XB-1 Supersonic Rollout
boomsupersonic.com
boomsupersonic.com
So close, yet so far away. Cargo cult speed ramping.
https://boomsupersonic.com/xb-1/model
Maybe they plan to put a second seat behind it sometimes?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Splitter_plate_(aeronautics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diverterless_supersonic_inlet
Also, for now they are using some variant of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Electric_J85 which is old, and maybe proven to work good with such inlets? The real engine which AFAIK Rolls Royce agreed to develop/build is not ready yet, and maybe enables different inlets?
No clue, just wondering.
edit: Also just wondering why nobody tries that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compression_lift thing like the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_XB-70_Valkyrie did. Shockwave -> compression lift -> less loud sonic boom because transformed at least in parts to lift?
Depending on your perspective, every expenditure and experience that money can buy, can be viewed as wasteful and harming the environment. For someone with no access to water, a long shower feels very wasteful.
If we don't actively come out of this dogma and not embark on some ground breaking technology, our lives won't change at all. So many new technologies from aircraft and space technology have made it to mainstream - Kevlar, carbon fiber to think of a couple. So, even if Boom ends up building only billionaire's toye, there is a possibility that second and third order inventions can make it to mainstream society and bring about change at scale.
You seem to be searching for a binary answer to something that most people would agree is a gradient. A long shower is not even in the same ballpark as a private supersonic jet, you clearly know this.
> If we don't actively come out of this dogma and not embark on some ground breaking technology, our lives won't change at all.
It's not an either/or proposition
But there will never be a future where private jets are economical for the masses (even private cars aren't really economical for the long term for everyone globally), and I doubt the tech Boom are developing will make it into widely used commercial planes, but perhaps it will.
When it comes to transport: Partially; air travel has become fairly accessible for a lot of people now compared to a hundred years ago. Cars are also pretty common now - although driving is still quite expensive.
But I don't see how we can ever have personal airplanes be as affordable and accessible as cars. Not going to happen. I'd be happy to be proven wrong though.
This first demonstrator is a two-seater. The next jet they are designing is the Overture, designed for the ~50 seater business jet segment. And as the name hints, they don't intend to stop there.
Sibling comment already addressed that Boom isn't "personal airplanes".
However: why not?
I mean, apart from the current fact that not enough people want this.
Let's look at a Cessna. It masses around 800kg empty, so lighter than many modern cars, and that's not due to exotic, expensive materials, and without that, cost tends to be roughly proportional to weight.
The engine is a four cylinder with 180hp. My car gets 200hp out of 2l with a turbocharger, but aviation tends to use very old-school engine tech for reliability, so it's got huge displacement, almost 6 liters. So there's some room for improvement there, particularly once we go electric, because electric motors are so much more reliable.
Fully electric is already viable for flight-training and other short-range needs, and unbeatably cheap for those missions. (A friend and I had this idea of getting a used Antonov An 2 and stuffing it with electric bus batteries for a south-/west- to east-bay commute... The numbers worked quite well).
Hybrid electric could mean getting to use much smaller, cheaper, common, efficient engines and use the electric engine and some batteries for safety.
Avionics? Yup, somewhat complex and expensive, but really not for too many intrinsic reasons. The gold standard for GA today is (still?) the Garmin 1000. An iPad has most of the same sensors (as does my Apple Watch), and the compute power is nothing to write home about.
More importantly most of those things don't inconvenience the people around me. If I use my computer or my kitchen-aid (high-price items in the past), it doesn't disturb my neighbors (or would have in the past when they were still in their infancy).
Ship travel was already something most people in developed countries could afford. What’s the use of getting around faster and higher off the ground?
It's hardly the same thing with a supersonic airliner, which just reduces the time in roughly half.
http://www.century-of-flight.freeola.com/new%20site/commerci...
My bet is somewhere like $4000 roundtrip trans-Atlantic ticket or $3000 cross-country ticket in U.S. is about the maximum the market will bear.
