Boom Supersonic CEO Blake Scholl recently declared “it’s time for a renaissance in energy and in supersonic flight” as the supersonic airliner company unveiled a Colorado factory dedicated to making gas turbines for AI data centers.
We are the future of supersonic flight! As soon as we do the AI thing!
So they are just a ThE fUtUrE chasing hype firm rather than having any particular ideas, confirmed.
Just so long as the future involves gas turbines.
wow so it’s stupider than i thought it is. concorde went at mach 2, regular airliner goes at mach 0.75-0.85, and this approach limits speed to mach 1.15. entire one quarter of travel time saved, probably less
anyway, remember abilene tx dc? coreweave contracted three companies for gas turbines, one real company, ge vernova, who delivered their turbines like four months in, presumably because they wanted their money before everyone gets broke. (you can see them from space). and two fuckass startups, this being one of them and some other that dealt in refurbishing aeroderivative turbines. not sure if they delivered anything, only these gas turbines from ge are actually visible on satellite photos
The X-39 is the non-bullshit version of this line of research.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_X-59_Quesst
The long nose is meant to heavily mitigate the decibels of sonic booms from crossing the sound barrier.
yes this is not what they’re doing and it places severe limitations on speed and on conditions when they can fly at all over mach 1
@fullsquare Note that the restriction on flying over Mach 1 is over the USA only: over ocean it’s not restricted, it may be okay over Siberia and Canada (north of the heavily populated bits), etc.
There’s a local minimum for drag around Mach 1.5 so that might be a better target speed for long haul.
But really, we have in-flight wifi via satellite broadband now. And a couple of hours gained by flying faster won’t offset the several hours lost due to security theatre on the ground.
Yeah this reminds me that I haven’t seen any discussion of the X-59 in terms of aerodynamically derived fuel efficiency gains for transonic or supersonic flight, my kneejerk guess is the sonic boom sound reduction and fuel efficiency gains are roughly inversely comparable.
