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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   27032 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 25, 2025

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Reading an article on why Britain should settle Antarctica from Palladium got me thinking: are there any major, visionary projects happening at the moment that have a plausible chance of success?

I'm still hopeful for SpaceX to at least make operations on the moon more feasible, though I'm skeptical of making a real go at Mars colonization, especially as Elon's star has fallen so far recently.

China seems a likely contender, but I don't know what they have going on. I know that AGI is the thing on everyone's mind, but I'm thinking more about a physical, non-software based major visionary project that's happening in the physical world.

To quote some from the article:

These apparently radical measures will look less radical by the year, but would nevertheless represent a dramatic break from the Westminster status quo. Declining nations can resort to many sensible technocratic reforms that are easy to explain, but they find it hard to come up with compelling political or bureaucratic motives for those reforms. That can only be done with national visions—visions that are not only suited to the capabilities a country could realistically develop, but also a congruent continuation of its history, or at least the best of its history. We can see that these two conditions have been fulfilled with nearly every successful national founding or refounding. Britain’s overlooked Antarctic legacy, and the vast frozen territory it still retains, then, offer us the opportunity for such a vision.

If such a project is pursued with enough vigor, it will make Britain’s claim to Antarctica inarguable. It is easy to draw peremptory lines on an empty map, but it is much harder and more admirable to people that map and to rescue its land from barrenness. For a stagnant or declining nation, it is easy to find this or that technocratic intervention that can solve this or that economic, social, or political issue. What is more difficult is finding a vision that gives the nation reason to carry out such reforms. These visions must be inspiring, but they must also be within reach. Most importantly, they must match the legacy and history of the country.

This is culture war because, well, the decline of nations is extremely political, and from my view the Trumpian Right, for all it's many and varied flaws, is the only party at least nominally pursuing a future vision of greatness, instead of simply ignoring or managing a decline.

Also, this is a very sassy quote from the article I loved:

This unworldly modern Britain is hardly the “perfidious Albion” depicted in the propaganda of its 19th century geopolitical rivals. Not wholly unflatteringly, contemporary Russian state media still portrays the country as the shadowy orchestrator of coups and death squads. A truer depiction, though, is that of the “cash-poor, asset-rich elderly woman who has somehow inherited a portfolio of scattered, high-value properties she doesn’t know what to do with.”

Boom is reasonably likely (2:1 odds) to get commercialized supersonic passenger transport by 2040. I think that will seem like a mere evolutionary change (plane go faster) but, if it succeeds and scales, will be transformative.

Given that Concorde was not close to being transformative, I think Boom would need to be 10x better than Concorde to be transformative with >50% probability, and they seem to be going for 2x.

Concorde wasn't transformative because it never scaled.

My claim is that merely achieving "equal to Concorde but consistently adds at least a handful of new routes every year" is transformative, even if it's not any better or cheaper. And they are already notionally aiming for $7000 tickets, which is 1/2 the inflation-adjusted price of Concorde.

Or maybe the other way around: Concorde wasn't transformative because they only built 14 of them and only served 3 airports, which was downstream of the fact that the thing could barely fly and bled[1] money.

And they are already notionally aiming for $7000 tickets, which is 1/2 the inflation-adjusted price of Concorde.

That is what I mean by a 2x improvement. Slightly less than half the inflation-adjusted price, for a marginally worse product (Mach 1.7 vs Mach 2.0). Still a niche product for rich people - the marketing spin is that the fare is competitive with business class, but airlines don't sell many full-fare business class tickets at the moment* - the average fare actually paid needs to go up a lot relative to subsonic business class for the economics to work out.

* As well as the usual discounted fares, the big volume business travel customers (mostly banks and consultancies) all have negotiated rebate schemes which means that the revenue to the airline is less than the face value of the ticket.

Sure. So 1/2 the price of Concorde but connects all the major cities of the world at Mach 1.7 instead of the 0.85 of a 777?

