Can’t wait.
...21,000 mph when? /s
Aerodynamic shapes don’t simply “scale up”. Plus, supersonic cruise is going to require revolutionary engines, a lot of fuel, and some kind of strategy to deal with heat dissipation. All of this means that, like the Concorde, it will be non-competitive for the average passenger dollar. But then John Kerry can get to the annual Davos forum much more quickly and without having to rub elbow with non-elite passengers who rudely snap pictures of is maskless horse-face.
The real trick is to:
1) Travel at those speeds using close to the same per-seat fuel usage as conventional airliners, and
2) Design the aircraft so the sonic boom is deflected upwards, so you can travel supersonic over populated land.
The ultimate downfall of the Concorde was the incredibly high fuel usage combined with the inability to fly supersonic over land. Thus only a few routes (NY to London, NY to Paris) were possible, and only profitable with $6,000 per passenger tickets.
Sounds great, but will half the pilots be women or POC?
“The company says it will use aviation fuel produced in a CO2-neutral way”
They plan to fail already. Any startup that announces something so stupid is run by people looking for sucker investors. I’m a recovering aircraft engineer. I’ve seen it a hundred times.
“The company says it will use aviation fuel produced in a CO2-neutral way”
They plan to fail already. Any startup that announces something so stupid is run by people looking for sucker investors. I’m a recovering aircraft engineer. I’ve seen it a hundred times.
Older Baby Boomers might remember “sonic booms” but few of our younger cohorts will have any clue.
Jets flying faster than the speed of sound create a shock wave in the air, and this shock wave causes a loud “boom” across the land area below. And I mean a BOOOOMMM!! The noise would make you jump, then you’d look around for a smoke cloud to make sure it wasn’t an explosion, or worse a nuclear detonation. Yeah, that kind of loud.
I don’t know the year that the U.S. Air Force outlawed supersonic flight over the continental U.S. but before then it was pretty common to hear the boom.
Successful or not, the real innovation here is that these are private sector efforts. In the fifties and sixties even the US was big into central planning for anything new like supersonic transport and space travel.
As a result, it only took a few lies circulating in congress to kill or sabotage such efforts. Elon Musk is a lot more resistant to some outlandish environmental whacko’s absurd fantasies about the ozone than your average room temperature IQ congress critter who only cares about cash and getting laid.