[rocket_surgeron]

Regarding Boom there are only two reasonable conclusions one can reach:

1. They are a Theranos-style operation

2. They are a Madoff-style operation

I, a lone aerospace engineer working out of my garage in my spare time, have a better chance of achieving supersonic flight than Boom does.

Even their technology demonstrator is an obvious scam. It demonstrates nothing. It does not demonstrate the ability to design, build, or maintain a supersonic passenger airplane, and it doesn't demonstrate any new technologies or materials.

The bloatiest of bloated old-school defense contractors can throw together a supersonic prototype for less than $100 million, in fewer than 7 years.

[bri3d]

Isn't there a third kind of operation, maybe a Magic Leap-style operation, where employees are earnestly developing against a goal which is fanciful but appealing to VCs? And in that case, what's the difference between that and the "usual" VC funded company?

I don't really think Boom are a Theranos style operation, because they aren't claiming to have an operational product when no such item exists. A Theranos style scam would be flying a known-unsafe airframe, or parading their demonstrator around claiming "it totally has engines and is ready to fly lol! we just haven't tested it yet." But so far, Boom have just honestly said "we're delayed" instead.

It's surely not a Madoff style operation as they employ staff who are earnestly working towards their goal, however fanciful it may be.

[johnbender]

As an aside Madoff Industries did employ people who earnestly worked outside the Ponzi scheme. I know because I met a few of them when I worked on a database architecture audit for them around 2008.

[bri3d]

"Database architecture audit for Madoff Industries" is a pretty good conversation starter as a resume item!

This is a good point, and something that occurred to me after I posted - there's also a type of scam company where honest employees are hired to do something real, but the executive staff are skimming inordinate compensation for themselves or hiding a more nefarious project underneath, like a Ponzi scheme, simple money laundering, or self-dealing / kickback style schemes.

I suppose it's possible that Boom could be one of these, and I don't really have enough data to say whether it is or not.

My personal take on Boom is that it's your typical amateur, marketing-savvy CEO with a lofty dream who managed to collect funding for a project they can't execute on. Whether this kind of thing is a net "good" or not, I'm not sure, but I really don't think it's a "scam" in a mal-intent sort of way.

If I were a VC, I wouldn't invest in an aerospace founder with no aerospace background, but plenty chose to, and their funds are at least being redistributed towards employees and suppliers. The whole idea of Silicon Valley style "innovation" VC is supposedly that their moonshot upsides can patch over their moonshot downsides, no?

[adolph]

Wasn't Theranos sending lab tests to other vendor and passing it off as their results? That would be difficult for Boom to pull off--send someone blindfolded on a regular commercial flight, reset the time on their watch and pretend supersonic happened.

[carabiner]

Lol you're too harsh. I was an aerospace engineer at an aviation startup you've probably heard of. We built a jet and received a type certificate, and sold ships. The company still went bankrupt. Boom is trying something harder, but it's not Theranos, or cold fusion. It's still just an engineering problem. They have aerospace engineers and facilities. It doesn't look more like a scam than SpaceX did in its early days when they were constantly blowing up rockets. It's just they're trying something very hard stretching what any manufacturing startup could do.

3. They're a startup in a manufacturing-oriented, highly regulated industry and dramatically underestimated capital needed.

[ghaff]

Engineering and economics problem--although properly speaking the former should imply the latter. Given that engineering isn't "We can build something that costs $X to build and operate but there's only a market for $X/5." That's still an engineering failure even if it works outside of cost constraints.

[leecb]

Eclipse?

[yabones]

Well, the problem was never technological to start with. The problem with supersonic transports was and will always be economic. There's a reason that there were only two SSTs in the 20th century instead of the five or six that were planned, and it's because the bean counters at Boeing, McDonnel-Douglas, and Lockheed-Martin wouldn't let their companies bankrupt themselves over a vanity project.

So, you take that and couple it with 21st century VC-appeal and you have a fantastic money-losing-machine whether it works or not. Hell, it probably does work with enough R&D, but that was never the problem in the first place.

[sidewndr46]

To be technical, I'd actually argue there were four. The first Concorde reached production & was later redesigned to include an afterburner (or reheat). Why I forget, but it apparently did actually save some fuel since it was used while accelerating to supersonic then shut off.

