Does Boom have a public roadmap? How much of a jump is it between building a fighter jet clone and building a passenger sized aircraft? I suspect it’s a massive jump. How much of the technology and testing is transferable? I also suspect not much. They’re going to spend an immense amount of money testing this aircraft, will it get them closer to passenger service as a result?
There's zero chance they can make a brand new, high output jet engine in one year, when zero of the market leaders want their business.
Are they going to build the engines themselves? Ask China how well that works even when have all the original engineering documentation.
Building a jet engine is not a technical or knowledge or willpower or anything like that challenge. It is a pure engineering challenge. It's about building and iterating new engines hundreds of times until you've made enough iterations that things stop melting in corner cases. It's about finding out, the hard way, every single way your assembly could possibly fail, melt, explode, wear too fast, or otherwise fail.
Understand that making modern engines often requires significant innovation in non-destructive testing to ensure the actual parts you are buying/making are up to spec.
Understand that Russia has a portion of decades of experience building, designing, and INNOVATING in jet engines and still struggles to build modern jet engines.
Understand that China struggles to produce economical modern jet engines despite massive funding, huge incentive, and literal national security concerns. The C19 jetliner currently uses an American engine.
Empirically, building modern jet engines seems HARDER than building modern rocket engines! It seems to require maintaining literal decades of raw engineering experience and patience, and now scale all that effort to a company that in 9 years has been told by all existing engine manufacturers "Nope, we won't make a profit on this plan", and has instead spent their time building a single demo plane that does not demonstrate any experience in building engines.
> zero chance they can make a brand new, high output jet engine in one year
Not one year. "produced by EOY '25" means they're almost certainly already very far along in the development process. There's no way they'd have a target date that early if they hadn't even started yet.
Rich people prefer the Rolls or Bentley when being a passenger, Sport/ performance vehicles are only fun if you are driving, I would expect the G650/800 style jets would be the preferred plane even if it is slower when you can travel in style and with your entourage.
Also range would be a consideration to this type of jet for passenger travel. Travel times makes difference only for long distance over the ocean flights, these jets tend to be quite short ranged.
XB-1 is only designed for 1000nm at 2.2 Mach compared to the 7000nm of G650 with cruise speed of 0.92 Mach. Basically XB-1 can fly for 40minutes at a time at its cruise(top?) speed of 2.2Mach
Lambo (all sport cars) owners tend to take speed limits as suggestions, it might actually be going twice as fast if not legally, still people being driven around, would prefer a Rolls.
Rolls and Bentley are normally driven slower than even regular cars like high end sedans, they are big and unwieldy, and their passengers really care about ride quality, the scene from parasite about coffee cup comes to mind.
If you had the money to own either car, you are rich enough that whenever you reach the destination is on time, other people work on your schedule, then speed becomes less important.
