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.