For now. 2022. Yeah no in the future too.

"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?

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.

CFM hasn't ever developed a supersonic engine. Safran's one military turbofan is an 80's non-supercruise design. It would be a long way to go for either of these outfits to produce an entirely new supercruise turbofan.

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.

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)

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...

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.

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.

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.

I have recently toured the GE plants where the engines are assembled and developed. I have worked in the same office with the engineers who design and service the engines. No way in hell GE can do this given the amount of resources for this project. And I highly doubt Boom would like working with them at all.

GE gets skittish about a project when the government has already given them billions to develop it.

> since you've had many HN accounts in the past

well aren't you the one now making big insinuations? I feel you are invading my privacy and making me feel unsafe so I guess I will use a VPN next time, thanks for making me aware.

I don't think I'm alone with my assessment. I've seen threads where comments were downvoted and flagged when they were critical of certain YC companies, and I can't recall 100% is why I suggested the likelihood of the same pattern. I didn't say YOU removed it but the people in that thread for whatever reason felt justified to censor those comments.

> we flagged zero comments in this thread and unkilled a bunch of comments that users had flagged.

Incorrect, you've removed my original comment which you completely took out of context and just assumed malice. This is a pretty aggressive stance, and it just reinforces what I've pointed out.

"hey i think theres censorship"

flagged and removed

to the outsider doesn't it seem pretty clear? you should at least allow some discussion around this, maybe I was wrong, maybe I'm not but claiming you removed zero comments is incorrect here. It only adds fuel to the suspicion.

somehow I don't think they plan for their airships to be supersonic.

Dude when the sanctions end the sanctions will really really end.

As much of a fan of SpaceX's vision as I am, the only ballistic point to point passengers I can envisage any time soon would be military operatives in a dire emergency.

I just can't see the likelihood of ballistic weapo..er.. projecti..er.. vehicles being allowed anywhere near major population centres, by tens of decamiles, therefore mooting the purpose of such extreme point to point passenger journeys.

Never mind the sonic booms and general noise. Even having regular scheduled passenger landings on water seems ... not entirely environmentally friendly.

>Going 2x faster is obviously a good thing, everything else being equal. Costs can potentially go down as you can run 2x the flights per day. People enjoy flights more.

Unfortunately due to where you can fly supersonic, you're pretty much limited to over water routes. NYC-LON is probably the most financially viable route - but a 3.5-4hr flying time, you can't actually really fly a decent red eye. Ask anyone who has done DEN-NYC. It's a pretty brutal experience.

You leave NYC at midnight, get in at 8:30AM local with a 5 hour time change. You might have gotten an hour of sleep. Sure, some people might pay it, but most would happily leave at 8:30PM and hopefully get 4 hours of sleep.

This was the same problem with Concorde - how do you justify 3-5x the ticket price to arrive less well rested? Who's 4 hours are worth that? It's a pretty small club.

There's a limited amount of daytime flights you can run, but you're going to wind up either running aircraft turns unprofitably to position the plane for your profitable times or having more aircraft than you want sitting on the ground.

Ultimately, it just doesn't really make economic sense. Yes, people value frequency, but they also value money. On NY-LON there's probably 15+ flights a day anyway.

>The difference between a 2.5 hour and 5 hours flight is a lot. A 6 hour and 12 hour flight, a lot.

Unfortunately there's a devil in these details - the plane can't fly a 6 hour supersonic flight. Their rosiest projections are 4,250nm - that puts FCO (Rome) out of reach). That flight is blocked at 8h20m. Of that, especially in NY, 1.5 hours is probably taxiing/climb out/descent. Boom can't do anything about that (except flying out of undesirable airports...)

On shorter flights, that becomes a large percentage of the flying time. I.e. NY-MIA that you could conceivably detour over the water to fly supersonic on, and maybe trim 30 minutes off the total flying time.

Ultimately, the airports where you can fly supersonic to for the majority of the flight are very limited even if you solved the economic challenges.

I still remember hearing the sonic booms from Concorde out on long island - no way frequent supersonic flights get tolerated when they're not well overwater.

Making money

= Actually making engines?

>If you build a more efficient engine

Even if you just build an engine on-par with everybody else. Or even just a bit sub-par. Not everybody wants or able or have use case for those large top of the line very efficient and very expensive engines from the top manufacturers. You can check out the global international drama during the last few years around Ukrainian Motor-Sich engine manufacturer - one of the main engine manufacturers from the USSR times. There are just too few of those engine manufacturers, even if sub-par, around for the current world demand. Anybody wanna make a startup for the engines, initially for UAS market? It is going to blow up after the war as drones have been showing their future dominance. And just look at that beauty (uses the Motor-Sich engines as Turkey don't have their own) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baykar_Bayraktar_Ak%C4%B1nc%C4... .

With correct inlet design those high power military engines I think can be made into super cruise - it is just that the inlet and the compressor will not work for long in that regime due to heat. Again for tests/demo should probably be fine. Not having chops for retrofits like this would definitely be a total disqualifier in that business though.

