Why We're Not Going To See Sub-orbital Airliners 300
glowend writes: Sci-fi author Charlie Stross has an article about sub-orbital flight, and why we'll never see it as a common mode of transportation. Quoting: "Yes, we can save some fuel by travelling above the atmosphere and cutting air resistance, but it's not a free lunch: you expend energy getting up to altitude and speed, and the fuel burn for going faster rises nonlinearly with speed. Concorde, flying trans-Atlantic at Mach 2.0, burned about the same amount of fuel as a Boeing 747 of similar vintage flying trans-Atlantic at Mach 0.85 ... while carrying less than a quarter as many passengers. Rockets aren't a magic technology. Neither are hybrid hypersonic air-breathing gadgets like Reaction Engines' Sabre engine. It's going to be a wee bit expensive."
Stross also makes a more general proposition that's particularly interesting to me: "One of the failure modes of extrapolative SF is to assume that just because something is technologically feasible, it will happen. ... Someone has to want it enough to pay for it—and it will be competing with other, possibly more attractive options."
Stross also makes a more general proposition that's particularly interesting to me: "One of the failure modes of extrapolative SF is to assume that just because something is technologically feasible, it will happen. ... Someone has to want it enough to pay for it—and it will be competing with other, possibly more attractive options."
huh? (Score:5, Interesting)
So, you're not going to see it, because it doesn't save money. Except, it has the potential to be many times faster. Which is a reason to use it that isn't "it costs less." So the argument can't hope to support its thesis. If it happens or not is not based on just if "because we can." It is going to happen or not based on the actual advantages of being faster, their value, and the final cost.
We can certainly say, based on our experience with Concord, that if it is fast enough and safe enough the rich will use it, and if it as safety issues, they will abandon it quickly.
Re:huh? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yet Concord no longer flies. They had a damn good safety record too. Its a little tough to compare because there were really only two airline operating them through most of there service life, but there was one major crash! One!
If anything the crash, made everyone wake up and realize the youngest of those birds was more than 30 years old. Which is pretty well EOL for airliners.
They stopped building them and they were only flying them because they had them, a sunk cost. The airlines recognized there in fact were not really enough rich people to sell tickets to such that they could be operated profitably if they had to pay for their own depreciation to enable purchase of a new bird. Either that or they figured if the charged what they would really need to not even the rich would bother.
No it was not safety that killed the Concord, it was cost and it was dead bird flying a long time before the accident in 2000.
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I think it was the noise. The US banned it, because it was so much noisier.
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Re:huh? (Score:5, Interesting)
It certainly was loud. I was in the next plane to take off from the same Heathrow runway on several occasions and can tell you that it is the only plane I ever heard above the noise of my own aircraft (usually Tristar, if memory serves). It was worth it! One of the most beautiful planes flying.
I lived under the heathrow flightpath, and in our school, which had sound-proofing, you could still clearly hear Concorde passing over. I remember one day in a lesson it got really loud, so loud that the teacher had to stop talking and some people put their hands over their ears. It turned out that the undercarriage of the plane landing before Concorde had collapsed and Concorde had to abort the landing, which meant using 100% thrust over the noise-abatement area, something that it was not normally allowed to do.
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The US banned it because it was European and because the domestic Boeing 2707 never even got to the prototype stage.
Both France/UK (Concorde) and Russia (Tu-144) had actual flying production aircraft but the US couldn't even get a prototype airborne.
That's the sad truth about the US SST program and why (in part) the Concorde never really made it big - what's the use of a very, very expensive airliner whose only redeeming feature is that it's very, very fast if it isn't allowed to go faster than a regular wi
Re:huh? (Score:5, Informative)
You've got some missing historical knowledge there. It was so loud it would actually damage tomatoes on the vine. (true story)
And it wasn't "banned" in the US, it was just required to operate at regular speeds.
Also.. Boeing has a large number of supersonic aircraft. Google it. ;) They're actually quite good at it, not some bumblers who couldn't get a prototype. It turns out, the market for them isn't really with airliners, because... well, because tomatoes.
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At the time of the SST battle between the three (US, Europe and USSR), Boeing was most certainly subsonic only - all of their successful supersonic aircraft products come from the merger with McDonnell Douglas, not original Boeing in-house.
