[perihelions]

- "And it is built specifically for use with Sustainable Aviation Fuel, a cleaner alternative to ordinary jet fuel — albeit one that costs several times more right now."

I've been thinking about this for a while, in the context of multiple different startups. There's this (anti)pattern I see repeatedly: a startup says they're doing something that's an obviously an overwhelmingly bad idea from a business sense, but that creates positive PR in the short term. "We're limiting ourselves to exotic jet fuel multiple times more expensive than our competitors'" is such an example. I've seen so many others, I'm beginning to wonder what's going on.

Is it bait-and-switch? Start out by promising something you don't plan to deliver, to garner goodwill and investment in the near term? And then switch to the "correct" mode later.

Is it unseriousness? Are they not 100% focused on doing everything to get the startup to succeed? Imposing artificial limits on your company isn't the action of a success-at-all-costs mindset. Do they expect to fail and are just coasting?

I'm overlooking something obvious and reasonable. Most founders are smart (?); there has to be a sensible business explanation for this.

(edit: Not that carbon-neutral jet fuel isn't a great idea for a startup. But this is a supersonic airplane company, not a jet fuel company. If your startup's success requires succeeding at two different extremely difficult novel things at the same time, your success probability goes from "epsilon" to "epsilon squared").

[jabl]

Sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) is a type of fuel that is ostensibly sustainable (however you define it), but fulfills all the requirements in the Jet A-1 specification. The idea being that they are completely interchangeable.

So it's just a marketing trick. They could just as well market it as "runs on standard jet fuel available at any airport worldwide". Ultimately it's up to the customer to decide what fuel they use.

Perhaps they are trying to attract investment from people who put wishful thinking (sustainable AND supersonic) ahead of common engineering sense.

[constantcrying]

>I'm overlooking something obvious and reasonable

You are missing the point entirely. Boom builds planes, they don't operate them and they do not build the engines (Kratos does). Their capacity to make the plane use "clean" jet fuel is almost zero. The people who manufacture the engines and operate the planes are the ones who need to put in the effort and pay the costs, it is not Boom who has to care.

This is a pure PR move. They get some nice comments, but their effort to make this true is almost zero. They aren't saying the plane will not work with regular fuels, it definitely will. This is not a bad idea, simply because it basically isn't an idea at all.

[masklinn]

> they do not build the engines (Kratos does).

According to the PR, Kratos (or more specifically FTT) does not build the engines, it (supposedly) will design them.

> The people who manufacture the engines and operate the planes are the ones who need to put in the effort and pay the costs, it is not Boom who has to care.

I mean, the manufacturer usually cares in the sense that the manufacturing and operating costs inform the purchase.

Though obviously the plane would need to exist first for operators to even evaluate it.

[constantcrying]

Kratos will at least build some. I have no idea whether Boom plans to then take over production themselves (I can not imagine that actually happening).

>I mean, the manufacturer usually cares in the sense that the manufacturing and operating costs inform the purchase.

Sure, but Boom never promised what exactly their partners will be doing. Unless they are pushing some serious requirements on Kratos, beyond "the renewable fuel should also work", Kratos doesn't need to really care.

[JoshTriplett]

It says "built specifically for use with", not "only works with". Is there anything that says it cannot work with other sources of fuel, either natively or at least with some adaptation?

I've seen plenty of products whose marketing says "built specifically for use with (our other product)"; that doesn't mean it only works with that.

If you're building something that won't get deployed for a while, you want to take the design constraints into account that you're going to need to work with, not just those valid today. It's not unreasonable, if you think your design will both take a while and need to stay in service for a while to pay off, to include future-proofing.

[kelnos]

I was clicking through the partner pages on their website, and noticed a disclaimer "... subject to availability". So I assume the implication is that, while it's designed for use with SAF, it can run on conventional aviation fuels as well.

What fuel to put in it will presumably be up to the airline, not Boom, so Boom can get the "credit" for building something "intended for" SAF, but the airline will get the flak if the end up not using it.

[ZeroGravitas]

Building for SAF is actually one of the plus points I see in this.

It's generally purer than old-fashioned stuff, and the wider industry has already committed to switching to it on all the legacy machines, so there is likely some benefits at the design stage to assuming this better quality fuel is available, which it almost certainly will be.

[tanseydavid]

>> ...an overwhelmingly bad idea from a business sense, but that creates positive PR in the short term.

When you look at it this way, it seems ironic and creepy that the acronym "SAF" is merely one ascii character away from "SBF".

[Digory]

At this stage, they're still selling ideas for funding. So the question is what claims lead to optimal cost of funding?

There are all kinds of people throwing private and government money at sustainable energy, with the expectation that it will only moderately succeed. Witness this weeks' "ignition" announcement, brought to you by nuclear weapons(!)

Even Death, destroyer of Worlds, needs a sustainable energy angle to justify their funding to Congress.

[ranger207]

The business explanation is that their customers, currently, are VC, not airlines