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?

[DarkOx]

Yet Concord no longer flies. They had a damn good safety record too. Its a little tough to compare because there were really only two airline operating them through most of there service life, but there was one major crash! One!

If anything the crash, made everyone wake up and realize the youngest of those birds was more than 30 years old. Which is pretty well EOL for airliners.

They stopped building them and they were only flying them because they had them, a sunk cost. The airlines recognized there in fact were not really enough rich people to sell tickets to such that they could be operated profitably if they had to pay for their own depreciation to enable purchase of a new bird. Either that or they figured if the charged what they would really need to not even the rich would bother.

No it was not safety that killed the Concord, it was cost and it was dead bird flying a long time before the accident in 2000.

Re:I think the thing being missed here

[iluvcapra]

I think the thing being missed here is that people are in a hurry. If I can fly a 747 from Seattle to Japan and the flight takes 14 hours, I would pay more to be able to do it in 7.

Would you pay ten times more? That's the kind of factor you'd be looking at for that kind of speedup.

Re:I think the thing being missed here

[Nutria]

the flight takes 14 hours,

10 hours, nonstop.

Turn trans-Pacific/Atlantic into a weekend trip instead of the current 3 days of travel time and there's a market for it.

The Concorde turned a 6 hour flight across the Atlantic into a 3 hour flight. Why, then, was the Concorde economically unfeasible? Cost

Those sub-orbital flights will cost a lot more than the Concorde flights. People will say, "$1200 for a 10 hour flight, or $5000 for a 4 hour flight?" Sure, a handful will pick the $5000 ticket ($20,000 when you add in spouse and a couple of children) but most will say, "4 hours is not worth $15,200."