I'd love to have more startups like this to watch, people solving REAL problems and making REAL things, not just a new social thingy or toy for bored suburban residents.
Plus I always wanted to fly on the Concorde but the fleet retired before I got the chance.
> I'd love to have more startups like this to watch,
There have been plenty of supersonic commercial jet startups-and-shutdowns through the years, to the extent that aviation people shrug when a new one appears ( but are quite happy to take the promotional merchandise that is handed-out at airshows! )
Don't get me wrong, I think it's great that someone is trying this but:
>people solving REAL problems
This real problem (as opposed to the cool tech)--unless the price of fuel goes to near-zero--is likely to turn out to be mostly about how to get international lawyers, investment bankers, CEOs, and so forth back and forth between New York and London fast enough to do a short turnaround trip.
As I recall the majority of passengers on the Concorde flights were businesspeople, the pricing made it prohibitive to regular consumers. But yes, to me it would be a cool experience to save the pennies and get a ticket.
So? Show me another startup with billions in non-binding commitments from customers saying they'd love to buy their product if it existed. It's a founder's dream.
I think the criticism is that it's not much of an achievement to get a non-binding commitment to sell what some people think is $20b worth of work for $2b. Yes it's a flashy number to throw around (whoa, $2b!) but at the end of the day, the real challenge hasn't even begun yet.
Edited: Revised the numbers to better reflect the article.
I'd call those criticisms spurious. First off, the Concorde had a unit cost of £23 million in 1977 - about $130 million in 2016 dollars – for a plane 2.5x the size. An early-bird unit price of $200m doesn't seem all that unreasonable. Secondly, why should they have to amortize all their development costs on the very first sale?
Yes, there's still a ton of technical work to be done. But it's a hell of a lot easier to hire smart people and raise the funding you need to build stuff when you've decisively proven the business case for your product.
The Concorde cost ~£1 billion to develop in the 1960s. That's something like £17 billion, inflation adjusted.
Also, not for nothing:
"An advertisement covering two full pages, promoting Concorde, ran in the 29 May 1967 issue of Aviation Week & Space Technology. The advertisement predicted a market for 350 aircraft by 1980 and boasted of Concorde's head start over the United States' SST project.
The consortium secured orders (i.e., non-binding options) for over 100 of the long-range version from the major airlines of the day: Pan Am, BOAC, and Air France were the launch customers, with six Concordes each. Other airlines in the order book included Panair do Brasil, Continental Airlines, Japan Airlines, Lufthansa, American Airlines, United Airlines, Air India, Air Canada, Braniff, Singapore Airlines, Iran Air, Olympic Airways, Qantas, CAAC, Middle East Airlines, and TWA. At the time of the first flight the options list contained 74 options from 16 airlines." [1]
Guess how many they sold? 14. LOIs for unbuilt, undesigned airplanes are meaningless.
To put things into perspective, I once did some back of the envelope maths which suggested that the governments that underwrote the development costs of Concorde spent something in the region of £2000 per flight ticket sold in today's money.
It's something of an understatement to say the business case for SSTs remains unproven.
