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Comment by ranger_danger | Hacker News Reader

You have to start somewhere before you can build towards an economy of scale that makes it affordable. If people used your same logic about regular airplanes, we wouldn't be using them today.

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Supersonic flight will never be suitable for the masses compared to normal flight due to basic physics. It will always require much more expensive planes and more fuel.

It's not more viable now wealth inequality just means that there are more rich people to benefit.

>Supersonic flight will never be suitable for the masses compared to normal flight due to basic physics. It will always require much more expensive planes and more fuel.

You could have used the exact same argument for normal flight 100 years ago. Supersonic flight being more expensive than normal flight doesn't mean it will always be too expensive for the masses unless you assume there'll be no more economic growth ever.

Physics doesnt change. It will always cost more energy to fly faster.

Relatively, absolutely, but look at computers. Yes, more computing still costs more than less computing. Physics hasn't changed, but the cost of computers has. I have, in my hand, for part of a couple months of middle class wages, more computing power than existed in the world in 1960.

Yes and now wafer costs are going up for n+1 node, because of physics reasons.

There are 28 000 passenger flights in the US every day, imagine the noise under major corridors if a large percentage of them was supersonic.

What are we talking about? 5% more? 200% more?

I'm still waiting for Tesla's plan to come true where the rich paid for development before scaling up brings the prices down. The luxury economy of scale is about as realistic trickle down economy

> still waiting for Tesla's plan to come true where the rich paid for development before scaling up brings the prices down

The low-volume, high-priced rich-person toys (Roadster) finance the scaling up that enables lower-priced mass-manufactured product (Model 3).

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