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Comment by thereddaikon | Hacker News Reader

Concorde was a large program backed by two governments and designed and built by nationalized aerospace companies. This is a strictly private affair, so no tax dollars behind it, just private funds. The end goal is also to be much more efficient than Concorde, which was a pretty brute forced effort which multiple large afterburning engines. They hope to make the production model capable of supercruise.

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"No tax dollars behind it" is directionally true since it wasn't built by one of the Primes, but not literally true. As is the wont of every company these days, they've extracted tens/hundreds of millions in taxpayer funds..

$200 million in North Carolina for production:

https://subsidytracker.goodjobsfirst.org/subsidy-tracker/nc-...

$60 million from the US Air Force for development:

https://www.aerospacetestinginternational.com/news/flight-te...

$2 million SBIR grant for development:

https://www.sbir.gov/awards/187787

The $200 million in north carolina is a discount on future taxes for when they start production. - seems a little unfair to count it against the company when they haven't even started production yet.

And the total amount of private funding raised to date is $700 million - so maybe 10% of funding to date is from the government? Seems like a good deal for the government?

Some portion of it is indeed a discount on future taxes - but a huge chunk isn't, whether it's direct grants, infra/hanger upgrades at the airport, a bunch of the subsidies are government spending to make the facility more useful for Boom.

It's not even that I'm opposed to that kind of spending, I'm a big believer in government support to bootstrap new industries! But the conceit that they're doing this without any government support should be disregarded. I'm only partially being pedantic on this because the CEO of the company in question is definitely not a proponent of that type of spending.

It's like when some of those other Thiel-adjacent goofballs kept tweeting things like "taxation is theft!" while ignoring that every one of their companies had multi-million dollar government contracts.

I think these types of arguments are somewhat disingenuous when it's referring to tax breaks on future taxes. It doesn't harm the state at all because the company wouldn't have located in the state in the first place without it. It just acts to remove the drag on the company being successful. If they're successful then the amount of tax revenue the state will get will be tremendous. So there's no downsides.

And it also doesn't immediately act as funding or tax dollars for the company.

Just talking about the "$200M" number.

Over half of the $200M is infrastructure upgrades to attract the new company as well.. so those are hard dollars spent in advance of a single new employee or anything positive for the state. It may end up being a good investment, but if you ask the voters, "Do you want to spend $100M in taxpayer money to get the airport facilities ready for a startup backed by the richest people on earth?" they might ask why those people don't just pay for the upgrades..

> "In addition, the state set aside in the state budget (via HB 334) $106.7 million for the site and roads improvement and for constructing hangers at the project site. "

> The end goal is also to be much more efficient than Concorde

I would think that is not very hard to accomplish. Their first flight is almost half a century after Concorde’s. Technology has progressed.

As an (imperfect) comparison, in subsonic flight (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_economy_in_aircraft#Past):

“Jet airliners became 70% more fuel efficient between 1967 and 2007, 40% due to improvements in engine efficiency and 30% from airframes. Efficiency gains were larger early in the jet age than later, with a 55-67% gain from 1960 to 1980 and a 20-26% gain from 1980 to 2000. Average fuel burn of new aircraft fell 45% from 1968 to 2014, a compounded annual reduction 1.3% with variable reduction rate.”

Supersonic is different, but there was half a century of development in military supersonic flight, so a new design need not start where Concorde stopped.

While true, the catch is that very little technology relevant to civilian supersonic flight has changed since Concorde. We have composite fuselages and that’s about it. Concorde was close to optimal within the design constraints it was built for and those constraints haven’t really changed - airport parking docks remain the same size, runways are the same length, London and NYC are still the same distance apart, people don’t want to hear sonic booms, and few are able to shell out $$$$ it takes to pay for all the fuel. I have huge respect to Boom for giving this a go but it will be incredibly hard for an aircraft manufacturer to turn a profit.

Concorde used supercruise for most of the flight - afterburners were only used for departure and for transonic acceleration.

Concorde didn’t use afterburner during cruise. There’s a lot of discussion from pilots and engineers in a long thread https://www.pprune.org/tech-log/423988-concorde-question-7.h... describing the actual flight profile.

There were plans for a Concorde "B" model that aimed to increase efficiency through wing and engine modifications, allowing the removal of the afterburners: http://www.concordesst.com/concordeb.html

> Concorde was a large program backed by two governments and designed and built by nationalized aerospace companies. This is a strictly private affair, so no tax dollars behind it, just private funds.

Why is this interesting?

Because once things are paid by consumers things get better, more responsible, efficient, and so on, compared to free money granted by states to a few at the cost of many?

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