They really did bumble with the 2707 - first a design with swing wings, which were all the rage then, but massively heavy, and then switching to progressively simpler designs until they end up with something looking very similar to the other two offerings...
Re:huh? (Score:5, Insightful)
Right, they no longer fly, but they flew for a long time and tickets sold well, right up until the end when renewed safety concerns led to the decision to retire them. They were never a big money-maker, but they were popular and commanded high ticket prices.
The reason they no longer fly is that they didn't make enough money to stimulate a new product generation, and the old product was retired after a long service life. They weren't getting safer as they got older, and after a crash there are expectations of design analysis, upgrades, etc., that would have been expensive and wasn't warranted for such an old aircraft.
People who read that as some sort of spectacular failure that would prevent interest, or imply lack of interest, in high speed flight, well, that is just silliness. It was clearly a successful craft, it flew full, and yet it didn't make a boatload of money. Lots of airlines around the world operate at a loss, that is actually normal for the industry and does not alone tell you if the airplanes they are buying are successful models or not.
Re:huh? (Score:5, Informative)
The reason they no longer fly is that they didn't make enough money to stimulate a new product generation
Indirectly, yes. What prevented them making more money was being banned at many airports over largely unfounded concerns over noise. What promoted the largely unfounded concerns about noise was that US airports wanted to support Boeing's SST effort by blocking the competition that got there first.
There are quite a few orders of Concorde lined up, it was only when some US airports decided to ban it that they dried up. Had they not done that there would have been regular flights to the Middle East and Far East, as well as over the Atlantic. Boeing's own SST might have been finished too, instead of being abandoned.
By now we would have much more efficient SSTs running at much lower cost.
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Huh? American airports didn't prevent flights to the Middle and Far East... The lack of destinations with sufficient traffic put paid to any flights to the Middle East. The enormous logistics costs (due to the fact it couldn't fly non stop) killed flights to the
Re:huh? (Score:4, Informative)
In fact, they lost money on every flight.
Only the French ones. The BA ones were actually profitable.
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News flash: almost all airlines are subsidized by governments, even the ones listed as not being. The entire industry is heavily supported, it is not some Ayn Rand libertarian free market Utopia. It is a strategic industry.
The same is true for all the aerospace manufacturers.
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The Concord could have continued flying. Virgin Atlantic offered to operate the aircraft but British Airways didn't want someone else operating them if they didn't.
Re:huh? (Score:5, Informative)
No, it really couldn't have - the Virgin Atlantic offering, like many of Bransons stunts, was nothing more than a PR exercise. He even used some of the typical bullshit myths surrounding the Concorde in order to put BA in a bad light - "you were given them for £1 each, so heres £7 give us seven Concordes and we will call it evens..." etc (BA didn't get them for a quid each, they paid real money for the core fleet which they ordered, and took on several unsold airframes at a slightly reduced price but still real money). Virgin also wanted all of the support infrastructure at Heathrow and elsewhere for a song as well - all of that was worth more than the Concorde airframes.
Virgin Atlantic and Branson were also ignoring the fact that the responsible manufacturer (Airbus) had withdrawn the type certificate and support for the aircraft, so there was absolutely no way VA were going to fly them except under an experimental certificate, which forbids passengers.
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...and realize the youngest of those birds was more than 30 years old. Which is pretty well EOL for airliners.
fleet age [airsafe.com] You'd be surprised how many airlines operate how many big jets close to that age... and I doubt they see 30 as EOL. Some airlines, in the north, operate planes averaging 80 years old, but its well understood you don't want to be flying in anything else that in cold, the old planes are the safest. I don't think that translates to the big jets (like Boeing 700 series) though. Chances are about equal you've never been on a Boeing that is under 30 years old.
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The crash was caused by French arrogance. The British knew of the danger to the fuel tanks and designed a fix. They offered it to the French who said "Non!"
A British Concorde would have survived.
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I don't think he is. The Concorde had a weakness that was discovered only in one of the last flight.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Re:huh? (Score:5, Insightful)
That word does not mean what you think it does.
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Take my word for it, people will never go to the Moon. Just way too expensive...