The Tu-144 went the opposite direction. Introduce with military engines which require full time afterburner. Later it was redesigned and re-engined with a non-military engine not needing afterburner all the time.

So two airframes, but with four distinct airplanes produced as a result.

None of these were particularly economical, to your point.

[TylerE]

Huh? The Concorde was designed with afterburners right from the start. It certainly did not enter service without them.

[pmyteh]

Yes; the Olympus engines used were derivatives of an existing military turbojet and had reheat from the beginning. It was used for takeoff and then to get through the high-drag transonic regime as quickly as possible to minimise fuel use. Once at cruising speed the engines operated 'dry'.

There was a longer-range 'Concorde B' designed, which was intended to have larger engines with no reheat at all (as well as larger wings and some other changes) but this was cancelled when it became apparent that it would never be profitable.

[sidewndr46]

OK, I think I got it wrong. You're correct it always had afterburners. It could supercruise, which is flying without the afterburner at supersonic speeds. So I guess that would bring the actual number to 3.

[hangonhn]

The reheat is needed to get past the transonic region and onward to supersonic. Once you've gone supersonic the drag actually drops a lot. So you want to get through the transonic region as quickly as possible and reheat is a good way to do it. After that the Concorde just supercruised.

[zardo]

> Once you've gone supersonic the drag actually drops a lot.

Certainly the drag coefficient drops, does it actually drop fast enough to counter the v^2 and see total drag drop as velocity increases?

[HPsquared]

I think so, many planes are like this: the transonic regime has the highest drag. It's not as simple as v^2, you have to consider the compressibility effects (wave drag where the pressure wave moves along with the plane, like a bow wave on a ship). Flying faster also means you can fly higher in lower density air, so the indicated airspeed (proportional to density * v^2) is reduced.

[zardo]

> It's not as simple as v^2, you have to consider the compressibility effects (wave drag where the pressure wave moves along with the plane, like a bow wave on a ship).

I think it is that simple. Those effects are the reason the drag coefficient is changing, you don't need to account for that twice.

[NovaVeles]

John Michael Greer summarized it wonderfully in the book 'Dark Age America'. Don't confuse technical capabilities with economic realities. Argued that Boeing never getting the SST off the ground was probably one of the better disasters to befall them.

Vaclav Smil was right in pointing out that passenger jets have gotten much more fuel efficient since 1967 but they travel no faster. The fuel savings were passed onto passengers and that made flight more appealing. Economics ultimately rule over what lasts long term.

Super sonic flight is a marvel of engineering but an economic nightmare. It is this lens by which a lot of technologies should be judged long term.

[_fizz_buzz_]

Harsh! I think Boom is trying to be SpaceX. A technology that is definitely possible, but pretty difficult to pull off as a start-up. But saying they are Theranos or Madoff is unfair. If they succeed to make the technology work and then succeed to make it profitable is of course not obvious at this point.

[ghaff]

I'd argue there's a significant market for the pre-SpaceX rockets--which are still used today. There's just a much larger potential market for significantly cheaper rockets given sufficient reliability as well.

There is on the other hand no apparent market for commercial supersonic passenger flight given the economics. That doesn't mean that some people wouldn't pay the freight but that there hasn't been enough apparent market to build an airplane program around that.

[MichaelCollins]

> 1. They are a Theranos-style operation

If they were that, they'd be lying about having their own engine in development that is an order of magnitude better than the competitions but won't show it to anybody.

[rocket_surgeron]

My angle was the "charismatic and overambitious leaders who think that gumption and sticktoitiveness can overcome any problem and who aren't afraid to start lying when they find out that solving science and engineering problems isn't like the scammy adware/SEO/social network they made their first chunk of money on" aspect.

I just can't believe people keep falling for it.

I'm willing to bet most of the $100m+ they've raised went right into executive compensation and that their engineers have been making do with peanuts since the beginning.

And I eagerly await the dueling Netflix/HBO documentaries to come.

[MichaelCollins]

> My angle was the "charismatic and overambitious leaders who think that gumption and sticktoitiveness can overcome any problem and who aren't afraid to start lying when they find out that solving science and engineering problems isn't like the scammy adware/SEO/social network they made their first chunk of money on" aspect.

Sure, but that's underselling Theranos' scam. For Boom to work they would need engines that could exist, but don't, and they weren't lying about the engines existing. Theranos was claiming they already had technology that couldn't exist.

