Ashlee VanceNYT Best Seller | Reporter at Bloomberg Businessweek

Boom Goes Supersonic #corememory #aerospace #supersonictravel

16 Mar 2025 · 1 min

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1:28

In this opening segment of Ashlee Vance’s feature on Boom, the narrator frames the story of Blake Scholl’s eleven‑year effort to revive commercial supersonic travel. Vance juxtaposes the iconic Concorde—its luxury, its ultimate retirement in 2003, and the resulting slowdown of civil aviation—with Boom’s modern ambition to make supersonic flight affordable for the “reasonably well‑to‑do.” He travels to Mojave’s famed Supersonic Corridor to witness a test aircraft attempt to break the sound barrier, while interjecting a brief technical aside about the inverse‑square law governing intensity versus altitude. The segment sets up the central question: is Boom’s multi‑hundred‑million‑dollar gamble a visionary breakthrough or a fruitless pursuit?

This is the face of a madman, and this is what he sounds like.
So there's an inverse square law. If you double the altitude, the intensity drops off by a factor of 4. Yeah.
For the past 11 years, Blake Scholl and his company Boom have been trying to bring supersonic flight to the masses. We've obviously been here and done that and failed. Here's the Concorde soaring through the skies in the '80s. Here's the champagne and the poulet à mâche. And of course, here's the French succeeding at something. But the world could not sustain such ambition and decadence. And since the Concorde retired in 2003, civilization has been pushed backwards. We're slower, grungier, and sadder. With that, I have come to Mojave, California to find out if Blake has been wasting his time and hundreds of millions of dollars on a fruitless quest, or perhaps if he's onto something. If supersonic flight really can be had by all, or at least by the reasonably well-to-do. I have come to see a plane zip through Mojave's famed Supersonic Corridor and break the sound barrier and to think of a faster future.