpected areas is a direct goal of the kind of research the government funds.

You know, like, the internet. The government wanted to make sure that nuking one air force base couldn't prevent the retaliation strike, so let's make a big network that is scalable, re-routable on the fly, and simple to put together. Creating a brand new sector of the economy and dominating the new sector with the likes of google and microsoft and apple was the exact outcome optimistic government employees would wish for.

I don't see how that is a refutation of what I wrote. For every example that people can point to of how government funding creates innovation you can point to a private example too. Heavier than air flight was mostly private money, jet engines were mostly government. The transistor was mostly private (Bell Labs) the IC was mostly government. In terms of energy the two most important things in the last few decades are solar and fracking. Solar got a lot of government subsidies, fracking improvements were largely due to industry.

Edit: and there are entire industries, like petrochemicals, where most of the advances came from industry.

> The transistor was mostly private (Bell Labs)

Wasn't Bell Labs indirectly funded by the French Government?

I think that's a pretty big stretch. I don't see a direct link between the award Alexander Graham Bell got in 1880 and the research output of Bell Labs in the 1940s. Bell Telephone existed as a corporation prior to the award from the French government. "Bell Labs" didn't exist as a separate entity with that name until the 1920s.

In 1880, the French government awarded Alexander Bell about $300k which he used to fund Volta Laboratory (Alexander Graham Bell Laboratory) in Washington, D.C. but AT&T took control of its patents (Bell System) by 1889.

I still don't see how that is a real link between the research that was done over 40 years later at Bell Labs in New York and New Jersey (where most of the important research took place). It is also true that Bell Telephone existed prior to the award.

I think you are underestimating the interplay between industry and government.

Government come in and sometimes push forward the technology industry already has, mostly by just given those industries more investment money.

But industry still invests gigantic amount of money to push technology forward and those innovations are constantly and consistently changing the game.

Government invests something in X and then for the next 100 years people in forum can say 'see this only happened because of X'. But that ignores a lot of the work before and after to actually make it game changing.

And what we also need to consider is that very often that huge government investment fails and goes nowhere. And at the same time large private investment can also fail.

To conclude from this no private investment can ever be game-changing doesn't really follow.

Starlink is a recent example that is pretty game-changing. Government didn't invest in it directly. Sure in the last 100s government invest in rocketry and electronics and antennas but so did private industry at a much larger overall rate (outside of rocketry).

So I think, at the end of the day, government will always have its fingers in almost every pie and will always talk about their success and never talk about their failures. If Boom isn't successful, well you can't innovate without the government. If Boom is successful, well Boom profited from government investment in supersonic military technology so they couldn't have done it without government.

So these kinds of arguments all circle in on themselves. At the end of the day, if you invest lots of money in something game-changing most of the time its gone go to shit, no matter who does it.

That seems like it would slow things down a bit, which is a problem in a higher rate world. Not sure business travel is going to stay on the same trajectory either.

Of course weirder stuff is happening:

https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/israel-ba...

Banning 4 engine aircraft from Israel means no more 747 freighters or new leisure supersonics.

Or visits from US presidents.

I would have to assume that falls under the “special permit” allowance.

> Operation of aircraft with four engines will be allowed in exceptional cases and only with a special permit.

Last sentence of the article:

> Operation of aircraft with four engines will be allowed in exceptional cases and only with a special permit.

I'd imagine that Air Force One will not have any trouble obtaining the special permit.

For now. 2022. Yeah no in the future too.

Actually, they carved out an exception for Air Force One.

This was probably to protect the flag carrier from a very attractive and more comfortable rival who were rumored to be considering a380 flights to the country

So what's changed since Concorde?

Concorde didn't fail for technical reasons but AA have put down a deposit for 60. This is limited to < Mach 1 over land so it's going to be most useful on the routes that Concorde could have serviced.

Is it just the noise aspect opening more potential routes? But then I would have thought we would be more concerned about noise now than in the 60s making the improvements a wash.

Supersonic is still banned over land, even if they can get the engines. We’ll see if overseas flights are a big enough market to be more than a loss leader.

https://www.faa.gov/newsroom/supersonic-flight (Read the last sentence).

They should have done that a long time ago, Boom never reference RR in any of their PR documents, including their websites [1]

This partnership have been running for quite a while and no results in the end

Also it is interesting to see only negative comments about RR? i wonder why? :) [2]

[1] - https://boomsupersonic.com/

[2] - https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/boom

Still have my money on Darkhorse showing promise to actually work at least.

Doesn't this say more about the RR engines company than Boom?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com