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

SF Economic Plausibility

[crow]

Yup, this raise one of my big complaints about some SciFi stories: lack of economic plausibility.

Science Fiction is great for looking at how we might deal with various potential technologies. Readers are perfectly happy to suspend disbelief and accept whatever technology is proposed. What readers aren't willing to do is suspend disbelief and accept people behaving implausibly.

To write good science fiction, you need to accurately portray people. You can make up the technology, but you have to get humanity right. And that means you have to get the economics right.

This is exactly the problem I had with reading the Hunger Games. Everything worked, except why would a society with hover cars and other advanced technology have need of the services of the districts? Surely they didn't need coal, and yet they had a whole district dedicated to mining it. The lack of economic sense pulled me out of the book. Instead of thinking about the characters, I was thinking about why the society that was described didn't make any sense.

Re:SF Economic Plausibility

[iluvcapra]

Surely they didn't need coal, and yet they had a whole district dedicated to mining it.

I'm not sure the Ancient Egyptians needed pyramids, either. Europe is also dotted with stupendously huge cathedrals that basically nobody uses anymore, and even when they were built their actual utility or even ecclesiastical justifications were pretty flaky, they were built mostly by towns competing with each other.

The impression I always got from HG was that the society was driven by outright class warfare as a kind of ideology. They didn't make the districts mine coal because they needed it, they made them mine coal because coal mining is a modality of suffering. The only imperative was: the Districts must suffer.

The 20th century is full of examples of state's imposing illogical, and pointless, and wasteful punishments upon people only to demonstrate the state's power. The German Army, when it was retreating from Russia, had to constantly fight with Eichmann's department for train stock and trackage, because moving Jews to concentration camps was actually given a higher priority than troop movements. Or, when Germany made an alliance with a country like Hungary or Croatia, they made it clear that it didn't matter how many army divisions they committed to the German war effort: their loyalty would be measured strictly on the basis of how many Jews and gypsies they expatriated every day.

The whole point is to send a message to everyone: we can punish whoever we want, neither laws, nor efficiency, nor common sense will stop us, so don't cause trouble. Nothing can take a higher priority than that because that's the entire society is founded in coercion and force.

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."

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.