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Kennedy said we should, and we found (created) the money. So we just need more politicians who create scientific visions.
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If saving fuel was the top priority, everyone would travel by bus and boat.
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suv's and trucks would not be top sellers
Re:huh? (Score:4, Insightful)
All those suburban moms drive SUV's because it's a vehicle with a lot of utility - seats four in comfort, with plenty of room for luggage and supplies, plus you can use it for trucking things around. People buy cars to account for all their usage, not just the most common parts.
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Fuel and price are not the same thing. Busses don't cross the ocean very well, but boats do. The problem with the boat is that it takes a week or so to get from Europe to the USA, which means that you're having to pay for food for that trip on top of the ticket and you need a lot more space (no one would put up with an economy airline seat for a week!), which drives up the cost a lot. And that's ignoring the opportunity cost from the lost time.
You can fly from London to New York in about 7-8 hours. How
Re:huh? (Score:5, Informative)
Me driving my car with nobody else in it is just as efficient as the average of domestic airliners. Yeah, I get over 40 mpg. A lot of people do.
Ships are TERRIBLY, spectacularly inefficient for passenger transportation. Queen Mary 2 has a mass of 75,000 tonnes with a capacity of 2620 passengers. That's 155 tonnes pulling each individual passenger. She burns 12 tonnes of fuel every hour to move about 25 nautical miles. That works out to roughly 9 mpg per passenger.
Dry and liquid freight is a completely different story. Tankers and container ships are not making as much speed, and they are using less than one tonne to support each tonne of payload. Often MUCH less.
If you gutted out the accommodations and packed people into Queen Mary 2 in airliner coach seating, it would be a lot more efficient (if you could get 99% of them to sit nowhere near a window for long periods, and they didn't all die from DVT), but you would still cube out.
Re:huh? (Score:4, Informative)
The Queen Mary 2 is not a good representation of a traditional ocean liner. No steerage class, at that, going from memory, it is basically one class that is awfully close to first class.
Last time I crossed the Atlantic by ocean liner, it took a week which gives an average speed closer to 15 knots and where our cabin was, we did not have windows and were probably below the water line. Very small cabin that 5 of us were crammed in. At the time it was much cheaper then flying even considering that we had to pay for a weeks food etc. Of course flying wasn't so subsidized back then and cost much more then now.
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I would point out that you would have to eat and drink regardless of whether you are travelling or not. Consequently only any incremental cost over your normal food and drink can be counted as part of the travel costs.
Re:huh? (Score:4, Funny)
Last time I crossed the Atlantic by ocean liner
That ranks up with "and that's how I had my most recent foursome with blonde cheerleader triplets" in my list of phrases I never expected to read on slashdot.
Re:huh? (Score:4, Informative)
Concorde service was never very profitable, in the end it was run for prestige. Concorde service was notoriously unprofitable through the 1970s and only made it to the 1980s with heavy government subsidy of the tickets -- it was in the early 80s that BA took control of the program and you started seeing the $10,000 tickets. It made a little money in the end but it just didn't produce the kind of money that justified the other expenses and hassles. After September 11th they just couldn't justify the service on those merits, notwithstanding
Since then, jets' biggest competitors for wealthy business travel aren't each other, their biggest competitor is telecommuting and telepresence.
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Lots of successful models of aircraft are operated at a loss based on subsidies. That tells you nothing about the success of the aircraft as a product. Note that in those cases, the aircraft manufacturer is still getting full price for what they built. The aircraft aren't even the subject there, the airline is. And you admit that you are aware that airlines run at a loss based on subsidies. So it is a known thing, even to you. That tells us, even if it is not "profitable," somebody might buy the aircraft, a
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It may be that if the "working people" subsidize it or not will be based entirely on if the rich people demand it and express a willingness to buy the tickets at some rate that is higher than regular airfare but below the operating cost of the service.
Re:huh? (Score:4, Funny)
No, faster was important when you didn't have to be at the airport three hours before your flight for your ceremonial security grope theater.