Boom won't be flying over any country. They will only travel over oceans, to prevent issues / complaints that Concorde had.
The reality we live in today was created through the use of wealth that employed people and produced better and better goods to meet more and more people's needs.
Pardon my lack of enthusiasm for yet another fight between privatized gains at the cost of socialized harms.
> Supersonic operations over land must be conducted above 30,000 feet or, when below 30,000 feet, in specially designated areas approved by Headquarters United States Air Force, Washington, D.C., and the Federal Aviation Administration.
https://www.af.mil/About-Us/Fact-Sheets/Display/Article/1045...
and
https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/17661/can-a-son...
Boom won't burn bunker fuel, nor will it dump munitions or nuclear waste, so how is this relevant? Some of those are real problems, but none of them will be made worse by Boom.
Those are permanent, globally occuring, chemical phenomena. A sonic boom is a very temporary, very local, mechanical phenomenon. You cannot draw any conclusions from one to the other.
> tiny sonar noises a few hundred kilometers away
Sonar originates from within water, while sonic booms originate in the air. Most of the boom's acoustic energy will probably be reflected by the transition from one medium to the other.
I think marine life will most likely be a lot less disturbed by sonic booms than by naturally occuring storms.
And flying a few execs from New York to London in 3-4 hours with renewable fuels isn't going to quite achieve that.
You seem proud of our current predicament.
There have been huge technical advances. Incredible progress.
But equally huge destruction and incredible externalities.
You seem to enjoy fireworks.
Pessimists have been historically wrong. I consciously choose to be an (prudent) optimist.
I'm a frustrated optimist, if that helps.
>The world, a couple hundred years ago: Our world is everlasting.
No one ever said that...not even the bible ;)
>There have been huge technical advances. Incredible progress.
>But equally huge destruction and incredible externalities.
That like saing Aircraft's are incredible but they make pollution...it says absolutely nothing.
>You seem to enjoy fireworks.
An you seem enjoying wasting energy for nothing...not even a beautiful firework.
Except to describe the entire history of the last, maybe 150-300 years, and the dilemma of the next 150-300 years.
And, anyway, I enjoy a good firework, but I never said I wanted our world to be one.
IIRC, southern fried chicken in the US descends from cooking styles that only the aristocrats of western England could afford. Which their 2nd sons (or rather, their 2nd son's cooks) brought along to Virginia.
https://www.mashed.com/220283/the-strange-story-of-ice-cream...
https://qz.com/1320584/ice-cream-in-cuba-reveals-the-growing...
The issues with inequality of wealth are real, and separate.
Holy shit, it's 2020. Look around.
I don't think it's as clear cut as you want to believe. Technological progress is almost exclusively fueled by economical gain, economical gain rarely aligns with long term progress.
Was leaded gas a progress ? Freon ? Asbestos ? Privacy invading social networks ? I guess it depends on the scale you look at it but it's more "is technological progress always desirable ?" rather than "tech is always good, always trust the tech, always praise the tech"
It may not have been worth the cost in lives, but the benefits we've had since from that technology are still benefits.
But then I believe the human-caused climate emergency exists and is important enough to do something about.
However, it's pretty clear that I'm in a tiny minority, and we'll keep obsessively consuming and burning fossil fuels until it's all destroyed.
How is being a Luddite an answer to a novel problem?
Boom is developing supersonic passenger jets. That involves a myriad of thermodynamic, aerospace, materials, tooling and other R&D. Nobody is saying if Boom makes an aircraft every hundred millionaire has a right to one. That’s the point of regulation.
Arguing we should ban even thinking about new technology on the grounds that it might make climate change worse is dogmatic adherence to a cultlike level.
