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by fakedang 1284 days ago
The challenge with supersonic flight is that you not only have to build engines that are capable of pushing your aircraft to the maximum limits of speed, but also it has to be able to carry a proportionate amount of fuel for it to be viable for flight. Supersonic aircraft consume fuel at a much higher rate than normal aircraft, hence you are forced to make a tradeoff between higher aircraft capacity and higher fuel capacity. This is not a problem for current military applications of supersonic flight, but for commercial purposes, it makes it financially unviable. You can only sell a limited number of tickets, which makes the proposition unattractive for large carriers. Thus your market would be limited to niche carriers/charters who cater to carrying a few UNHWs and execs, which in the grand scheme of things isn't a large enough market to recoup your investment.

Not to mention, Boom hasn't innovated in any way to solve the two key issues here - they aren't using a significantly lighter fuel to compensate for the tradeoff, nor have they radically changed the engine design to consume less fuel at supersonic speeds. If they did, they would be touting that instead rather than hiding behind a proprietary "superfuel".