I've been thinking about this for a while, in the context of multiple different startups. There's this (anti)pattern I see repeatedly: a startup says they're doing something that's an obviously an overwhelmingly bad idea from a business sense, but that creates positive PR in the short term. "We're limiting ourselves to exotic jet fuel multiple times more expensive than our competitors'" is such an example. I've seen so many others, I'm beginning to wonder what's going on.
Is it bait-and-switch? Start out by promising something you don't plan to deliver, to garner goodwill and investment in the near term? And then switch to the "correct" mode later.
Is it unseriousness? Are they not 100% focused on doing everything to get the startup to succeed? Imposing artificial limits on your company isn't the action of a success-at-all-costs mindset. Do they expect to fail and are just coasting?
I'm overlooking something obvious and reasonable. Most founders are smart (?); there has to be a sensible business explanation for this.
(edit: Not that carbon-neutral jet fuel isn't a great idea for a startup. But this is a supersonic airplane company, not a jet fuel company. If your startup's success requires succeeding at two different extremely difficult novel things at the same time, your success probability goes from "epsilon" to "epsilon squared").
So it's just a marketing trick. They could just as well market it as "runs on standard jet fuel available at any airport worldwide". Ultimately it's up to the customer to decide what fuel they use.
Perhaps they are trying to attract investment from people who put wishful thinking (sustainable AND supersonic) ahead of common engineering sense.
You are missing the point entirely. Boom builds planes, they don't operate them and they do not build the engines (Kratos does). Their capacity to make the plane use "clean" jet fuel is almost zero. The people who manufacture the engines and operate the planes are the ones who need to put in the effort and pay the costs, it is not Boom who has to care.
This is a pure PR move. They get some nice comments, but their effort to make this true is almost zero. They aren't saying the plane will not work with regular fuels, it definitely will. This is not a bad idea, simply because it basically isn't an idea at all.
According to the PR, Kratos (or more specifically FTT) does not build the engines, it (supposedly) will design them.
> The people who manufacture the engines and operate the planes are the ones who need to put in the effort and pay the costs, it is not Boom who has to care.
I mean, the manufacturer usually cares in the sense that the manufacturing and operating costs inform the purchase.
Though obviously the plane would need to exist first for operators to even evaluate it.
I've seen plenty of products whose marketing says "built specifically for use with (our other product)"; that doesn't mean it only works with that.
If you're building something that won't get deployed for a while, you want to take the design constraints into account that you're going to need to work with, not just those valid today. It's not unreasonable, if you think your design will both take a while and need to stay in service for a while to pay off, to include future-proofing.
What fuel to put in it will presumably be up to the airline, not Boom, so Boom can get the "credit" for building something "intended for" SAF, but the airline will get the flak if the end up not using it.
It's generally purer than old-fashioned stuff, and the wider industry has already committed to switching to it on all the legacy machines, so there is likely some benefits at the design stage to assuming this better quality fuel is available, which it almost certainly will be.
When you look at it this way, it seems ironic and creepy that the acronym "SAF" is merely one ascii character away from "SBF".
There are all kinds of people throwing private and government money at sustainable energy, with the expectation that it will only moderately succeed. Witness this weeks' "ignition" announcement, brought to you by nuclear weapons(!)
Even Death, destroyer of Worlds, needs a sustainable energy angle to justify their funding to Congress.
It seems Boom designed some engine ideas and is now partnering with other companies to see if it can be built.
This sounds a little like Magic Leap. Sell great ideas and then conclude it can't be made (yet).
Hopefully it works out this time. This is a very hard problem, and they're outsourcing one of the most critical components.
[1] https://denvergazette.com/news/business/colorado-s-boom-supe...
As far as this particular project goes though, I would have a hard time expecting it to succeed. They have a great number of hurdles to overcome, and the engine design has to be the biggest one. Designing an engine that can work efficiently in both subsonic and supersonic regimes without an afterburner is very very difficult.
It's highly probable that Rolls-Royce left the deal, and not vice versa, but the GP press release leaves that question unanswered.
They're (Boom) not the ones designing it. Kratos Turbine Technologies has made turbopumps for liquid rockets so they're well placed to do this work.
The hard part is making the rotors which I bet is why GE is involved.
Liquid rocket turbopumps and jet engines are completely different things.
And FTT was a designer of missile and UAV engines, according to Kratos' website they're developing 300lb thrust turbojets and 900lb thrust turbofans: https://www.kratosdefense.com/products/uav/air/turbines. Their KTT is 200lbf, targeted towards "cheap cruise missiles" and "attritable" (aka expendable) UAVs, and was developed in 18 months.
But apparently they'll be able to develop an airliner engine with 175 times more thrust (without afterburner), in 2 years?
Hell, the linked page boasts of their newly commissioned "X-58 test facility", able to accomodate engines "up to 3000-lb thrust".
I'm not panning KTT here, I don't know if they were even involved in the press release, but things don't really make any sense.
And remember, this is a project Rolls-Royce fucked away from 3 months ago, after two years of collaboration. So in 3 months Boom has supposedly found a company which is able to design an engine type which has basically never existed from scratch with no experience.