[carabiner]

> My angle was the "charismatic and overambitious leaders who think that gumption and sticktoitiveness can overcome any problem and who aren't afraid to start lying when they find out that solving science and engineering problems isn't like the scammy adware/SEO/social network they made their first chunk of money on" aspect.

Are you talking about SpaceX?

[rocket_surgeron]

No comment.

edit: Ok comment. perhaps spacex is not the best comparison though. SpaceX had tremendous necessity driving it. The need for launch vehicles for commercial, scientific, and military purposes.

There is no similar necessity for supersonic commercial aviation.

A Boom customer isn't going to watch 14 test failures and say "well we have no other choice we gotta get people from ny to london in 2 hours" but there was a "we MUST be able to launch people and things into orbit on a US rocket" driving spacex.

[adolph]

Not certain about "tremendous necessity driving" SpaceX. At the time few would have bet that SLS and Starliner would become the duds they are. Maybe Atlas and Ariane incrementing without re-usability and costly Starliner would be viewed positively since there wouldn't be an alternative story (unless BO did better).

[MichaelCollins]

Falcon 9 flies very regularly, and the Raptor engines for Starship are in an advanced stage of development. The engines Boom needs don't exist.

You're right about some of the rest of that though. Particularly the personality matter.

[beambot]

What lie are they telling...?

[bell-cot]

That would not be a credible lie - it is too widely known how very difficult & expensive the technology needed to produce any such engine is.

[MichaelCollins]

Theranos' lie wasn't credible to people in the biomedical technology industry. That's why Theranos had to get investors who knew nothing about it.

If Boom's lies(or wishful thinking?) were as egregious as Theranos, they never would have gotten their foot in the door at Rolls-Royce.

[hef19898]

They had money, those engines seemed technically possible given RRs history and RR delivered tests and whtnot. And Boom paid RR for it.

Theranos could have easily found a medical lab equipment manufacturer to conduct some similar testing and early stage development.

[MichaelCollins]

> Theranos could have easily found a medical lab equipment manufacturer to conduct some similar testing and early stage development.

I don't think they could have. Siemens/etc would have already known that Holmes' idea of running that wide array of blood tests from a single drop of fingertip blood wouldn't have worked. One of Holmes' professors, Phyllis Gardner, told Holmes it wouldn't work before the whole scam even began. Siemens or other lab equipment manufacturers surely would have known it too, since they know what it takes to make blood testing equipment.

[cmdrriker]

Unless some government(s) steps in and dumps a ton of money into SST development and production nothing is going to happen.

The Concord showed this by shouldering the burden of research, development, prototyping, and then production. Turns out SS's don't have the load factor & associated economics to make it a viable mode. That revelation was before environmental and political challenges made those economics worse.

Unless unobtanium can me mined, tooled, and manufactured cheaply into airframe parts and power such as scram-jet or super cruising turbofans can push a plane at Mach 2 with 200+ seats behind the pilot, methinks its just a pretty artist's conception on a Pop Mechanics or Science magazine cover.

[tlogan]

I have very simple way of figuring if something will succeed ir it is a scam.

If CEO have some experience in the field then it might succeed (workday, salesforce, okta, etc.) If not, then it is probably a scam.

Of course, there are exceptions but these exceptions prove the rule.

[rollinggoron]

Agreed. I know nothing about aerospace engineering or aircraft design, but the hype around Boom always puzzled me. If this start up can all of a sudden make an economical supersonic jet, then surely the existing plane manufacturers could do it quicker and cheaper. Boeing, Lockheed, Airbus, etc... already have existing designs from decades past that they could at least use as a base. They have experts in material science, airplane design, and actual resources/contracts to actually build one. If it made sense.

[chadash]

I agree with you, but to play devil's advocate, what if I changed your comment to:

Agreed. I know nothing about automotive engineering or car design, but the hype around Tesla always puzzled me. If this start up can all of a sudden make an economical electric car, then surely the existing automotive manufacturers could do it quicker and cheaper. Toyota, Mercedes, Ford, etc... already have existing designs from decades past that they could at least use as a base. They have experts in material science, car design, and actual resources/contracts to actually build one. If it made sense.

Sometimes the incumbents are just too entrenched in what they are doing to make what out an outsider sees as an obvious move.