I think the thing being missed here (Score:5, Insightful)
I think the thing being missed here is that people are in a hurry. If I can fly a 747 from Seattle to Japan and the flight takes 14 hours, I would pay more to be able to do it in 7. That's an easy choice. Time spent in the air is generally wasted time. Turn trans-Pacific/Atlantic into a weekend trip instead of the current 3 days of travel time and there's a market for it.
The futuristic prediction that it would be economical to take a sub-orbital flight from NY to LA is probably not going to happen, but for trans oceanic and/or China/Japan to Europe. Definitely a market there.
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Airfare is driven off of the cheapest flight between two places - saving a couple hours isn't going to be a commercial success, look at the example of the Concorde
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"My company requires me to book the LUF (Lowest Usable Fair) "
That's not fare!
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Re:I think the thing being missed here (Score:5, Insightful)
Would you pay ten times more? That's the kind of factor you'd be looking at for that kind of speedup.
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Re:I think the thing being missed here (Score:5, Insightful)
Moore's Law does not apply to jet engines.
Nominal income hasn't significantly changed in the US since 2000 [nytimes.com], and has only improved 20% since 1980 (that's less than 3% per year). Productivity has gone up but all the gains have accrued to the highest income percentiles. So you're right, somebody will be able to buy flights on the aerospike liner, but it's not going to be something that "people" do, it'll be for the rich.
Re:I think the thing being missed here (Score:5, Insightful)
the flight takes 14 hours,
10 hours, nonstop.
Turn trans-Pacific/Atlantic into a weekend trip instead of the current 3 days of travel time and there's a market for it.
The Concorde turned a 6 hour flight across the Atlantic into a 3 hour flight. Why, then, was the Concorde economically unfeasible? Cost
Those sub-orbital flights will cost a lot more than the Concorde flights. People will say, "$1200 for a 10 hour flight, or $5000 for a 4 hour flight?" Sure, a handful will pick the $5000 ticket ($20,000 when you add in spouse and a couple of children) but most will say, "4 hours is not worth $15,200."
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By "unfeasible" you mean, what? Because you can't mean what it says in the dictionary. We have the benefit of hind-sight; we know that regardless of if it "made" or "lost" money, the Concord was able to acquire and maintain operating capital, and they never had trouble selling tickets.
Unfeasible doesn't mean, "well it was good enough to keep it running, but I think it was a mistake."
Most people don't have $15000 to spend on a vacation. And those that do are possibly not just choosing it based on utilitarian
It's pointed to in the summary and was not missed (Score:5, Informative)
It's pointed to in the summary and was not missed - there were not enough people in a hurry to sustain Concorde flights.
An ironic thing is the 747 was opposed within Boeing in the late 1960s because it was thought that only supersonic airliners would have a place on long hauls in the 1970s - so very few were built in the first batch. As mentioned in the summary the 747 went on to render Concorde mostly irrelevant.
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Air travel used to be a luxury that only the rich enj
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I recommend reading the full article on the website, it isn't very long and I should have read it before I wrote my single point post above. The article covers many more points including those you raised above.
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It's pointed to in the summary and was not missed - there were not enough people in a hurry to sustain Concorde flights
Wikipedia sites other, different reasons. Specifically, the decline of the airline industry after 9/11, combined with uncertainty because of the crash, and the withdrawal of maintenance support by the manufacturer. Sir Richard Branson was trying to pay lots of good money to buy them and continue operating, but it was that last one, lack of maintenance support, that foiled him; not any speculation about how much of a hurry people were in.
Branson would be operating them today, but for the withdrawal of maint
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There's another problem. Turboprops are in fact more efficient for long range and are capable of only marginally slower speeds than modern turbofan aircraft but they are comparatively very noisy. As a result, they are far less comfortable to travel in and often incur additional penalties due to noise on take off.
Re:I think the thing being missed here (Score:4, Insightful)
I think the thing being missed here is that people are in a hurry.
I think you didn't read TFA. Relevant:
I know that if I had the money, I'd prefer to fly by bizjet. If I'm 5 minutes late it is still there waiting for me, and it flies from where I am directly to where I need to go... that's pretty hard to beat.
And he's right that governments will get really nervous about hypersonic craft. As he says in TFA, the hypersonic flight could stick to its planned flight path and then deviate only for the last 20 minutes, and still be able to hit an arbitrary target. With less time to react to the threat, government will try to preemptively secure each flight, which means the already-inconvenient airport security will get even more inconvenient.