So it's going to have 3d printed rotors and probally other , which is super cool.
GE Additive have previously made 3d printed turbine parts for GE Aviation[1], so they do have some experience. Also, this appears to be Kratos' second jet engine [2]
[1] https://www.ge.com/news/reports/mad-props-3d-printed-airplan...
[2] https://www.janes.com/defence-news/news-detail/kratos-comple...
- Look at the top of the last two stages of the "low-pressure compressor", you can see like some "phantom" blade airfoils? And yeah, no stators at all...
- The "high-pressure compressor" is even more bizarre: each stage seems to have a slightly different, random chord length, the first stages' airfoils have alternating pitch/curvature resembling rotor-stator stages but in the last ones they forget about this...
- In the turbine casing they have included some grooves that resemble cooling channels or labyrinth seals but the shapes seem random?
- The primary and secondary dilution air holes in the combustion chamber are huge, like those of small RC gas turbine? No fuel injectors at all?
That's a.. Forward looking design.
Making aircrafts is hard, making supersonic aircraft even harder and making a new supersonic aircraft company hardest of all. That there's progress by Boom should be encouraged. Otherwise we are just saying that aircrafts will continue to be the domain of Airbus and Boeing only who don't have much incentive to innovate.
Some of us who weren’t born yesterday have seen this rodeo before, and when a startup aircraft manufacturer switches engines it tends to indicate their concept isn’t viable. The fact that Boom are proposing to build their own engine, rather than partnering with an established engine manufacturer, tends to suggest that the engine manufacturers don’t think it’s doable either.
Sometimes the establishment gets it wrong, but jet engine manufacture is a very mature field, and Boom isn’t proposing to do some radical new engine design. That makes me pretty suspicious.
Personally, I'm very skeptical when they say things like "zero carbon" or "anywhere in the world for $100", very difficult to believe them. The only progress they made for now is building a single seat supersonic plane that maybe will fly. We have lots of those already.
Completely made up nonsense with no evidence is not "new technology".
> That there's progress by Boom
Is there though? PR is not progress.
The physics within a jet engine are basically unknowable. The material science is the hardest we have. The tolerances and margins for error are insane. I wanted Boom to succeed and even believed some of their hype, but this basically means they are dead.
Not to mention, Boom hasn't innovated in any way to solve the two key issues here - they aren't using a significantly lighter fuel to compensate for the tradeoff, nor have they radically changed the engine design to consume less fuel at supersonic speeds. If they did, they would be touting that instead rather than hiding behind a proprietary "superfuel".
A technological progress isn't progress if it's a social or environmental regression.
We should be super skeptical these days. Too many promises and not enough deliveries. Also, just because something is hard, doesn't mean it shouldn't deserve criticism.
A supersonic no-afterburner 35000 lbf mid-bypass (whatever they mean by that) turbofan, cheap enough (to build and maintain) for civil variation, designed in two years would be a pretty impressive thing tho. If it existed. Especially from a company whose biggest previous offering is a 900lbf turbofan.
The F-35's F135 "only" has 28000lbf dry thrust, and the plane tops out at 1.6, while Overture is supposed to reach 1.7 (and supercruise, which the F-35 can not do).
Although in fairness the Tu-144D had engines specced at 54 and (like Concorde) cruised at M2.
On the other hand, it was even less efficient and economically justifiable than Concorde, and the entire thing was shuttered in 1983, after only 6 years, and regular groundings (Tu-144 only flew scheduled 103 times before the programme was cancelled, BA alone flew Concorde near 50000 times, and the class logged more than a million flight hours.)
But here all that exists is a Boom PR release.
The fact that Boom exists at all suggests sufficient optimism about new technology is out there somewhere.
Anybody know how much this fuel is supposed to cost relative to fossil jet fuel?
Boom says they have a deal with Airmade for 5M gallons of SAF per year. [2]
But it doesn't look any serioys movement will happen until after someone makes a plane and proves it's quiet enough.
So Boom are taking a bit of a leap of faith, and also designing it to be capable of trans-Atlantic flights as a semi-profitable backup plan.
> Currently, U.S. law prohibits flight in excess of Mach 1 over land unless specifically authorized by the FAA for purposes stated in the regulations. The two supersonic rulemaking activities would not rescind the prohibition of flight in excess of Mach 1 over land.
Can anyone compare this to other commercial and military engines?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolls-Royce/Snecma_Olympus_593
Supersonic jets like the F5 might use something like the GE J85 which produces a base 3,500 lbf or 5,000 with an afterburner [3].
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garrett_TFE731
Or quite a bit more for a more equitable comparison, the F135 reaches 43 with afterburners, but it "only" reaches 28 dry.
According to TFA, this fantasy doesn't have afterburners (although the Tu-144D didn't either though, and the RD-36-51 is documented at a pretty incredible 54000 lbf, then again the 144 was not exactly a cheap and efficient plane).
Who gives a crap what the engine is called? Just give it a serial number and be done with.
Edit: By serial number I mean some insignificant labelling instead of a marketing campaign. Sell me the supersonic trip not the engines that you have to build to make it work.
Edit: Investors is their audience for this announcement, less so potential customers.