[Ajedi32]

Yeah, I hate this kind of weakly justified pessimism. Sure, if you just assume every new idea will fail you'll be right 95% of the time. But if everyone did that we'd be stuck in the dark ages.

I applaud people and organizations that take that chance, innovating and trying new things even when there's a high chance of failure. Worst-case, they fail and other people can learn from their mistakes and hopefully do better next time. Best case, they change the world.

[rollinggoron]

I wasn't trying to be pessimistic, just trying not the fall for the "too good to be true" hype machine common in tech (e.g. new batteries with 100x the capacity are right around the corner, carbon nanotubes uses, etc...).

Is this a new idea, though? It's not like supersonic commercial jets are a new thing and they haven't been built. The economics of building a commercially viable production supersonic plane is much more difficult to do than building a car or writing a new website to disrupt Facebook or Google.

I 100% agree that people need to be exploring this stuff. That being said, I'll believe it when I see it.

[cycomanic]

The difference there is that the traditional car manufacturers didn't want to push EVs because that would have canabalized their ICE business and their competitive advantage (electric motors are really easy to build in comparison to an ICE). That's how Tesla could just zoom past them, they did not want EVs to be successful.

The situation with supersonic flight is very different, the requirements and skills are very similar the ones of traditional plane manufacturers and supersonic flight wouldn't really canabalize their traditional business. I think they simply see that it doesn't make sense. I mean boom can't really explain what has fundamentally changed since tge concorde that supersonic flight is now economically viable.

[senko]

One can certainly argue that Tesla is overhyped.

[nfw2]

Sure, but no one could argue that Tesla is a Theranos-like operation. Arguments can be made about whether Tesla's valuation is reasonable, but it's certainly a legitimate car manufacturer.

[microtherion]

Tesla certainly delivers cars. But there are parts of it that are quite Theranesque, especially the self driving:

* Re-sell third party products for a while ("Until our own offering is ready"). If the recently posted self parking video is to be believed, the in-house products are still not on par with the third party predecessors: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsb2XBAIWyA

* Pre-sell your product years before it's ready.

* Aggressively suppress internal and external criticism.

* Avoid objective evaluations of your product.

[panick21_]

Tesla has literally opened up its FSD Beta an allowed people to film it. We have more insight into its behavior in a huge range of different driving conditions then we have for anything else.

They have even change the terms&conditions to make it clear that beta testers were allowed to share.

Beta testers have shared lots of not-flattering things and Tesla has not 'aggressively suppressed' them.

They have asked for the outright fraud and slander campaign conduct by a competitor to be removed.

> * Avoid objective evaluations of your product.

Like what?

Tesla Vision (no radar/no lidar) has just been objectively tested:

https://www.tesla.com/blog/model-y-earns-5-star-safety-ratin...

There are no objective evaluations for FSD as nobody has actually made general full sell driving work.

But you can get the Beta and do any kind of 'objective evaluations' you want. You can even publish all the details, amount of interventions and so on of all your drives.

[sidewndr46]

You forgot "engage in lots of dubiously legal union busting"

[mrguyorama]

I'd say tesla's "full self driving" and "autopilot" claims are pretty theranos like.

There's zero way they don't KNOW internally that asking an inattentive driver to take over with no warning doesn't work, and that they aren't as safe as they are trying to spin.

[pclmulqdq]

What about the times when they announced different types of car models, promised delivery in a year, took pre-orders, and then didn't deliver (and still haven't)? That's pretty Theranos-y behavior.

[panick21_]

Delays in the car industry are pretty normal and you can get your reservation money back if you cancel.

[nfw2]

you read my mind :)

[gamblor956]

The existing automakers are making EVs faster and cheaper than Tesla did, and the EVs they are making have substantially greater build quality than Tesla's vehicles.

[signatoremo]

Tesla’s profit margin is higher than most of automakers. So no, EVs made by traditional automakers are not cheaper. If anything that means Tesla’s cars are more desirable because they can command a premium.

Faster? What is that supposed to mean? Tesla is the largest EV maker by volume (not sure if I miss any Chinese ones).

Substantial better build quality? Define substantial. Who decide that? Certainly not the consumers, because they can’t get enough of Tesla cars.

[gamblor956]

It's easy to goose profit margins when you don't use automotive grade parts and skip quality control.

