The project isn't a standalone: EADS is also planning and building a rocket craft that will make trips to the edge of space from 2012 onwards - for passengers willing to pay €150.000 - €200.000 for the trip including three minutes of weightlessness. The C2 will in part be based on that Astrium craft.
That's terribly vague. Honestly, I don't see any sort of great increase in travel speeds until many years in the future when(if?) it becomes feasible to build craft that take sub-orbital hops around the world.
Interesting. I've always been kinda sad that the planes I fly on today are much the same as the planes I flew on as a kid, three decades ago. Yes, avionics, materials, and efficiency are all improved, but still. We continue to lug along at 500 miles per hour and at 35,000 feet. London to Los Angeles in five hours? Sheesh, I'd do that once a year if it were halfway affordable.
For me, that's a sign of the general stagnation. Seems like the only progress we make at the moment is in warfare and how to build bigger TVs. I'm afraid that's a side effect of capitalism - why develop new ideas at a high cost when you can milk the money with the same old stuff over and over again.
Yes, because all the innovative technologies have come out of the communist countries. Technology and the amount of options available to people grow drastically all the time.
Not talking communism. Talking about a shift in thought processes, like doing stuff again that's not immediately monetizeable. In other words, we shouldn't let the bean counters and controllers run technological progress.
Well, given the thread, faster, greener and more comfortable airtravel comes to mind. As Paladin said above - airplane designs are 30 years old. Even the A-380 is basically an old design blown up to be bigger. I'm not an engineer but I guess there are tons of plans to improve the experience significantly. But why do it when people fly anyway? It's kinda like Hollywood producing sequel after sequel after prequel and not having original ideas any more.
There is faster, greener, and more comfortable air travel. However not with all three together, and certainly not for the same price where almost anyone can afford it. These companies already invest billions into their research, if there was a way to produce an airplane that could be more comfortable, or faster, and still be able to be offered at a similar price (or just a little bit more) they would produce it since it would make them a LOT of money.
London to LA in five hours isn't happeneing unless they find some magic way of dealing with the sonic boom. The FAA would not allow it, and that's the end of that. The best they could do would be to blast over the atlantic, then hug the very edge of mach 1 the rest of the way. This depends on the route though. I don't know how far north London-LA goes. If it runs through the arctic circle or the wilds of northern canada for much of the route then full speed through most of the flight might be doable. I know that New York - Hong Kong goes pretty much straight north, over the north pole, and then straight south to the destination.
I'd say you're quite right about capitalism having something to do with it - it makes sure companies come up with stuff that people actually want. Unfortunately, that means lots of cool stuff doesn't ever really get made (the lack of success in going into space probably has similar causes). People want bigger TVs, not super-sonic aircraft. And, lemme be honest, LA-London in 5 hours sounds cool - but I doubt there's enough people willing to pay that much higher a price just to save 10 hours or so.
People were willing to pay thru the nose for concord, it still didn't really make enough to keep it in BA's eyes.
One of the benefits of living on the east coast -- Europe and California in 5 or 6 hours, for affordable rates. Before I had kids, I often went to Europe for a weekend for no reason other than seeing a good fare.
It ran at a slight profit up until the Paris crash. After that people were not as confident of it, pax numbers were down, and it was running at a loss, which is why it was discontinued. The reason the Concorde never came to dominate air travel and why SST's in general never took off (no pun inteneded) is because it was designed with pre-1970 oil prices in mind. The oil crisis + thirsty afterburning turbojets equaled doom for any prospects of a great SST future. Concorde survived for a few decades as a prestigious luxury high speed vehicle of the rich... but the paris crash was the final straw, after which it wasn't profitable at all.
But even coming up with faster aircraft is just refinement of an existing technology. So is coming up with a bigger TV, a smaller computer, a greener car, and the like.
It's related but not the same. TV is something passive, and it gets hammered into our brains from everywhere. All the tech news are brimming with 'news' about something that pretty much makes us sit on our asses, consuming and being persuaded to consume. Air travel at least gets you out of the house. But I agree that it's not some huge invention. I wonder if those are behind us or if there's some Trek tech in store for us.
Midnight Funeral has something right- if they don't lick the sonic boom like the QSST folks have claimed to, their shiny new SST will be going subsonic as soon as it goes feet dry. If it ever gets built- we're talking a Euro aircraft company here, right?
I heard, or read, somewhere, that innovation in a particular field happens on a curve roughly the shape of a solution to an elementary differential equation - slow for a long time, extremely fast for a while, and then slow again, but still increasing - first we walked everywhere for thousands of years. Then we harnessed horses for a few thousand, then built sailing ships for a couple more thousand years. Then with the invention of the steam engine, things started really speeding up ( ), and in the space of 150 years we were up to rockets to the moon, Voyager 2, and Pioneer 10. But since then... stalled. Or not so much stalled as much more slowly improving - we're coming up with ion engines and solar sails, and ever-so-slowly bringing down the cost of suborbital flight. We've hit the end of the transportation innovation boom. But that doesn't mean it won't improve at all in the future.
Well, not to get off an ideological slant but...it seems to me that capitalism produces plenty of good and useful stuff--and virtually all of the good things that have come out of aviation. I've certainly not seen any alternative that does any better. And I have ZERO faith in greater government involvement improving things. If affordable SST flying is in the future, it will almost certainly be capitalism that makes it real. But the current reality is that supersonic flight is really, really expensive. Most every traveller would want it at $500/ticket, but only an elite few can afford it at $3000/ticket. Unless it's affordable, it'll never be of use to the masses. Throw in regulation of sonic booms, emission of pollutants, and the economic demands of the airline business, and it's not an easy problem to solve.
I think the technology exists today to make it a lot cheaper than the Concorde was, but the fact remains that when it does come back around, it will be a valued commodity (especially at first, when there aren't many SST's making runs) and hence supply and demand will make it pricey whether it needs to be or not. Of course, I have full faith that the management of any airline acquiring SST's will find a way to fuck up the financial structure of the operation so completely that it'll eventually drive them back to Bankruptcy.
Then again, most of the supersonic tech I'm seeing is more in line with what YOU do... I can see more market for supersonic corporate jets than I can for supersonic airliners.