I don't have any math to support my belief just a little bit of logic, but it works like this: 1) 787 burns X lbs of fuel per hour in flight 2) 787 takes Y hours to fly from point A to point B at Mach 0.85 3) X lbs of fuel * Y hours = Z polution 4) Boom burns Xf lbs of fule per hour in flight (could actually be less because it's smaller or could be higher because of additional needed thrust) 5) Boom takes Y.85 to fly from point A to point B at Mach 1 6) (Xf) of fuel (Y*.85) hours = H pollution
So as long H is less than Z then Boom would be decreasing the impact on the environment. Now I know that there are a lot of missing numbers in here like passenger count production impacts, etc. But the solution you seem to imply is that flight just shouldn't happen and I'm not sure this is an option so if Boom can reduce the amount of pollution created by flying then it seems like something you should be for not against.
This is why your airliner is about 100 to 150 mpg per passenger but a container vessel is 1000mpg per tonne of cargo.
More relevant is that drag goes up with the square of speed generally... in the subsonic regime... I'm not sure what happens across the sound barrier, but I believe it gets worse.
There is a wikipedia article on the topic (of course): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_economy_in_aircraft
"Concorde, a supersonic transport, managed about 17 passenger-miles to the Imperial gallon, which is 16.7 L/100 km per passenger; similar to a business jet, but much worse than a subsonic turbofan aircraft. Airbus states a fuel rate consumption of their A380 at less than 3 L/100 km per passenger"
But the real comparison should not be between subsonic and supersonic trans-ocean business trips. It should be between taking the trip or not taking the trip at all. The best way to reduce emissions is to avoid long-distance air travel completely.
Concorde found a kinda niche between the East Coast of the US and European cities near the sea, but it really doesn't feel sustainable for an entire aircraft class to be limited to only that route (and wasn't for Concorde).
If it doesn't go supersonic then what is the USP?
> Overture flights will focus on 500+ primarily transoceanic routes that benefit from supersonic speeds—such as New York to London or San Francisco to Tokyo. Overture won't generate a sonic boom over land cruising at subsonic speeds. Its passengers won't even notice breaking through the "sound barrier," which will be inaudible and uneventful.
So I guess they haven't really solved physics. edit: in an economic way.
>Graves explains that SonicBAT is an unusual test in that it uses a typical military aircraft with its loud sonic boom to help engineers better understand the sounds from future quiet supersonic aircraft
>"We're hoping we can eventually lower sonic booms to a low rumble," he said. "The goal is to eventually accommodate jets that can fly from New York to Los Angeles in two hours."
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/new-supersonic-technology-desig...
I'd hope that Boom is also working on such an approach
That's really only true west of about a North-South line through the eastern edge of the Texas panhandle. From there east, there's still some open space (not a lot once you hit the Mississippi River), but you'd have to dodge around to make path not going over population concentrations.
The Low-boom Flight Demonstration mission has two goals: 1) design and build a piloted, large-scale supersonic X-plane with technology that reduces the loudness of a sonic boom to that of a gentle thump; and 2) fly the X-plane over select U.S. communities to gather data on human responses to the low-boom flights and deliver that data set to U.S. and international regulators.
Using this data, new sound-based rules regarding supersonic flight over land can be written and adopted, which would open the doors to new commercial cargo and passenger markets to provide faster-than-sound air travel.
"NASA has a project to test whether the physics can be adequately finessed" would be more accurate description of what is on that page than "NASA has solved the physics".
in concorde, the passengers didn't even notice breaking through the sound barrier either.
regarding sonic booms over land, their plan iirc is to reduce the noise level to the point where they can lobby to change legislation.
And if transoceanic supersonic travel becomes popular, pressure will mount to define overland supersonic corridors, or manufacturers will invest to reduce the noise, or both.
By the time Concorde was actually retired, 9/11 dented air travel demand in general and the thing was a flying dinosaur with not a big enough market to justify an upgraded version of the plane.
yes, that definitely need to happen. I wonder whether the sonic boom public scare is just based on the fact that the majority of the public has never experienced it. I grew up on a Navy base in USSR, and we regularly had fighters booming at the altitudes much lower than the altitude normal for the commercial supersonic travel. It was just fun for us children. May be you'd not want the boom echoing/bouncing through the Manhattan concrete mazes, yet at 20km altitude over rural areas there should be no issues.