Wishful thinking, delusion or scam.

There are so many foundational issues with low supersonic flight from a usability perspective as well (time zones are not your friend for some of it), that lots of routes can only command a premium in one direction.

You have to make so many rosy assumptions to even believe this makes sense if someone was willing to pour billions into engine tech - and still maybe have no options that are commercially viable. It’s also a nightmare from an environmental perspective.

Unless Boom can get some government to write off the billions needed to develop engines then it's all fiction.

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.

Safran's M88 should be sufficient for Boom's 1/3rd scale demonstrator I think? Then at least they'd have something to show other manufacturers and investors.

> If this was doable and there was a market for it, what on earth would stop Boeing and Airbus

Boing and Airbus have lots of things to choose from to focus their (large, but still limited) resources on. Even if they think it is doable and has a market, they'd probably also think that improving what they have is less risky and a bigger market.

I don't know, but it's certainly the first question every investor asked, so we can assume they have (or at least had) a pretty good answer, no?

> 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.

> 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?

What lie are they telling...?

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.

Uh…

DARPA, In-Q-Tel, etc…

> grifters work on the final product, the movers work on the first step, having a plan to make that profitable, so they can build toward the final product. SpaceX is probably the example that comes to mind

For me, it's Virgin Galactic showcasing the seats before they'd made it to space versus SpaceX building its engines and only much later unveiling spacesuit designs.

FYI, SpaceX developed all of their engines in-house[1]. Other American rocket companies use Russian engines and Congress's bill forbidding that going forward has put ULA in a very bad place because Blue Origin's BE-4 engine still is not ready after more than a decade of development.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_rocket_engines

It's a pity there aren't more jet engine providers.

Government funded research being basically throwing money into the ether and hoping some entire brand new world of chemistry or physics or communications or anything like that is the whole point of government investment. Research into one area providing gains in other unexpected areas is a direct goal of the kind of research the government funds.

You know, like, the internet. The government wanted to make sure that nuking one air force base couldn't prevent the retaliation strike, so let's make a big network that is scalable, re-routable on the fly, and simple to put together. Creating a brand new sector of the economy and dominating the new sector with the likes of google and microsoft and apple was the exact outcome optimistic government employees would wish for.

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

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.

He wanted to buy some Russian rockets to send a greenhouse to Mars, but they did not take him very seriously and quoted very high prices. After that is when he got serious about starting SpaceX.

> 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.

Rolls Royce, and most other engine makers on this level, are essentially metallurgical gods.

... which is tantamount to saying that efficient supersonic transport won't happen because the engine is too expensive to design, though. And maybe that's true. But even if it is true it's still on Boom to make that happen somehow. Not all startups succeed, but those that build the wrong product fail at a 100% rate.

The real money is in the service contracts.

I think that's a pretty big stretch. I don't see a direct link between the award Alexander Graham Bell got in 1880 and the research output of Bell Labs in the 1940s. Bell Telephone existed as a corporation prior to the award from the French government. "Bell Labs" didn't exist as a separate entity with that name until the 1920s.

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.

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.

One can certainly argue that Tesla is overhyped.

you read my mind :)

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.

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.

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

Or better QC.

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.

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

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.

Off the shelf means buying something already available for sale. Paying someone to develop something for you is the opposite.

Going back to the analogy from before, you can go to companies which specialize in chip design and development, and you can pay them to design a chip that will meet your specifications and make it in small quantities. It is economical for these companies to keep the technical staff and equipment on hand for this highly specialized work, because they use them for more than just one AI startup's need.

Perhaps an easier analogy would be legal services: every startup needs them at some point or another, but it doesn't mean every startup needs to or should build up an internal legal team. You hire the pros when you need them, and since you're not their sole source of income they can maintain a much better legal staff than you could every support internally. Even for companies where legal expenses are frequent, if the legal services are merely enabling something else then you still shouldn't be a law firm.

Likewise, Rolls Royce has years of engine development experience, it has the tools to manufacture and test prototypes, and it has the facilities for mass production already, and it uses those same expertise and tools for many product lines serving a wide swath of the aviation market such that no one aircraft needs to pay for it all. For Boom to acquire this same capability would be orders of magnitude more expensive than paying RR to do it for them.

The deal has not fallen apart because the development can't be done or because RR doesn't have the capability to do it; the deal has fallen apart because boom is unwilling to pay whatever price RR has named for it providing this service. Boom didn't decide to build the wrong thing, they are just unwilling to pay a required business expense.

There are very valid reasons why no ariframe manufacturer is building its own engines and vice versa.

And having a civilian suoersonic turbofan engine nobody needs or wants doesn't get a comoany anywhere.

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.

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.

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

Furthermore, before they put cell radios in cars, you could count on the software buried deep in your car working in a consistent manner. Now with over-the-air updates, your car can suffer a software regression at any time.