What they want is a return to the old pre-Obama days where all the taxes and mandatory fees (government and stuff they made up) were only displayed at check out. Kind of like resort fees on hotels.
If you live in the SF Bay Area, it's pretty blatant: most of the economic gains go to property owners - both landlords or people who bought real estate early on (or inherited real estate early on) - due to the self-perpetuated housing shortage.
See the ACLU guidance referenced in a previous comment. There's no right to counsel during routine admission. The right only arises when arrested or being investigated for a crime.
But you can (and should) ask if you're being detained on suspicion of a specific (criminal) offense, or not (e.g. officer wants to doublecheck your story, or background, or thinks there are irregularities), or (esp. for non-citizen) refusing to consent to unlocking your devices.
The answer to the above should give you some idea what's likely to happen, and what CBP has flagged you for, if anything.
“That’s not travel, that’s like a thing you might hope to do once in a lifetime,” says Scholl, before adding, “Versus where we want to get, which is anywhere in the world in four hours for 100 bucks.”[1]
Anywhere in the world in four hours for $100 USD really caught people's imagination and attention. I'm puzzled by how they will achieve this.
Huh. The longest flights are around 10,000 miles. They usually cost over $1000. Fuel apparently accounts for about 25% of ticket price on long haul, so $250 in fuel normally. To do that in 4 hours is to travel 2,500 mph. Naively, traveling twice the speed requires 8x the power, so going over 4x the usual 550mph should mean over 64x more fuel burn, or $16,000 in fuel alone. Maybe a bit less since drag doesn't grow quite as quickly above transonic, call it $10,000. But if a ticket's only $100, I guess they've figured out how to get gas for 0.25% of typical prices.
The air density decreases exponentially with the altitude, while the drag only increases quadratically with speed. It is entirely possible that there is an altitude, maybe 70km, where it is much more economical to fly (at supersonic speeds) than the current subsonic planes. Most likely the CEO of Boom ran the numbers, and the $100 ticket price is doable, at least if you exclude things like profit, capital depreciation, insurance, etc.
> something to market to investors and potential employees
Neither the investors nor the potential employees strike me as gullible. By the way, the $100 ticket price target was not for the first aircraft, see [1]:
> The four hour, $100 dream is Boom’s long-term aim, two or three generations of aircraft down the line.
I don't get the analogy. The Boom CEO explicitly stated that $100 tickets are not around the corner. Two or three generations down the line means four decades at a minimum, if we think one generation takes 20 years. Lots of things can happen in 4 decades, like: significant advances in ramjet engines, rotation detonation engines become mainstream, people get comfortable with windowless aircraft (so there's no need for drooping nose Concorde-style), airports could start being equipped with arresting wires, like aircraft carriers today, airplanes without the vertical tail fin become common place, stronger and lighter composites become available, and, who knows, maybe even some jets will start running on hydrogen rather than jet fuel (hydrogen having about 3 times more energy density per unit of mass). I have to admit the even with all these things, $100 per ticket to any place in the world still seems like a stretch, but I'm willing to give the guy the benefit of the doubt.
>Naively, traveling twice the speed requires 8x the power, so going over 4x the usual 550mph should mean over 64x more fuel burn
You've forgotten to cancel the denominator. If you use the drag relation of speed to power, you're multiplying by time, but the time is reduced by the speed. It would be more straightforward to use the F ~ v^2 relation between speed and force. So going 4x as fast for the same distance would require 16x the fuel, while going 4x as fast for the same time would require 64x the fuel. But the latter would obviously never happen in practice as you'd circumnavigate the Earth.
Once you get out of the atmosphere, drag (and fuel consumption) is ~0. So theoretically possible, but I'm not sure if that's what he was talking about. Certainly Overture won't be capable of that.
Isn't that specifically one of the types of travel predicted to be made possible by reusable rockets capable of landing on the ground? From Florida to Japan in 45 minutes type of thing
Yes point to point travel was a market for Starship. I think they’ve mostly backed off that though, as Starlink offers an easier market opportunity and just as much revenue potential.
The supersonic plane would have advantages over the rocket approach though. Rockers require long, inconvenient transfers to offshore launch facilities. (But would have the selling point of a microgravity transit.)
Reaction Engines in the UK spent over 35 years working mostly on that concept
(though when they eventually went bust trying to scale up last year I think they were focused on reusable space launch business model which is ironically more realistic)
No, they were working on the latter (skylon) most of the time, though the new management that came in after their £60M investment quickly dropped SSTO in favour of more immediate RoI applications. The passenger plane was LAPCAT which was a paper study commissioned by the EU. They did some interesting real work too, such as designing and testing a hypersonic engine combustion chamber that could reduce NOx emissions, which would be a big problem in any ‘conventional’ (eg scramjet) hypersonic engine.
> Fair, I hadn't considered the intercontinental ballistic passenger missile approach.
The terminal deceleration on an ICBM trajectory would be lethal. Ballistic passenger transport at global distances has to be almost orbital so the entry is sufficiently shallow.
There actually is still significant lift. We define the edge of the atmosphere to be where the lift to drag ratio of a plane would be less than 1 below orbital velocity (ie if you were going fast enough to lift your weight with conventional wings you'd be in orbit), so you can't fly conventionally in space but lift might still be generating a force which is significant compared to your craft's weight.
Well the assumption was that there is no drag because the air density is so low. You can’t just say there’s no drag but still assume that you get lift. Your lift/drag ratio won’t go up infinitely just because you’re flying higher.
GP's assumption was travelling through space to avoid drag which doesn't necessarily imply generating lift in space.
My comment was not a support of that argument, but a clarification that simply being in space does not automatically mean no aerodynamic forces. I'm also not saying L/D increases, actually the opposite happens at higher speeds and altitudes.
But judging by "in four hours" I'm guessing he's imagining something somewhere in between those two extremes. High enough to substantially reduce drag, low enough that you don't need to approach orbital velocity to maintain altitude.
"Fast enough" is very nearly orbital speed, though. Suborbital range is very short on the lower end, and increases rapidly and nonlinearly later. E.g. if you can boost to 2km/s (~ Mach 7), this gives you, I kid you not, around 200km of ballistic range. It's either atmospheric flight or orbital flight, and there's nothing really useful in between.
New York to Sydney for $100 in 4 hours? My bullshit alarm is blaring. Unless they have a secret teleporter project they aren't telling people about. If you're burning dinosaurs to do that it is not happening, not unless oil becomes magically free and even then I think you would struggle to make ends meet.
That’s overstating it. I literally did this flight in Polaris yesterday (from NYC), and I’d say tickets from LA are more like $5-7k. There are lots of options from LA to Sydney next week in that range.
Maybe they were talking about the program where you report tax evasion and then once the missing money is collected you get up to 30% of it? That exists.
Sure. But during a casual chat maybe somebody mentioned that reporting tax fraud can earn you money, and then somebody else assumed that they were talking about IRS employees even though they were not.
Anti-tax people like Grover Norquist and Republicans who have made his pledge have long been concerned that if paying taxes were easy, then the American people might not despise taxes anymore. So making paying taxes painful is part of the plan.
What they want is a return to the old pre-Obama days where all the taxes and mandatory fees (government and stuff they made up) were only displayed at check out. Kind of like resort fees on hotels.