Thus his point that even if hypersonic airplanes were available to them, rich people would rather fly a subsonic bizjet with minimal hassles (and with Internet available during the flight) rather than get to an airport on time, wait in the security holding pen with all the other common horde, undergo intrusive security procedures, fly really fast to whatever hub airport the hypersonic flight goes to, and then likely have to travel some more to get to the actually desired destination.
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The problem with the bizjet is that it has very limited range. Small jets can't cross the Pacific Ocean, and many can't cross the Atlantic. If you're flying regionally, and can afford it, yes, bizjets are great. Coast-to-coast probably means a fuel stop in between. But unless this is a rather large "bizjet", it's not going to take you to London.
Re:I think the thing being missed here (Score:5, Informative)
They've built planes like the Gulfstream G650 [privatefly.com], 14 passengers and 7500nm range which means that from New York you can reach Tokyo to the west and Dubai to the east non-stop. It won't take you to Australia or South Africa but it's fairly global. A full range trip works out to $200-$250k so it's not for the average person but if you're a multimillionaire flying with an entourage between two local airports - a 14 passenger plane can probably land just about anywhere - then it wasn't as absurdly expensive as I thought. A little out of my budget tho.
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So can subsonic aircraft. And that's setting aside his confusion (easily missed by uneducated readers) over the difference between a ballistic suborbital craft and a hypersonic aircraft. And overlooking his error in thinking a hypersonic vehicle can be diver
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You would think that there are enough 1% ers out there who would be willing to pony up the $$$ for a supersonic private jet if one was available.
Hell... I bet that an egomaniac like Larry Ellison would even pay extra for a custom built supersonic plane that's even faster than the standard model if another tech billionaire got a hold of one first :)
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SF Economic Plausibility (Score:5, Interesting)
Yup, this raise one of my big complaints about some SciFi stories: lack of economic plausibility.
Science Fiction is great for looking at how we might deal with various potential technologies. Readers are perfectly happy to suspend disbelief and accept whatever technology is proposed. What readers aren't willing to do is suspend disbelief and accept people behaving implausibly.
To write good science fiction, you need to accurately portray people. You can make up the technology, but you have to get humanity right. And that means you have to get the economics right.
This is exactly the problem I had with reading the Hunger Games. Everything worked, except why would a society with hover cars and other advanced technology have need of the services of the districts? Surely they didn't need coal, and yet they had a whole district dedicated to mining it. The lack of economic sense pulled me out of the book. Instead of thinking about the characters, I was thinking about why the society that was described didn't make any sense.
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Not to mention, why would a society based around the oppression of the populace, regularly and deliberately raise one of the oppressed to the status of popular hero, through a game designed to teach guerilla warfare?
Re:SF Economic Plausibility (Score:4, Informative)
The story apparently seeks to establish that these methods do not teach the desired lessons, but instead, teaches people that the leaders are evil, and that compliance doesn't protect or save them, and that their Hope is to resist evil, even at a high cost.
Well, duh.
The problem with Hunger Games was not that it was hard to understand, but that it was politically retarded, and nowhere near as funny as Battle Royale.
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What would have pulled me out of reality for that was realizing I was reading a book aimed at 15 year old girls.
Re:SF Economic Plausibility (Score:4, Interesting)
Why? Snobbery is not taste, you know. YA genre fiction is often quite entertaining, and the prose quality of the Hunger Games books was fine. While the premise was a bit goofy, the writing was at least consistent.
Heinlein Win (Score:2, Insightful)
While Heinlein's juvenile fiction was, well, juvenile, I like that it at least played with the concepts of economics.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F... [wikipedia.org]
Early Heinlein was heavily influenced by C. H. Douglas's Social Credit [wikipedia.org] ideas, including a Basic Income.
Re:SF Economic Plausibility (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm not sure the Ancient Egyptians needed pyramids, either. Europe is also dotted with stupendously huge cathedrals that basically nobody uses anymore, and even when they were built their actual utility or even ecclesiastical justifications were pretty flaky, they were built mostly by towns competing with each other.
