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WAY too much money.

If you have a (plentiful at Davis-Monthan etc) surplus ejection seat whose pyrotechnics are current all you need is to bolt the rails to the cockpit floor with a simple mount of your choice and cut a hole in the roof covered with a light panel. No electronics to connect and the seat is self-contained.

OV-10 Broncos had a very fast seat because it used a canopy breaker and punched through the light upper transparency.

Neat site with lots of interesting ejection info:

http://www.ejectionsite.com/seatgalnf.htm

Uhhh..we actually didn't have any way to know then because we hadn't reached 25 MPH but thanks to a guy that detached a retina for science we know pretty much EXACTLY what the human body can take and at what point you'll have serious damage. this is why we use see combat pilots in battle they flip over before diving because the human body tolerates positive Gs much better than negative.

So sure if you start out really slow and build up very gradually? Then even the fat guy in front of you in line at the Wendy's could handle a ride in the thing, its just a question of how long that build up and slow down would take and would it be worth the fuel. Considering how much gas the Concorde blew through i'm thinking probably not practical.

"break the sound barrier, and live. "

not sure if this qualifies, but a supersonic bailout from a plane has been done decades ago from an F-100.

" In the first known case of a man surviving a supersonic ejection, George Smith(IIRC will be verified) ejected from an F-100 Super Sabre in a dive. It was known that he ejected supersonically due to eyewitnesses who heard and saw the ejection from nearby based on the sounds of the sonic booms and the visual clues of the crash. "

http://www.ejectionsite.com/ejectfaq.htm

The original ejector seat in the F-104 was designed to eject downward because of the high T tail. If you lost the engine on takeoff you had to roll it to survive ejection. Don't know if they changed that later.

According to this F-104 Ejection Seat the reason for firing downwards was because they didn't have powerful enough ejectors to go upwards (which would help clearing the tail) but later on when they were available then upwards egress was used.

Acceleration - and deceleration by itself are fairly survivable. There was a guy who used to ride rocket sleds. He bled from his eyeballs but otherwise he kept his day job (which apparently was riding rocket sleds).

http://www.ejectionsite.com/stapp.htm

Capt. John Stapp withstood a 46.2G decceleration when his rocket sled going 632 mph plowed into a water brake. His eyeballs were completely filled with blood, but cleared overnight.

They don't do it like they used to

I thought one of the records set for sustained human Gs was on a rocket sled... Ah yes, Dr. John Paul Stapp.

Ejection seats are another area where people are exposed to high Gs. The Gemini seats were particularly infamous. Both rocket escape systems and ejection seats balance the chance of injury to the crew against the risks of not getting them away fast enough.

Good stuff, as long as I only have to read about it :D

John Paul Stapp disagrees (emphasis mine):

When the Sonic Wind had hit the water brake, it had produced 46.2 Gs of force. And for an astonishing 1.1 seconds, Stapp'd endured 25 Gs. It was the equivalent of a Mach 1.6 ejection at 40,000 feet, a jolt in excess of that experienced by a driver who crashes into a red brick wall at over 120 miles per hour. Only it had lasted perhaps nine times longer. And it had burst nearly every capillary in Stapp's eyeballs.

Then the company is trying to expand by putting this into other vehicles like humvees and helicopters. (why in a helicopter?)

first safe landings from orbit

Certainly the flight profile of the XB-70 (high altitude supersonic) was more like shuttle re-entry than that of either the F-111 or B-1. The system was designed to allow safe ejection at Mach 3 and 70,000 feet.

This system was actually used after a midair collision, and saved the pilot's life.

-ccm

The original was Captain Joseph Kittinger who freefell for some 4.5 minutes. He had serious thrill issues.