Also there are large swaths of less populated lands in other countries who may be open to having such corridors over these areas. And back in Concorde times, there weren't such a big rich markets like China who has different approach to clearing of permitting/regulation issues for example when it comes to public transportation infrastructure.
second - those are very different modes. We don't know how to design a plane flying efficiently (and thus achieving a good range, and the range is already an issue for supersonics) in both modes, subsonic and supersonic (well, we do have B-1 and Tu-160 though that is well beyond commercial reach and i'd say those planes more like illustrate the issue than showcase the solution). Concorde for example was using afterburner to get to supersonic mode as quickly as possible, and while afterburner is very inefficient, such approach was overall still most efficient for Concorde because the plane was designed for the supersonic mode.
What this meant in reality was that anyone in South West London (near to Heathrow but not necessarily just west of Heathrow) had this part of the day when the noise was terrible. You could be outside, sat down enjoying beers and all conversation would have to stop until this thing went overhead. Ear splitting was the word and there was no doubt the plane was Concorde.
Further down the road in the West Country the Concorde (there was only one!) would be able to be heard but it would not be announcing its presence and demanding that you stop everything that you were doing to look at it. At this stage it was high altitude but not on the supersonic super-cruise.
Then, over the Bristol Channel, Concorde would hit the afterburners good and proper to get up to full speed. People in Devon, Cornwall, South Wales and the south of Ireland would hear the boom albeit not at full intensity. It was still a 'boom' though.
If you look at the map and the size of the Bristol Channel then you can get an idea as to how big of an overland corridor you would need. It is huge, even for somewhere like Tibet.
Or was that only an economic necessity?
This did not single handedly killed the Concorde, there are plenty of routes with substantial flying time over unpopulated areas. Presumably if the cost of maintenance and the fuel consumption were lower it could still be flying.
So assuming Boom fixes those 2 points, then not being able to go supersonic over land just lowers efficiency but does not mean it's not viable.
Whether supersonic travel is still relevant is another question, but there buyers then, maybe there would be now too.
With careful planning the fastest I can get to Australia/New Zealand is ~18-24 hours flight time - on a 10 day vacation that's ~40% of my vacation time including recovery from an 18 hour flight. I'd be fine flying 6 hours to the west coast then hopping on a supersonic flight for a 2-3x premium ( still expensive, but worthwhile every few years ).
https://www.flightradar24.com/blog/winter-winds-how-singapor...
https://www.greatcirclemapper.net/en/great-circle-mapper.htm...
Anchorage is a very busy airport for cargo routes for this reason.
Traveling to Hawaii is a more dangerous than to something like Japan from mainland US due to the distance from land being much greater.
Never look at Mercator projections when thinking about flights, they will mislead greatly.
Though honestly even 4500nm is not very far for transpacific; from ANC Hong Kong and Manila are barely within/outside range, Bangkok and Singapore are out of the question.
You can do two hops, by stopping in Anchorage, which will get you to Tokyo or Seoul on the second hop (Stopping in Hawaii won't get you the range to go to Seoul), but at that point a no-stop subsonic flight is faster, more comfortable, burns less jet fuel, and does not require you to make a landing within spitting distance of the Arctic circle.
This jet promises[1] to deliver a range of 4,500 nautical miles, which will barely get you from Seattle to crash-landing in the mountains east of Seoul (4530 nautical miles)
[1] It remains to be seen whether it will deliver on this promise.
Can you explain more about this? I assumed those routes were just ones that were only of interest to the more local carriers.
Wouldn't those be covered under the fifth freedom[1], assuming the flight originated in the airline's home country. E.g. BA flying London -> Seattle -> Tokyo.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedoms_of_the_air#Fifth_free...
Otherwise, they wouldn't build their plane around gas turbines, which create trust from burning carbon compounds.
Most likely: they do care, but it is not their main priority.
It could contractually require buyers to offset carbon emissions but that's a dubious idea.
