CEV to be made commercially available

Andre Lieven wrote:

But, while WalMart serves the masses, there still remains a niche
market for Bloomingdale's and Tiffany's stuff, too. Perhaps such
a market could have existed in ST travel, too.



Concorde did find itself a market, and at least stayed in the black in
operations if never recouping its development costs.
One of the things that made Concorde work was the small number of the
jets produced; having flown on one was a bragging point, much like
flying on a Zeppelin was in the 20's and 30's. If there had been 100
Concordes built, I think a lot of that cachet that went with flying on
one would have vanished.
In the case of the 2707, I can see a lot of things that could have gone
wrong and turned the whole program into a complete flop:
1.) Boeing had almost zero experience with supersonic aircraft, much
less Mach 3 supersonic aircraft. Lockheed or North American (or even
Convair/General Dynamics) would have been a more logical choice to build it.
The fact that the design lost the swing wings around halfway through the
design process showed that Boeing hadn't thought things through very well.
2.) By choosing to go for a Mach 3 design, Boeing pretty much limited
itself to a titanium or stainless steel structure due to the heat the
aircraft would encounter; again, this is something they had very little
experience with.
Also, would the aircraft need special fuel like the Blackbirds used?
That could be a real headache as far as commercial operations go.
3.) If the Valkyrie and Blackbirds are anything to go by, Mach 3
aircraft are very hard to develop and are very maintenance intensive to
keep in service, neither of which bodes well for development cost or
day-to-day service cost of the finished SST.
What they might have ended up with was the SST equivalent of the Space
Shuttle- an extremely expensive to develop and extremely expensive to
operate aircraft that had a real potential for catastrophic failure if
any of its systems should fail at full altitude and speed. Ticket prices
could have been so high that you'd be lucky to ever fill one up on any
flight, and empty seats are the last thing this aircraft's operating
economics needs.
I'll say this for Concorde- although I consider the plane to be
basically a failure in an economic sense: They put far more rational
thought into the concept and finished aircraft than Boeing ever did.
There may have been no way to make the idea work economically at the
time, but if it were to succeed, then Concorde was probably about the
best way to approach the problem.


And, consider that it took a couple of generations of commercial
jet aircraft to really work out the technology. We never got a
second generation SST, as we never got a second generation shuttle,
( Note: Not Shuttle ) so its hard to say what could have come from
developing, and continuing to develop, the next generations ( Note
the plural ) of such vehicles.



I think what's really needed is some major improvement in rocket
propulsion efficiency; if you can up the performance significantly, all
the other pieces fall into place.
Unfortunately, I don't have a clue how to accomplish that.

Pat