Originally Posted by
rickair7777
At this point I think there will be a biz SST, assuming one of them can build a business case for supersonic only over water. Relying on changing regulations for over-land is a bit iffy, although NASA doing the research certainly lends credibility... THEY apparently think it's worth pursuing.
Maybe.
Hell, remember the "light business jet" trainwreck? Startups left and right thought they'd be selling ~1 million dollar VLJs with Epic seeming to lead the charge at the time. I can't even begin to count how many startups and proposals there were fighting for this vision and expecting to sell thousands of jets. When you looked at it from the outside, it was total insanity. There was no way in hell that market demand would allow for all of these companies to simultaneously be selling all these very small jets.
So yeah, there might be a supersonic business jet, but that economic model is pretty damn precarious and it seems more like the things that dreams are made of, rather than a solid business plan. In other words, I wouldn't expect more than throw-away investment in it and would not count on it surviving, but if it does, that would be pretty neat. Then it has the possibility to spur on competition, but that would be pretty far down the road IMO. Airliners? They hedge on the bottom line and profitability. Not going to see that for a long time unless we have some sort of physics/engine break-through. I agree with the bit about electric airliners too. There might be some electric applications on aviation, but moving people longer distances en-mass requires energy that electricity just won't provide for a long time, long enough that it doesn't make any sense to be making up pie-in-the-sky schemes at that level. Maybe ~300 miles for a climb-to-alt and glide back, and that would still be pretty far off in the future. As problematic as hydrogen is, it will still work better in that application than batteries.