The fuel requirements from the US to Asia are pretty intense, so I'm interested to see how they solve that issue.
Sonic booms haven't always been illegal in the US (1973?). My dad grew up near O'hare, and he said you'd occasionally hear them when it was still a military base. Its just annoying, but for people who live near airports, jet noise is already annoying? I think as long as jets just boom over specific areas, it would minimize the public nuisance.
Much more interesting than our anecdata is probably the Oklahoma City Sonic Boom study: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oklahoma_City_sonic_boom_tests
> the NORC reported that 73% of subjects in the study said that they could live indefinitely with eight sonic booms per day, while 25% said that they couldn't. About 3% of the population telephoned, sued, or wrote protest letters, but Oklahoma City surgeons and hospitals filed no complaints.
However, with the city population at 500,000, that 3% figure represented 15,000 upset individuals. There were 9,594 complaints of damage to buildings, 4,629 formal damage claims, and 229 claims for a total of $12,845.32, mostly for broken glass and cracked plaster.
Especially from US airforce bases in germany you can't expect much, they pretty much ignore air safety regulations entirely and do what they want (there have been multiple almost collisions over my city reported to air safety, several accidents where people got injured or died due to american personel acting reckless).
I tried to google verification of this but only find more current information.
That's not how it works. The boom is continuous along the flight pass
To make a supersonic passenger plane meaningful you can’t just go supersonic in a few areas but you have to go at that speed as much as possible.
Did this killed the Concorde? I don't know the story well, but I always though it was because it was never a profitable venture but it was kept because it was good PR. Then the accident happened and it was just not worth it anymore ...
The major issue with Concorde by the time of its retirement was that it was very old and outdated, among other things needing a 3-person crew. The market for new Concordes was not large enough for a next-egeneration update to be profitable. And 9/11 had dented air travel demand.
Thanks! I did not know about that.
This doesn't add up. At the moment when I fly from the UK to New York I leave my house at 6 AM and could be in the city by just after lunch. With supersonic, including airport and transfer times, I could literally get up at my normal time in the UK and arrive to get a full working day in New York. None of the day is wasted.
In the other direction it’s harder. Too short to sleep on the plane, too long to get a full day.
If you want to be in London at 9am, you’re leaving NYC at 2am-ish for a supersonic flight. (1h transit to airport, 2h at airport, 3h flight, 1h transit to London)
I'm not sure what you mean - that gets you into London at 2pm not 9am (2am + 1 + 2 + 3 = 9am New York = 2pm London.)
To get into London at 9am you'd need to leave New York City at 10pm (9am - 1 - 3 - 2 = 3am London = 10pm New York. Which seems fine you're doing it overnight no days lost? You'd not get tons of sleep that night but you're not wasting a day either way. Could leave at 8pm and get two hours's sleep in the arrivals lounge!
And leaving at 10pm instead of 5pm as you have to now makes all the difference because it now isn't interfering with your day at all! That was the goal wasn't it? Makes it worth it?
As for worth it, prob depends on who you are and why you're flying and how much more than a normal ticket it ends up costing. For me paying 5x the price isn't worth it under any circumstances.
And I'm pretty productive on airplanes (esp now with good wifi) so 3h vs. 6h flight isn't a big deal.
Hardly anyone pays for first class, but will they pay three to four times as much to arrive a few hours earlier?
(On a personal level I hope there isn't a market of even more people who want to come here who'll be enabled by greatly shorter flight times. We had more than enough tourists already, TYVM. But economically, we won't be able to resist because jobs)
I think you might underestimate how many people would visit if the long-haul flights weren't an obstacle. Pre-covid Iceland, easily reachable from Europe and the NE US, had over 1M arrivals on a population of only 300k: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tourism_in_Iceland
But I think you must be right. If the trip becomes less burdensome more people will want to come. The obvious (to me) response is to set a target tourist number, and raise the arrival fee until we get approximately that number of tourists. But now we're getting into policy :)
longer wings are better for lift (which is why gliders have super long wings), and shorter wings are better for maneuvering.