Consumer Reports stopped recommending Teslas because of the abysmal quality of their vehicles. And every Tesla owner I personally know has said their first Tesla will also be their last.

[panick21_]

This is just complete nonsense. Go look at the tear-downs of Tesla where actual engineers with automotive analyses each part. The reality is Tesla is ahead in a whole number of areas and have better quality in many areas.

Tesla have top ranks in safety, the best most performant interior board computer, their glass roofs are pretty amazing, their internal heating/cooling system is the best in the industry by far. The reliability of their engines and battery packs is actually extremely good. Their structural engineering with their castings is ahead of anybody in the industry. The Model S is literally the fastest production car in the world. They have the largest global fast charging system and the single best integration of cars and charging.

If Tesla gets criticized for quality control most of the times its fit and finish something a lot of people don't actually car that much about. The majority of Tesla cars are produced in China and those cars have an excellent reputation for quality.

> I personally know has said their first Tesla will also be their last.

Tesla has the highest consumer satisfaction ratio and the highest costumer retention ratio in the industry.

But I'm sure your personal experience is what is most important in this discussion.

[silon42]

They can easily make a better interior on usability.

[ngcc_hk]

Or better QC.

[mrtksn]

Unpopular opinion but wasn't Tesla subsidised and missed the cost goals anyway? My impression is that Tesla succeeded thanks to Musks personality that made the customers forgive unfulfilled promises that they paid thousands of dollars for.

Almost as if Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos imitated Musk instead of Steve Jobs and kicked the can down the road and delivered traditional but improved blood test machines and kept promising stuff down the road by collecting money and be edgy on Twitter, she could have been a hero by now.

I mean, Tesla still delivered stuff that people value. Just not the promised ones.

Tesla makes the best computerised vehicles out there and has built a valuable charging network, not the stated goals but valuable anyway.

[MichaelCollins]

I wish Tesla would cut it out with the computerized car bullshit and focus on making the best battery cars instead. They shouldn't need bullshit like "it will be fiscally irresponsible to not buy our cars because it will be a robotaxi that pays for itself"; it imperils the long-term success of the company for a short-term boost in sales. And it alienates anybody with a modicum of critical thinking.

[mrtksn]

Okay but the genius of Musk was this computerised car stuff and it's exactly where the traditional car manufacturers fail. Just recently the CEO of VW changed and the important part of the failure of the previous CEO was their shit software on their electric cars.

It's not like Tesla managed to make cheap electric cars? They managed to make cars with good computers and this is something that people actually want.

Essentially, Tesla made the first usable as daily driver electric car by promising stuff that people believed they want(but very hard to make) so they can collect money and make sales but doing stuff that people actually needed(within the reach of the current technology) to live with electric cars.

[mrguyorama]

Actually, I desperately want the software world to stay as far away from cars as possible. Even in a VW, I know I will go 100k miles with zero issues with most of the stuff. Someone somewhere wants to put javascript between me and that, and I hope they have a bad life.

[sidewndr46]

Musk didn't even contribute to the automotive technology, at all. It's the result of an acquisition of a company called "AC Propulsion".

[panick21_]

The narrative about Musk being some genius exploiter of subsidies playing 4D chess with all kinds of financial and marketing trickery is total nonsense if you actually look into it.

In terms of subsidies, Tesla wasn't actually subsidies that much. The received a 400M loan from the DoD for advanced vehicle manufacture. At that point however, even without the DoD they could have raised that money. Tesla payed that lone back early and with interest. DoD also gave much larger loans to GM and Ford, neither have fully paid back their loan yet.

The tax subsidies only started years later and Tesla profited from the 7500k tax credit. However this was limited to 250k vehicles and Tesla blew threw that very fast and have since operated without a tax credit and had to compete against vehicles coming in from all the global car companies that all got this tax credit. GM also used that tax credit. So did Tesla get a subsidy that helped them, I would say yes but this was open to all car companies and a number of them took advantage of it.

Tesla also gets the same tax reductions as any large company that makes large investments in particular regions.

> My impression is that Tesla succeeded thanks to Musks personality that made the customers forgive unfulfilled promises that they paid thousands of dollars for.

Not sure what this is based off. You don't build a company the size of Tesla based on forgiving costumers.

Yes, sure some costumers waited a while for their model 3 because of production issues, but this isn't really unique to Tesla. Car production often gets delayed. And costumers did not 'forgive' this universally, many canceled their order and bought something else.

