Why We're Not Going To See Sub-orbital Airliners

glowend writes: Sci-fi author Charlie Stross has an article about sub-orbital flight, and why we'll never see it as a common mode of transportation. Quoting: "Yes, we can save some fuel by travelling above the atmosphere and cutting air resistance, but it's not a free lunch: you expend energy getting up to altitude and speed, and the fuel burn for going faster rises nonlinearly with speed. Concorde, flying trans-Atlantic at Mach 2.0, burned about the same amount of fuel as a Boeing 747 of similar vintage flying trans-Atlantic at Mach 0.85 ... while carrying less than a quarter as many passengers. Rockets aren't a magic technology. Neither are hybrid hypersonic air-breathing gadgets like Reaction Engines' Sabre engine. It's going to be a wee bit expensive."

Stross also makes a more general proposition that's particularly interesting to me: "One of the failure modes of extrapolative SF is to assume that just because something is technologically feasible, it will happen. ... Someone has to want it enough to pay for it—and it will be competing with other, possibly more attractive options."

Comments

Re:huh?

[AmiMoJo]

The reason they no longer fly is that they didn't make enough money to stimulate a new product generation

Indirectly, yes. What prevented them making more money was being banned at many airports over largely unfounded concerns over noise. What promoted the largely unfounded concerns about noise was that US airports wanted to support Boeing's SST effort by blocking the competition that got there first.

There are quite a few orders of Concorde lined up, it was only when some US airports decided to ban it that they dried up. Had they not done that there would have been regular flights to the Middle East and Far East, as well as over the Atlantic. Boeing's own SST might have been finished too, instead of being abandoned.

By now we would have much more efficient SSTs running at much lower cost.