On the one hand, that makes a lot of sense as in, "Let's build a supersonic platform based on one that we know works to prove to ourselves that we can actually build a supersonic plane."
But the marketing spin around "Hey we made a copy of this plane that was built 60 years ago and we think it will work." Just doesn't have the same flair :-)
Still, as NASA has shown time and again, if you have a reliable air frame that is well characterized, and you instrument the crap out of it, then you can set it up a wide variety of aeronautical experiments and collect really valuable data that feels more trustworthy then "theoretical results" from a 10K core parallel computer doing CFD analysis.
If they are smart (and we can presume they are) they are doing both and updating their CFD models with data from XB-1 so that they are more confident that Overture will work. That said, to be really "ground breaking" they really should use the "low boom" technology that NASA has been researching to make a plane that can fly supersonic over land. That would actually be a new spin on the old Concorde business plan where it opens up more routes. Just the "hey it will be cheaper" bet doesn't leave a lot of room for an assumption fail late in the certification process.
Like I said, it makes a lot of sense to build a platform that can prove that your tooling gets you to a working aircraft. And once you can do that, you can then iterate using the platform to inform your engineering choices. SpaceX has done this brilliantly and is the current poster child AFAICT.
So I'm looking forward to the test program to see how it does, but was chuckling at the over the top marketing speak with which they "rolled out" this revolution.
Step 1: Build a plane (check!) Step 2: Fly the plane (next on the list)
> So I'm looking forward to the test program to see how it does, but was chuckling at the over the top marketing speak with which they "rolled out" this revolution.
Same! :-) I'm even more skeptical of their use of the word "sustainable," although I commend them on making that a goal.
It's not, but there's a very conspicuous counter-example - developed in the USSR.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikoyan-Gurevich_MiG-25 - with only 9% titanium content, compared to 26% of the F-15.
For a number of economic and engineering reasons, instead of making jets out of titanium, the USSR, for the most part, preferred to export it to the US, in exchange for dollars.
It's interesting to see the Mig-25 steel design come back pretty much in SpaceX's starship.
The X-3 and XB-1 both have long noses, and the similarities end there.
The wing shapes are completely different, the engine intakes are configured differently, the tail is completely different etc.
In terms of similarities, it looks more like an X-59 to me: https://www.nasa.gov/aeroresearch/nasa-marks-continued-progr...
On the plus side the X-59 was developed by Lockheed and one of their advisors, Dr. Johnson was a CTO at Lockheed so there could be some cross pollination there.
That said, its kind of picking nits. If everything's a remix[1] is true, that is even MORE true in aviation.
Um yeah of course?
My point was the the long nose + wing shape (which defines much of the aerodynamics) is much more similar than the X-3 where the wing shape is completely different. See pics here: https://www.nasa.gov/centers/armstrong/news/FactSheets/FS-07...
(Also hopefully the XB-1 is much better than the X-3 which was not a great plane!)
I hope Boom do better!
For comparison the XB1 has "maximum thrust of 12,300 lbf" and X-3 had two " Westinghouse J34 turbojets were substituted, producing only 4,900 pounds-force (22 kilonewtons) of thrust with afterburner" so a bit more - 12300 lbf vs 9800 I guess.
And yet here we are, admiring a plane that will probably burn ten times as much fossil fuel as a regular plane, which is already far too much.
You’re not helping your cause by making exaggerated claims unsupported by science or reason.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_climate_change#On_h...
The best experts basically all rely on subsidies for their livelyhood.
Furthermore, we can only measure and calculate properly for a couple of decades.
And finally, don't you see the biblical theme of your message?
In the winter, my house was cold. In the summer, it became hot. The next winter, it got cold again. Now my house is on fire. But it's fine, because it's just becoming hot again. The temperature of my house is always changing, you see.
> The best experts basically all rely on subsidies for their livelyhood.
What's a good neutral source you'd recommend, then?
