My metric for success is simply making more money than they spent.

Supersonic planes are already proven technology. We made the Concorde and the Tu-144 in the 70s, and have plenty of supersonic military planes in active service. The assumption was simply that you can't make a profit by selling them as civil aviation planes. That's the assumption Boom is challenging, and to be proven correct they have to turn a profit. And not just an operating profit by selling planes for more than they cost to make but make back the research and development costs as well

Neither of those planes made more money than they cost.

The Tu-144 was famously not reasonable at all.

Concorde at least made more money than it cost to operate (and maintain).

The TU-144 made 102 commercial flights, with 55 of those carrying passengers -- the others I assume were cargo.

Not 102 flights per day or month -- 102 flights TOTAL between the first commercial flight in December 1975 and retirement from passenger service in 1978 and from all commercial service in 1983.

With 16 built, that's an average of 6 flights each in their lifetime.

SpaceX has Falcon 9 rocket boosters with 4x as many hypersonic flights on them.

    > Concorde at least made more money than it cost to operate (and maintain).

This overlooks development costs. Wiki says:

    > Delays and cost overruns increased the programme cost to £1.5–2.1 billion in 1976, (£11–16 billion in 2023).

That is an astonishing price for 20 aeroplanes!

I didn't overlook development costs, I SPECIFICALLY excluded them, and SAID that I was doing so.

But you can't just exclude them. They are part of the cost.

Of course you can exclude them, to determine whether the aircraft themselves are a viable commercial proposition for the people who bought them (the airlines) -- which they were, just as other aircraft such as the A380 today are. The people who bought A380s are happy, and will be using them for decades. Emirates would still like to buy more (and may end up buying used ones from less successful airlines)

The fact that the aircraft manufacturer spent far too much on development relative to the sales they made is of course important to the manufacturer -- or at least to whoever is financing the manufacturer, but that is a DIFFERENT question. In fact more than one question.

There is the question of whether the price they were sold to airlines for was greater or less than the incremental cost to build one aircraft. If the price was greater than the cost then there was some hope for a successful program, and they simply overspent on development and/or didn't sell enough copies.

If they were sold to airlines for less than the marginal cost then it's just an all-around manufacturing screwup that could never be solved by any amount of sales.

£16 billion in inflation-adjusted development costs is peanuts.

You should look at the costs of the F-35 :)

But of the F-35 there are >1000 planes to amortise the costs over. Which is two orders of magnitude larger than the concorde

F35s are now selling for $81m on average per plane - https://www.airandspaceforces.com/f-35-program-office-lockhe...

And yes, the program is expensive but there will be thousands of F35s by the end of it all (1000+ already)

What cargo would justify a supersonic flight?

They often flew mail on it as their cargo. But the plane was more a matter of national pride than something that made sense.

Anything high value and perishable, like sushi grade fish for example. Or did you mean morally justifiable?

Flying fish that are increasingly not sustainably harvested on insanely fuel in-efficient supersonic planes is exactly humanity deserves to go extinct.

Hence why everyone thinks supersonic passenger planes are a bad idea. Lots of profitable military supersonic planes, but every existing example of a civilian supersonic plane is only justified as a Cold War dick-measuring contest.

How do you measure the profitability of military aircraft?

Taxpayers willing to pay for it, and at a cost that's inclusive of the profit for the builders.

Wouldn’t that make the Tu-144 a success? And make every government purchase ever, successful?

Could we at least limit it to choices made by elected governments?

> And make every government purchase ever, successful?

yes. From the POV of the supplier, every gov't contract is going to be profitable.

That's why the military industrial complex is so big, and profitable. It's why some people go into politics to extend it. Esp. in america.

> How do you measure the profitability of military aircraft?

what you truly meant is how to do you measure the value obtained from a purchase of a military aircraft. And scholars have studied this for centuries and not arrived at a true answer.

I assume that’s the source of the doubs about Boom.