The impression I always got from HG was that the society was driven by outright class warfare as a kind of ideology. They didn't make the districts mine coal because they needed it, they made them mine coal because coal mining is a modality of suffering. The only imperative was: the Districts must suffer.
The 20th century is full of examples of state's imposing illogical, and pointless, and wasteful punishments upon people only to demonstrate the state's power. The German Army, when it was retreating from Russia, had to constantly fight with Eichmann's department for train stock and trackage, because moving Jews to concentration camps was actually given a higher priority than troop movements. Or, when Germany made an alliance with a country like Hungary or Croatia, they made it clear that it didn't matter how many army divisions they committed to the German war effort: their loyalty would be measured strictly on the basis of how many Jews and gypsies they expatriated every day.
The whole point is to send a message to everyone: we can punish whoever we want, neither laws, nor efficiency, nor common sense will stop us, so don't cause trouble. Nothing can take a higher priority than that because that's the entire society is founded in coercion and force.
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Ancient Egypt had periodic floods of the Nile, and when your whole population is unemployed and homeless for 2 or 3 months every year, public works projects in the desert can be quite appealing.
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Right. If only someone had the vision to write (Economic) Science Fiction. . . (or maybe that's Fantasy writing right there. . . )
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Economics is a very poor model of human behavior.
What's the difference between macroeconomics and microeconomics? Microeconomics is wrong about specific things, and Macroeconomics is wrong about things in general.
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Pournelle makes libertarian economics his theme. I was reading some short stories of his from the 1970s. His predictions, based on libertarian economics, were ridiculously off the mark, of course. For example: he predicted the Swiss franc would be the world's currency, and that it would still be backed by gold. But in fact, the Swiss just voted against a gold standard-type initiative. And the Swiss banks don't want to make their currency a world reserve currency. So they deliberately keep the exchange rate
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I thought of Pournelle while reading the summary, and some of the comments, because he seems to be in the vein of "it will happen because of economics". But economics is notoriously non-predictive, and Pournelle's understanding of it is as deficient as Stross's apparently is.
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This is exactly the problem I had with reading the Hunger Games. Everything worked, except why would a society with hover cars and other advanced technology have need of the services of the districts?
Same thing - in reverse.
Richard K. Morgan's Takeshi Kovacs books.
It is constantly repeated that there is an oligarchy which "exploits" the "masses" in an economic, political or some other sense.
Trouble is... Everyone is practically immortal.
Sure... for SOME REASON it supposedly costs A LOT of money to get a new body... but... they have virtual worlds.
AND you get to improve your education and earn degrees in virtual.
AND they have colonies across the galaxy and extremely well paying jobs for the taking... yet
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I don't even know who you are, but we should be friends. I had to show my wife your comment because she was frustrated that all I could comment about after the last movie was the economic infeasibility of the whole district system.
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How do you know they didn't need coal? Coal is a fantastic starting material for plastics, dyes, and many other products.
OTOH, if you expect Science Fiction to be prediction, you're looking in the wrong place. That's not what it's about. What it's about is saying "If you had these changed circumstances, how would responses be different?" There are a lot of sub-generes that look at specific kinds of responses, so whether the mining of coal was a significant plot element, significant enough that it needed
Lift (Score:2)
The other problem is lift. When you get to that kind of altitude, you either need to be at orbital speeds (not going to happen) or you need an incredible wingspan relative to mass to get lift from what little atmosphere is available. A third option is some kind of thrust to directly counteract gravity, which would be horribly fuel inefficient. Regardless, you end up with an extremely specialized, hard to fly aircraft like the U2 or SR-71 Blackbird, which has severe limitations in "normal" flight characte
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The flip side (the error Stross seems to be making) is to assume that because economics predicts something (hyperinflation, scarcity, etc.), it will happen.
Lots of reasons (Score:3)
Sure it would be the fastest transPacific transport, but who can afford it.
Some of the flight is going to be in microgravity, There goes your lunch
And of course if something goes wrong, your chances of survival are zero as well.