> Furthermore, we can only measure and calculate properly for a couple of decades.
Says who? And measure and calculate what?
> And finally, don't you see the biblical theme of your message?
what
Ad absurdum. And I am not saying it goes up & down, I am saying it has been going up for thousands and thousands of years already.
> What's a good neutral source you'd recommend, then?
I would recommend to avoid polarization and listen to both sides of the spectrum.
> Says who? And measure and calculate what?
I say so, I have studied computer science, did plenty of math, then 'numerical math' where you discover how hard it actually is to do precision calculation with these damn computers. You might be surprised. Then I worked with a bunch of scientist who developed physics models and experienced first hand how much they struggled to get anything right.
> what
End-of-times. The (grand) deluge. Messiases who predict the end-of-times and offer the solution to it?
It sounds like the world will end for you a couple of times in your lifetime regardless of climate change because your bar for the end of the world is so low.
(Also, you don't make fuel from CO2.)
No, it's a marketing slang. It's like saing E-mobiles are CN just because they are E.
But that IS actually Carbon neutral.
EDIT: But just if you compose the dead body correctly otherwise methane...even worse
What, in your opinion, is carbon-neutral?
Is burning wood from a sustainably-managed forest carbon-neutral in your eyes?
You're also a murderer, of course. I don't see the "you're a murderer" equivalent in a conversation about carbon dioxide.
This is not hard to understand, unless you're motivated to misunderstand it for some reason.
It's more like taking water from the ground, drinking it, and sweating / pissing it out again.
But I too don't see how they can make fuel out of CO2, they're probably doing something with carbon neutrality, planting trees or something (or more likely: giving some money to one of many shady companies that claim to plant trees. You know, a bit like plastic recycling)
https://www.nationalgeographic.co.uk/environment-and-conserv...
Second, we don't really know how to make carbon neutral fuel. There are all sorts of ecological issues with existing biofuels. Other methods have very low yields. And in any case, we can't make enough clean fuels, so what we really don't need is yet another very wasteful way of using them.
Sure Teslas don't emit CO2, but electricity generation does, and until electricity generation is carbon neutral, all "we're carbon neutral because we used electricity to create our fuel" is patent bs.
The solution is to take that energy without impacting the environment too much. Zero foot print, not zero movement.
Doubtful; it would slow down / reverse the economy and probably cause population decline (which would be horrible because it would be through famine and the like), but I don't see how we'd end up gone.
I believe we have a very small window of opportunity to become a multi planetary species, which would greatly reduce our current "all eggs in one basket" situation.
But fast technological progress is the only way to get there.
We need to act on both fronts: become more sober AND produce more clean energy.
Only fools would floor the acceleration pedal.
So if accelerating increases our chance of going through the opening, I say go for it.
It makes sense to floor that pedal if the opening is slowly closing.
I believe you will see supersonic electric jets capturing overland routes, I think think overland will happen otherwise. Electric planes will fly higher and thus have far less of a sonic boom problem. Even some shorter range over the ocean routes are possible.
Battery technology is improving fast and electric planes have inherent operational cost advantages.
I also think Starship without a first stage can compete in this already not very big market and with a first stage they can do routes that would be impossible for Overture.
Boom often compares itself to SpaceX, but I don't know if you can replicate SpaceX in the air domain. Space was much less sophisticated and much less commercial. And as I said, SpaceX is now going after the same market with rocket technology, so the difference between air and space domain is shrinking.
I wish them luck but who knows if any of these are gone work out anytime soon.
How much louder/jarring is a sonic boom to a thunder clap in the vicinity?
Very fun if you are kid.
The pressure Wave in front of the moving plane moves away at the speed of sound, so it just stacks up.
This is a description of trans-sonic flight.
But would the impact be that high?
Cutting flight time by 40-45% is nice, but end to end travel time includes driving to/from the airport and immigration, which does not change.