But here is the thing, the demand for Tesla electric cars was so high that it didn't matter.

Tesla was successful because they had a product that a huge amount of people desperately wanted, and after some initial delay they got it to those costumers in very large numbers with very good unit margin.

In fact, Tesla often increased the spec of the delivered product compared to the one that was initially ordered.

And the money from reservation undelivered vehicle and FSD is certainty not why Tesla is successful.

Tesla is successful because they sell a 1 million+ vehicles a year with an automotive margin of 30%.

> I mean, Tesla still delivered stuff that people value. Just not the promised ones.

Can you explain what you mean? What did they not deliver on?

Some people (a minority of costumers) didn't get the FSD but that certainly not most costumers.

[mrtksn]

This comment itself is an example of forgiving customers.

If we agree to not make it a big deal of people not receiving the products they paid for and if we agree not to make it a big deal for delays and low quality then sure, Tesla is just as any other company.

If people didn't make it a big deal that Theranos runs its test on Siemens machines we wouldn't have had a Theranos scandal too!

If we not make it a big deal for Tesla missing the targets for making the cars cheap and collecting pre-order money for products that not deliver(or deliver late if you kick the can down the road long enough) we can say the exact same thing about Theranos. Let's not make a big deal on how much blood is actually required to run the tests today, it would be 1 drop next year(update the next year every year)!

If you choose to put the threshold of "subsidy received" above what Tesla received, you can claim that Tesla did not receive subsidies. I think TicTac sweets had some trick like that, i.e. if you define 1 TicTac as one serving and if the calories of 1 serving is below the threshold to report you have 0 calories per serving and as a result you can claim the whole box is calorie free!

It really depends on what you choose to forgive or not, I guess.

[panick21_]

I have never spent a single $ on a Tesla product so I have nothing to forgive.

People should be able to get their money back for the FSD package, I totally agree. I don't know what the status of that is. In my opinion that it should legally clear that you can get your money back as it clearly does not does what it said on sale but I have not read the contract.

As a costumer that would piss me off if I couldn't get my money back on that and law suite would make sense.

Given the absurdly high demand for second hand Tesla and your ability to resell the FSD package while there are lots of people who pay extra for that package, it isn't nearly on the same scale as what Theranos did. In fact since many bought it of much less then it is now, you might have a change of making money.

And FSD sales are a tiny % of Tesla overall business. That makes it very different from Theranos. What makes it also very different is that Tesla has a reasonable chance at delivering and is continually investing and improving towards that goal. They have the capital to continue to work on that, they are not just burning investor money.

Theranos had no realist hope of ever making money and no capital to continue research.

> If we not make it a big deal for Tesla missing the targets for making the cars cheap and collecting pre-order money for products that not deliver(or deliver late if you kick the can down the road long enough) we can say the exact same thing about Theranos.

No we can't. That's an absurd claim. You reserve a product and you can get your money back if you don't get it, that is no different then many other reservations and is totally common practice in the industry.

And no idea what 'making the cars cheap' is supposed to mean.

> If you choose to put the threshold of "subsidy received" above what Tesla received, you can claim that Tesla did not receive subsidies.

Every large industrial company receives subsidies of various kinds. This is simply the world we live in. But some how it gets brought up far more often with Tesla then with other car companies while Tesla actually received less and they absolutely for certain did not receive enough subsidies to somehow claim Tesla was bootstrapped by the state or had some sort of unfair advantage.

So its really just used to downplay what they achieved, "Oh look they had X subsidy therefore XYZ". The reality is the car and road transport are subsidized and Tesla is part of that market.

I would prefer much of that money being spent on trains but I'm not gone shit on Telsa for existing in reality.

[klintcho]

This argument could be made about any big SV company the past 30 years.

- Anyone of IBM, Microsoft or Yahoo could build a better (quicker and cheaper) search engine than what a bunch of new grads from Stanford can (Google)

- Anyone of the car manufacturer can build a better (quicker and cheaper) electric car than a software millionaire (Tesla)

I don't agree with the statement, I think there are numerous reason people embark on ambitious project that incumbents "could" do, but are not doing;

- An unexpected insights,

- A new research breakthrough from some other field

- Collecting a bunch of the most bright people coming up at the same time in the field (Mueller for SpaceX comes to mind for instance) etc.