Similar to space tourism I guess
The target market... (Score:2)
...will basically be executives who's time is worth the price to get them to Tokyo and back for a deal. The very nature of the beast entails a small number of seats and thus a high price per seat. The cost and logistics go up by a very large amount when you increase the size of the vehicle. There are also issues with generating supersonic booms in places that are not used to it, limiting it to mostly ocean overflights or re-entering over sparsely populated areas. It won't be a mass market item, but
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Also, the idea of a terrorist takeover of a suborbital flight is ridiculous on many levels.
That target already captured elsewhere (Score:5, Informative)
Sucks, but all that extra effort to go supersonic/hypersonic prices it out of most civilian situations.
An adjunct proposition (Score:5, Interesting)
An adjunct proposition to consider is that certain technologies will never disappear, no matter how many attractive alternatives arise.
I'll offer one example right now: paper.
Discuss.
Cheap tech (Score:2)
"One of the failure modes of extrapolative SF is to assume that just because something is technologically feasible, it will happen. ... Someone has to want it enough to pay for it—and it will be competing with other, possibly more attractive options."
I'm not sure what Stross is saying here. An important part of the process of developing technology is not just to ensure it can be developed, but that it can be developed at a price that most people can afford.
So when I seen advanced technology portrayed in SF being used by fairly ordinary people, I assume that the technology has been made affordable enough that paying for it is not an issue.
42 minutes (Score:2)
Give me a straight tunnel between any two points and I can get you there in 42 minutes for practically no fuel cost.
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I will bite, if I gave you a tunnel between New Zealand and Australia how would you do that?
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In theory sure, but in practice it is prohibitively expensive and takes insanely long to complete one. For example New Yorks' Tunnel No 3, an Aqueduct, is only going 60 miles, was began in the 70s, is not expected to be completed until 2020 at the earliest & will cost over $6 Billion. That is $100 Million per Mile, so a relatively short tunnel system (say Chicago to New York) would cost almost a hundred billion dollars and take somewhere between 5 decades and a century to complete even if you started
He's confused (Score:2)
Given fast turn around reusability with rocket engine restart capabilities claimed by SpaceX the numbers work out for high end passenger fares if you go to a lower suborbital velocity and then bleed off energy while stretching distance by passively skipping off the atmosphere. By "passive" I mean no scramjet (or other propulsive kick). If you really need distance use rocket engine restart and carry extra propellant.
Moving the Goalposts (Score:2)
A fine example of moving the goalposts. He starts with the thesis:
we're not going to see sub-orbital airliners
He ends with the conclusion:
Supersonic bizjets for the rich might well be viable...Virgin Galactic's sub-orbital pleasure hops are unlikely to be problematic...But point-to-point sub-orbital passenger services are, I think, going to remain a pipe dream for the foreseeable future.
Congratulations. You've just proved yourself wrong. Maybe next time start out with a more reasonable premise like "We're not going to see point-to-point sub-orbital passenger services in the forseeable future", instead of whatever sounds dramatic.
Not to mention, his primary objection seems to be screeching about 9/11 security theatre. Maybe that's a good reason why they won't be seen in the US, but the rest of the
Sci-fi is not "Econo-fi?" (Score:2)
Sci-fi is usually literate in matters of science. I'm guessing that's why they call it "Sci-fi" instead of "Econo-fi"
I've noticed those deeply moved by science and technology are a *very* different crowd than those deeply moved by economics, accounting and finance. Too many sci-fi stories cop out on the explanation of how something was funded by saying something like "we've advanced FAR beyond the need for money" as if money is merely a technology with no ties to motive, ambition, wealth, effort or cultu
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"as if money is merely a technology with no ties to motive, ambition, wealth, effort or culture."
But the motives, etc. behind money is what led to AT&T turning down engineers who came to them with proposals to build an internet infrastructure in the 1970s. AT&T, motivated by the perverse incentives of capitalism, saw the internet as competition for their telephone business and wanted no part of the new technology. Wouldn't we be a lot better off if we realized that money is indeed merely a technolog
We need to accelerate tech (Score:2)
I will wait till the Eschaton teleports me to my destination with a couple of cornucopia machines.
SF also extrapolated an AI singularity and it may not be so technologically feasible.
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It hasn't been immanentized yet. Sorry.