Success should be measured against the stated objectives, the promises made to investors, or general positive influence on society. In this case the objective was "supersonic flight in our lifetime. Not just as a private jet, but something most anyone can afford to fly." [0]

> Basically, the critics

You're being uncharitable and hyperbolizing the criticism to more easily dismiss it. Would you hyperbolize any praise as "identifying another way this won't work is also a success in itself"?

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11329286

It’s hard to argue a startup succeed until profits > investment.

This is only true from the point of capital - if a startup changes the world in a way you like it can be a success to you. Profitability brings a certain approval and sustainability, but don't confuse that with your goals in what you are working on.

It’s fine to have multiple aims, but asking for investments without trying to be profitable is fraud.

Sort of. There's a class of startups that's not meant to be profitable, except maybe by happy accident. Many (most?) tech startups are like that now. After all, the investors don't care about creating profitable companies - they just want to make money, which they're positioned to do in many ways. One of them is to help create profitable companies. Another is to help grow companies to be sold to other companies and/or to the public for maximum value, giving the investors back a large multiple of initial investments, after which... they don't care anymore.

It's like with modern husbandry: you can make money selling milk, eggs and meat by sustainably raising animals living comfortable lives, but you can make more money by sticking them in cages, pumping them up with antibiotics and optimized fodder, to maximize production rates and minimize costs. The two approaches are inherently incompatible with each other. And I dare to say, modern startup ecosystem kind of entered the era of "factory farming" some time ago now.

Aiming to build a company to be bought by Microsoft or whoever is still aiming to be profitable, the product is simply the company’s assets (IP, customer list, etc).

It’s unsustainable in that the profit is a one time event, but that doesn’t mean you’re not to turn cash into something worth more than what you spent and then sell that thing.

That’s… not true at all.

Cooking books and falsifying projections is fraud.

Asking for investments with a clear disclaimer that the goal is a social good that won’t be profitable? If that’s fraud, then every major arts institution everywhere is guilty.

There is a reason we usually use the word donation in that context. And don’t call it investments. As those tend to be associated with an expectation to be paid back times x.

If you want money to provide a social good without the expectation that the money will be paid back, you're asking for a donation. You can also ask for money as a loan, fee for service, etc.

But an actual investment isn’t “investing in our community” it’s asking for money in exchange for to potential to gain more money etc.

In what way do you think building a new but still-uneconomic supersonic plane is going to change the world for the better?

Uber and Lyft are largely still unprofitable, but they definitely have changed the landscape, as many would argue, to the better.

The cost of putting a single car and driver-for-hire on the streets is a handful of dollars, so it's easy to do many of them at a loss. The cost of putting a single instance of a new airplane design of this scale into the air with even a single paying passenger is in the range of billions if not tens-of-billions of dollars.

This is not even remotely comparable.

But just for comparison, Aérospatiale and BAC actually built a real supersonic plane (Concorde) and managed to fly and operate that plane for decades. It's hard to find much measurable impact on the world at all. What do you propose would be different here, given that the discussion is already presuming a world in which they haven't succeeded economically?

Uber is not unprofitable, there are so many people that got rich off it, they just max out salaries and compensations.

if your only measure of success is monetary profit, then sure. i think that shouldn't be the only metric, and in fact, the focus on that so completely is a big part of the problem with what people term "late-stage capitalism"

Start a social club/co-op/non-profit/religion or whatever and the metrics are different.

However, when you’re asking for investments your goal better be profit or you’ve just committed fraud.

I'd say the opposite actually, that the idea that an established company can lose money and still be considered a success is absolutely a hallmark of late-stage capitalism - and not a very healthy one either.

(I know Boom isn't gigantic, and of course it's losing money at this stage which is right and proper. However losing money in aviation is extremely easy and so I think we call it a successful business when it's profitable. Today, it's proven itself a successful prototype engineering endeavor.)

If the claim is „we’re going to make supersonic transport available to everyone“, that’s what they chose.