But most of the time it's just that it's not really in their business to do a 100 million dollar - 1 billion bet on something that risky, they are in the business of returning like 7 - 10% a year to their shareholder, not producing 5x returns (like the VC/startup business).

[rollinggoron]

Eh, I figured I would get this response but writing software e.g. your IBM, Yahoo, and Microsoft example is much easier and faster to do than building a cutting edge, physical, supersonic commercial jet. To build Google, all you needed was a computer, and a new approach/algorithm to solving web search. Software companies are much easier to disrupt than physical product companies.

As others have pointed out the Tesla isn't a great example either because building a car is still 100x easier to do than building aircraft, let alone supersonic planes.

"Unexpected Insights" and "A new research breakthrough from some other field" seems to be handy wavy. A supersonic jet breakthrough is not something that can be discovered in a dorm room. It requires millions in research and expensive materials to build and test against.

[klintcho]

I did include SpaceX as well, and I'm not sure one can find a better example than that, but there are others as well:

- Cruise + other self driving car companies (obv also a bunch of software, maybe even software focused, but looking at Waymo, they developed all their own hardware, LIDAR tech etc.)

- Commonwealth Fusion + a bunch of other fusion startups (obv they haven't really gotten to a product yet one could argue, but a bunch of breakthroughs in high powered electro-magnets has been made)

- Heart aerospace - electric planes

- Canvas construction - robotic plastering and painting for construction.

While supersonic flight has been proven, albeit not economically viable, it's still something that has been done, and done like 40+ years ago. It's not really on the "fusion power"-levels of difficult. But sure, I guess on could argue both sides equally well :)

In regards to research breakthrough, sure they were handwavy at least as it relates to jet engines capable to support supersonic flights. I don't have any sources but I have little doubt that jet engine / material breakthroughs has been made since the 80:s.

[chadash]

SpaceX, yes. But I think some of these other examples work against your point. Yes, some of them have raised lots of money (or even sold for lots of money), but revenue for Cruise + Commonwealth Fusion + Heart combined (I haven't heard of Canvas) is about $0 so far. It's yet to be seen if any are viable businesses even if they have already invented cool shit. To your point above, Boeing is not in the venture capital business. Their investors most likely want dividends and stock buybacks, not capital intensive moonshot bets.

[panick21_]

I mostly agree with you. I think Heart will manage it, doing an short range electric plane is not comparable to a supersonic jet liner. And the short range electric plane has a pretty clear market fit and very little technology risk unlike the supersonic jet.

[raverbashing]

Except costs for prototyping and building a plane are (no kidding) 100x the costs of prototyping and building a car

And that's for "easy" stuff like electric cars. Not a supersonic plane (which has a full bag of hurt to go with)

If you don't believe me just look at the price tag of a brand new Cessna (which is old/proven/boring technology)

[nfw2]

I also know nothing about the subject, but just to play devil's advocate here, doesn't SpaceX show that a startup could potentially solve hard physical engineering problems more effectively than established incumbents?

[pclmulqdq]

It does, but a supersonic personal jet is a much bigger feat of engineering than a rocket that lands. Most people don't appreciate that. We had landing rockets in the 80's, but Boom was trying to do several things that are completely new. SpaceX's real technology is about launching the rockets cheaply, not re-using them (which is only part of the problem).

And SpaceX started with engineers who knew a lot about the domain of the actual problem (rocket engines). Boom has never designed an engine.

Starlink satellites are a great example of SpaceX solving engineering problems that an incumbent couldn't, but SpaceX was a pretty large company at the time the effort started.

[signatoremo]

Boom isn’t trying to do something completely new. Concord was in commercial services for many years. Benefits and shortcomings are well known.

OTOTH, there was never a rocket that could land, only suborbital prototypes. Shuttle doesn’t count since it’s reusable in name only, as it still cost substantial amount of money and time for refurbishing. In fact there are still no other reusable rockets, seven years after SpaceX did it for the 1st time.

[pclmulqdq]

I didn't realize that the Concorde was a private jet. Also, I'm not so sure that SpaceX has managed to achieve reusability (launch turnaround cost) better than end-of-life space shuttle yet. The space shuttle did take a lot longer to work out the kinks than falcon 9, but it was also a much more complicated vehicle.