Not strictly true (Score:3)
I've done some research into hypersonic technology, and it's not strictly true that hypersonic flights are necessarily less efficient per passenger mile. Sure, up to this point it has been the case, but we haven't explored in detail.
The US currently has tested a hypersonic glider that goes a heck of a long way, with a surprisingly good glide ratio, above Mach 20. Apparently it was to glide for thousands of miles, while only descending maybe 20 miles, implying a tremendously high glide ratio, over 100:1. If that's true, then you could have extremely efficient flight at Mach 20.
These "waverider" planes use radically different aerodynamics, so the old rules don't apply. They're nothing like the Concorde.
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If that's true, then you could have extremely efficient flight at Mach 20.
Glide ratio != efficiency per passenger mile.
I don't think there was anything efficient about the HTV. It carried 0 passengers and the heat literally melted it's own skin off. Building a fast missile with a good glide ratio has very little to do with fuel efficiency of a passenger plane.
fundamentally silly arguments (Score:2)
Fundamentally unread arguments (Score:2)
Try reading it again (or for the first time) and you'll find the following:
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For example, as I recall, getting a 100 kg adult to Earth orbit using kerosene and liquid oxygen costs around $10,000 in propellant. It goes up to $30,000 if you use liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen. The actual cost of the energy required to put a person in orbit, if it were elec
While suborbital flight may be too expensive.... (Score:5, Interesting)
....We may see a return of supersonic flight within the next 15 years.
Thanks to better understanding of how sonic booms are generated from the shape of the plane and definitely way better jet engine technology, we may be able to very soon build a business jet seating 10 passengers capable of flying at Mach 1.6 at ranges up to 6,000 nautical miles with just about no sonic boom audible on the ground even when the plane is fly at Mach 1.6.
How is this possible? First, aerodynamic research using computational fluid dynamics have identified ways to minimize the pressure wave buildup that causes the sonic boom in the first place with very careful shaping of the fuselage and wings. This makes to possible to effectively eliminate the audible sonic at speeds up to Mach 1.6. Secondly, modern engine design using variable cycle engines (GE Aero Engines successfully tested the technology on a engine intended for the Advanced Technology Fighter program that resulted in the F-22A Raptor) means high-bypass turbofan fuel efficiency at subsonic speeds but can change configuration to fly at supersonic speeds with a small amount of reheat (afterburning) to keep fuel consumption and harmful exhaust missions as low as possible. Finally, by keeping the top speed to Mach 1.6, it means less structural heating from flying at supersonic speeds and less need to run a lot of reheat (afterburning) on the engines, which means lower fuel consumption and less need for expensive high-temperature rated stainless steel or titanium structural parts like those used on the Concorde.
I've read companies that sell fractional ownership of private jets such as FlexJet or NetJets would immediately buy 50 of these supersonic business jets once approved for production. The ability to fly from New York City to London in around 4 hours as opposed to the circa 7.5 hours with current jet airliners makes it very attractive to business customers, especially since many live by the motto of "time is money."
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Err..
First, the Concorde cruised at Mach 2.0 without reheat. On the Concorde, reheat only added some 20% (IIRC) to the thrust was used mainly to accelerate to cruise speed.
Secondly, to design a more powerful/fuel efficient engine without reheat, you need to handle higher flows, temperatures and pressure.
Reheat is a "cheap and easy" way to work around this issue, although at the expense of fuel efficiency.
That said, using more advanced materials which can handle higher temperature and pressures to build more
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I think that term is just short for "sub-orbital space flight". Which is to say that the plane/rocket hits or passes the line where space technically begins, but cannot or does not attempt to enter orbit.
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Right, just attach the suborbital planes in pair with a rope to some space elevator like device and have one take off as the other land. Problem solved.
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I'm hoping for a bungie sling with a cannon on the end, swung from the side of the space elevator. And for landing, a net attached to a pole that rotates around the space elevator. Then you can use regenerative braking and recover some electricity during the landing.
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If you read the actual article (and perhaps some of his replies in the comments) you'll find he isn't really saying "never", he's talking about the short to medium term: the next few decades. And the main thrust of his argument depends on post-9/11 security measures rather than overall pricing. That won't last forever either ... or at least I hope not ... but it probably won't change much in that timeframe.
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