It only connects all the major cities of the world if

  • It can fly supersonic over land. At the moment the discussions between Boom and the Trump admin are on the basis that they will only be able to fly supersonic over CONUS if the boom doesn't reach the ground, which means slowing down to Mach 1.3 and increased fuel consumption. The politics of Concorde was that countries that didn't build it were disinclined to be generous about letting it fly in their airspace, and Boom will face the same problem with countries that are not the USA.
  • They release a plane with long enough range for trans-Pacific routes. (Overture has a planned range of 4250nm and LAX-Tokyo is 4768)
  • The economics of an all-business class service (which requires 80% occupancy, mostly at full-fare, to break even) work out on enough routes. Apart from a long history of failed all-premium operations, the big problem they face here is the lower supersonic premium on eastbound flights - a 4-hour supersonic TATL is too short to work as a night flight but doing it as a daytime flight means that you lose 5/6 hours work time to the time change. A flat bed on a subsonic night flight offers a lot of people a better value proposition for their $3500. Concorde had to sell cheap eastbound tickets as a bucket list experience to fill the plane.

Right now the only city pair which has supported an all-premium flight sustainably is London-NYC*, and it currently doesn't. The British Airways Babybus is a pretty direct comparator to what Boom would be offering (all-premium service marketed to full-fare business travellers that offered significant time savings by running from London City and pre-clearing US immigration while refueling in Shannon), and the economics was marginal. (It was cancelled during the pandemic and never reinstated). As well as the problems selling enough full-fare business class tickets to keep the plane flying, there is the issue that most of the airports that might welcome an all-premium flight are slot-constrained, and a 777 makes more money out of the slot than a small all-premium flight.

You need fat point-to-point routes to make Boom work, which are long enough for supersonic flight to be worth it, short enough to be within range, and mostly over water. On day 1 that means the premium trans-Atlantic city pairs only. Business travellers won't use a less-than-daily service, and the whole point of flying supersonic is lost if you end up with a layover when a non-stop subsonic flight was available.

It's a great product (assuming they can actually build the Symphony engine, which I rate as a 70% shot) and if they do sell a $7000 LHR-JFK return I will probably fly it. But "Concorde at a third to half the price" gets you regular supersonic service on 10-20 city pairs vs 1 - not a transformation of the airline industry similar to the 707 or the 747. Boom are not proposing to change the physics of supersonic flight or the economics of the airline industry.

* London-NYC is comfortably the busiest long-haul city pair, with about 40% more seats than London-Dubai in 2nd place (overflies densely-populated Europe so probably not supersonic-friendly) and almost double number 3(Paris-NYC). Number 4 is London-LA (out of Overture range if they have to slow down over land) and number 5 is Singapore-Melbourne (dependent on Australian government permission to make sonic booms over the Outback). Tokyo-Singapore and Seoul-Singapore would be perfect supersonic routes if they were fat enough to support daily service, which appears to be marginal.

One way I could see it being transformative is if it puts more pressure on cities to finally improve their airport infrastructure.

Right now, it usually takes at least an hour to check in, clear security, and get to your gate. But it's highly random, so most people try to get there at least 2 hours before the flight. Even more if you're at a busy airport and trying to do something complicated.

Then on top of that, most airports are far from the city and most cities don't have very fast transit options to get there. Typically an hour to get to the airport, could be more if you're coming from far away.

Repeat again on the other side, especially for an international flight... 1 hour to get out of the airport, 1 hour to get back into the city. Minimum.

Flying from NYC to London takes about 7 hours. That's annoying, but becomes much worse then you add in around 5 hours of extra time to get from your home to the plane, and then the plane to your real destination. 12 hours, plus the jet lag and stress of travel basically kills an entire day.

Right now, we put up with all the extra waiting because there's just not enough pressure to make it better. 5 hours of waiting seems reasonable compared to 7 hours on the plane. And rich people can avoid some of that anyway by using private planes. But if Boom can get that down to 3.5 hours on a plane, I think there'd be a lot more pressure on cities to improve the overall airport experience. It's not impossible, it wasn't all that long ago that people could just drive right up to the gate and step on the plane with minimal security. We still need security of course, but we could automate a lot of it, and add valet parking and better public transit.

Combine all of that? Let's say the current model is 12 hours total from NYC to London. Boom + Better Infrastructure could get it down to 6 hours total. That really is a pretty change. It would make it a lot more practical to go to a meeting in both cities on the same day. Or work in one for the week and commute home for the weekend. Still a long trip, but only half of what it is now.

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