[chadash]

> We had landing rockets in the 80's, but Boom was trying to do several things that are completely new. SpaceX's real technology is about launching the rockets cheaply, not re-using them (which is only part of the problem).

And we had supersonic passenger jets in the 60's. But they weren't economically viable. I'd argue that Boom is trying to do exactly what SpaceX is doing for rockets, which is to make supersonic air travel make economic sense. Any engineering that they need to do is really towards that goal.

[bell-cot]

Yes, definitely. BUT - there is a very wide and thinly-populated gulf between the folks who only talk about doing that, and those who actually deliver viable, working systems.

SpaceX went from founding the company to their first orbital launch attempt in 4 years, was obviously d*mn close to successful orbit 1 year later, and actually made orbit another 18 months after that.

Vs. Boom Supersonic, not having had to design nor build its own jet engines, is already 5+ years behind on their 1/3-scale, zero-passenger technology demonstrator even trying to taxi down the runway.

[samatman]

I would say that a brand-new rocket company making a rocket which can land itself would sound more implausible than what you're describing, if we didn't all know that it in fact has happened.

That doesn't mean Boom is that, however.

[hef19898]

Landing rocket boosters happened in the 70s already, and said rocket company benefited heavily from NASA, government and defence contracts and research. If Boom would have had access to supersonic jet research from the government, along with government contracts, development or production doesn't matter, RR wouldn't have stopped the cooperation.

Edit: Reusable or VTOL rocket were tested, successfully landing, in the early 90s by McDonnel Douglas under the DC-X program. No idea where the 70s thing came from...

[signatoremo]

Which rockets landed in the 70s?

Note that SpaceX didn’t get any meaningful defense contract until they’ve proved themselves with Falcon 9.

[MichaelCollins]

He must either be talking about the Apollo Lunar Module which first landed on the Moon in the 60s (but was not "landing a booster", much less on earth.), or more likely he's talking about the Delta Clipper which was in the 90s (and also not a rocket booster.)

Probably the latter, because there are some low-brow skeptics on reddit and youtube who inexplicably seem to think the Falcon 9 is a stolen Delta Clipper with a new paint job.

[hef19898]

I kind of take ofense with the low-brow reddit sceptic :-) Obviously, a Falcon 9 is not a reused DC-X. The technologyvto land a booster was already there before, it wasn't invented by SpaceX and was discussed as far back as the 60s. SpaceX made it possible, which in itself is quite an achievement. That nobody else tried so is due to the fact that there were not enough launches to make it economically viable (I found a ESA study on that topic a couple of years ago and subsequently lost it again, Google and DDG fail to dig it up again ever since). And whether or not reusable booster do make econommic sense or not, and just how many launches are needed to break even, is impossible to tell without SpaceX financials, they are the only ones doing it right now, which we don't have.

[rockemsockem]

The reason why startups continue to make things that big companies don't is because your assumption that big companies *can* do it is wrong. They cannot due largely to organizational challenges and inertia in one direction or another. It is very rare that a large company successfully continues to innovate indefinitely.

[tarunkotia]

Also known as Innovator's Dilemma https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma

Most established players don't want to cannibalize their existing market by launching a product in a niche segment. Sales and Marketing $$$ eat into the profits which is not easy to justify when you are profitable. If you are fighting for your survival then it's easy to reallocate resources to fight.

[deepnotderp]

Agreed, SpaceX has no chance against ULA /s

[pbreit]

"surely the existing plane manufacturers could do it quicker and cheaper"

How could you possibly think that?

[AustinDev]

As an aerospace engineer do you know what kind of thrust they'd need and why they can't just use something like the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pratt_%26_Whitney_J58#Specific...? My guess would be that the military engines are not at all designed to be economical on either fuel or unit cost.

[MichaelCollins]

Those haven't been made for a long time and there's nothing presently in use like them. Also those were turbojets; Boom wanted to use turbofans for fuel efficiency.

[Melatonic]

Is it possible they had some insider knowledge of engines being developed at one of the big manufacturers?

Thinking out loud here - lets say you have a few senior engineers that know that GE or Boeing or RR or something is currently working on a smaller supersonic engine. You know you cannot yourselves design such an engine but if it is released maybe it would make sense to get a head start designing a product to take advantage of it?

[pbreit]

Are any of your comments defensible?