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The End of the "Age of Speed"

Posted by samzenpus on from the taking-it-easy dept.

DesScorp writes "'The human race is slowing down,' begins an article in the Wall Street Journal that laments the state of man's quest of aerial speed: we're going backwards. With the end of the Space Shuttle program, man is losing its fastest carrier of human beings (only single use moonshot rockets were faster). 'The shuttles' retirement follows the grounding over recent years of other ultra-fast people carriers, including the supersonic Concorde and the speedier SR-71 Blackbird spy plane. With nothing ready to replace them, our species is decelerating—perhaps for the first time in history,' the article notes. Astronauts are interviewed, and their sadness and disappointment is apparent. In the '60s and '70s, it was assumed that Mach 2+ airline travel would one day be cheap and commonplace. And now it seems that we, and our children, will fly no faster than our grandparents did in 707s. The last major attempt at faster commerical air travel — Boeing's Sonic Cruiser — was abandoned and replaced with the Dreamliner, an airliner designed from the ground up for fuel efficiency."

9 of 531 comments (clear)

  1. So what? by gblackwo · · Score: 5, Insightful

    So we are choosing to be more efficient than fast?

    I used to speed a lot as a teenager- guess what? Now, I like to take my time, enjoy the travel, and save money on gas.

    1. Re:So what? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      We don't use them. Nobody uses them.
      This is about machines that are actually used. We don't fly to the moon anymore. We don't use shuttles anymore.
      Concorde was, for decades, the fastest any 'ordinary' person could go, and it's no longer here. There's nobody developing any alternatives to that.

      The world doesn't seem to need speed anymore. And that'd pretty believable; What's the use of shaving a few hours off your London-New York trip when you might as well just have a video conference with the people there? Transporting humans with speed doesn't seem to be important to the world. Instead, transporting data (And in a lesser amount; physical goods) faster and in more volume seems to be.

      Yes, there'll always be somebody pushing the limit. Be that some top secret military project, be that some suicidal maniacs on a salt flat. They will always be there. But this is about machines and methods that actually make it to the real world; And in the real world, who cares about speed?

    2. Re:So what? by robthebloke · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Concorde was, for decades, the fastest any 'ordinary' person with 4 grand burning a hole in their wallets could go, and it's no longer here.

      Fixed that for you. Easy jet is preferable for ordinary people, because it's affordable. Video conferencing is preferable for business, because it's cheaper than flights + hotel rooms. There is a common theme here - money! (and a desire to retain as much of it, as you can).

    3. Re:So what? by TheRaven64 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      No, we're still pushing up average speeds. Trains are now easily twice the speed that they were a couple of decades ago (in places with decent rail systems) and they carry vastly more people than the shuttle or concorde. Even if you measure passenger-miles, these two are largely irrelevant. Making a subway train 50% faster has a much bigger impact on overall quality of life than making a transatlantic flight 50% faster. 5-10 minutes off a daily commute is a much bigger win than 2 hours off a 5 hour flight that most people are lucky to make once every few years.

      --
      I am TheRaven on Soylent News
    4. Re:So what? by Skarecrow77 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I used to love to fly when I was a kid, and even as a young(er) adult.

      Now though... getting there several hours early cause you never know how long security is going to take...

      wondering what new hoop I have to jump through. What's that? empty my pockets? ok sure I guess. Huh? take off my belt? what really? ok, let me hold my pants up... take off my shoes? are you kidding? really? well crap, I didn't bring my shoehorn with me it's going to take me awhile to get them back on, no wonder this damn line is moving so fuckin slow. Take my computer out of the computer bag?! are you serious? isn't that what the damn x-ray machine is for? put my deoderant, suntan lotion, and mouthwash in individual plastic baggies? ok fuck it i'm going home this is rediculous... oh what's that? I'm under arrest? well fuck.

      and that's even before the groping.

  2. Commercial flight is fast enough now by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    With the pat-downs and all the hassle at both ends of a flight, why would we need a Mach 2+ vehicle in the middle?

  3. There's not much point .... by yelvington · · Score: 5, Insightful

    There's not much point in plugging faster airplanes into a hub-and-spoke air transit system with chronic Air Traffic Control delays (assuming they're not asleep), 45-minute airport security lines and 20-minute waits for your baggage.

  4. Actually very true by Chrisq · · Score: 5, Insightful

    it's bandwidth that matters.

    A 200mph train link giving affordable travel between distant cities would be much more useful that a celebrity supersonic service.

  5. Meh... by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 5, Insightful

    As much as I think space travel is cool, and the SR-71 was one of the more aesthetically pleasing aircraft ever, and similar sentiments, I can't really muster much pity for the disappointed astronauts and test-pilot types.

    There's a saying from the murky world of the intersection between market actors and regulatory agents: "Nobody screams louder than the guy whose subsidy is being cut."

    Astronauts, and their ilk, while they did the jobs we offered, fair and square, were (in terms of human speed) some of the most subsidized travellers in history. For a mixture of reasons, some more or less universal(scientific curiosity), some bound up in particular historical moments(Cold war dickwaving and spy games), we made comparatively massive investments in the velocity of a small number of pilots carrying out specific missions. I have nothing against the pilots, who largely executed their missions with skill and nerve; but that doesn't change the fact that those were some of the most expensive tickets in human history, made possible only by certain historical conditions. Those guys were playing with once-in-a-lifetime white elephants, not prerelease prototypes of consumer goods.

    (Now, unfortunately, our extraordinary subsidies projects seem to be focused on our parasitic layer of financial services con-men, an entirely crasser class of people, with far fewer virtues and far greater dangers...)