Let's look at JFK-LHR (New York - London). The flight time is cut from 6.5h to 3.5h. Let's add 2 hours overhead at each end (somewhat ... optimistic), which makes it 10.5h vs 7.5h.
LA-Sydney is 14.5h vs 8.5h, or 18.5h vs 12.5h end to end.
Is that difference really going to change if you take the trip or not? Would you be willing to pay a significant markup for that?
Seems like the market would be constrained to relatively high profile business travel.
The target per cost is equivalent to today's business class. Some people might jump at that. And we have no idea what a non-premium Boom cabin might look like.
You can stop to refuel in Hawaii, but that will eat much of your time savings.
Musk's The Boring Company is working on changing the speed of travel to the airport. Midtown Manhattan to JFK is around 45 minutes to drive. But it's only 11 miles away. If you can travel in a straight line at 80 mph, it should only take 8.3 minutes).
And rich people who buy flights like that can already take helicopters and have separate immigration/customs gates without lines and checks.
https://cooperator.com/article/a-look-at-what-lies-beneath/f...
There literally has never been a product announcement around hyperloop. It was a technical paper laying out the idea, that's all.
Second, you don't actually need a 'hyperloop', a 'loop' is perfectly fine. A 'loop' already exists in Nevada, and its just a tunnel with an electric car/bus/platfom inside. That isn't hyperloop fast, but you can still get up to 100+ MPH pretty easily.
And the 'loop' system is Las Vegas is perfectly within its schedule plan so far. The question is just if somebody pays for these tunnels.
They're likely to be indirectly relevant to mainstream air travel because coach seats are subsidized by first/business class, which this is likely to cannibalize.
The JAL flight JL01 from SFO used to leave near midnight. I screwed up once and booked the flight on the wrong day. When I showed up a day late, they asked if I was okay as I had been booked on the flight the day before. We had a good chuckle at my screwup as they found me a seat on the flight, handing me a ticket, no change fee, etc. without a thought.
[1] https://www.flystaypoints.com.au/the-singapore-frequent-trav...
Cessna Citation produces 6 tons for every 3 hour flight. Lets say, there are 3 people each flight. So 2 tons per person per flight. If someone takes the private jet _every day of the year_, thats 700 tons. Still a far cry from 100,000 tons from a small town.
People like Elon Musk have gulfstreams. Elon has a gulfstream G550 which outputs 9,432 lbs / 5 mT per hour. He traveled 150,000 miles in 2018.
Aviation industry is responsible for 2.8% of global emissions, but it is portrayed as the villan. Btw, Boom Supersonic is looking into synthetic fuels to stay carbon neutral.
Also wonder how will they compete with SpaceX Starship who’s probably going to be operational sooner and be even faster.
> Our focus with Overture is to develop and build a commercial supersonic airliner for anyone who can afford a business-class ticket, not a private jet.
He says that because that's the kind of weird koolaid that 'inspires people' and investors apparently.
It also takes the edge off of 'this is for rich people' and makes it more about the plebes.
It's pure communications koolaid, Valley Style.
It'd be scale if it was the exact aircraft except every linear dimension was shrunk down. But having a different number of windows, different inlets etc. makes it a smaller concept demonstrator.
Here's an actual scale model in aerospace: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GHz2B_4g2tM
> The world is better off when families can spend more time together
Yeah, almost no families in the world have the money to fly anywhere business class, in their life, ever. More importantly, it's ridiculous to rely on flight as part of the daily routine of a family - for multiple reasons, not the least of which being the environmental one.
> businesses have more opportunities to succeed in our global economy
This is the actual motivation, I would think.
> and world leaders can foster greater understanding in person.
Well, this point itself is debatable, especially considering certain current world leaders, but basically it's the same as the previous pont.
So the motivation is: "Let rich/powerful organizations ferry important people around faster to further their interests." Not so romantic, but it's a legitimate reason to work on a high-end product or service, I guess.
You: "No family can afford it"
Countless services we take today for granted have been introduced initially as toys for the ultra rich, then made their way to the general consumer. It's a good thing.