Translator: Suyeon Ji Reviewer: Cihan Ekmekçi
So, long before I moved to Denver,
I grew up in suburban Cincinnati, Ohio.
(Laughter)
And I was lucky.
My grandpa lived just an hour away in rural Indiana.
We got to play together almost every weekend,
building sand castles, driving model trains,
and tending his garden together.
He was an integral part of my childhood.
A self-made man and a World War II veteran,
who taught me the value of self-reliance and defining joy in everyday moments.
Fast forward 30 years,
and now I have a family of my own: two little boys and a little girl
and they, too, have a very special grandpa.
A founder of a real estate empire
with so many lessons to share with his grandchildren.
But tragically, he lives 18 hours away in Hong Kong.
The travel time is simply prohibitive,
and they get to see each other only once a year.
So they’ll never grow close.
But it wasn’t always this way.
Amazingly, the airplanes we have today
are no faster than the ones we had when my parents were growing up.
We have failed to conquer geography.
For most of human history,
we lived and died no more than 20 miles from our birth place,
able to go only as far as our feet could carry us.
But in a tiny sliver of history, we’ve made incredible progress.
In the 1840s,
if you lived in the Eastern U.S. and thought of going West,
you took a covered wagon.
The perilous journey took months,
and you didn’t visit, you moved with no hope of ever coming back.
In 1869, a breakthrough invention came to market:
the transcontinental railroad.
The journey that previously took months took just 83 hours by a train.
I know that might not sound like much by today’s standards,
but remember this,
for the first time, a New Yorker could dream of going to California
and actually coming home.
(Laughter)
And progress continued to accelerate.
In 1903, the Wright brothers built the first airplane.
And just three decades later, we had transcontinental air service.
The journey that stretched out 83 hours on the railroad
shrank to just 20 hours on a propeller aircraft.
But to really understand the value of speed,
let’s look closely at what happened
when we went from propellers into the jet age.
Now in the 1950s, if you lived in San Francisco
and you dreamed of a vacation in Hawaii,
you’d have to get on one of these.
That’s right. That’s a flying boat.
(Laughter)
The journey would take 16 hours, and once you learned that,
you probably decided to vacation somewhere closer to home.
(Laughter)
But the jet engine changed all of this.
The 16 hour flight shrank to just six hours,
and all of a sudden, many more people began to choose to vacation in Hawaii.
Travel to Hawaii skyrocketed sixfold in the first decade of the jet age,
and it kept on growing as we built hotels, tourist attractions, and resorts.
This distant far off state, Hawaii, exotic, remote,
suddenly became accessible to the whole world.
But it wasn’t just about where you could go,
but it was also about what could come to you:
The Beatles.
(Laughter)
Yes. The Beatles took the first world tour in 1964,
a tour that would not have been practical
just 10 years earlier with slower airplanes.
And the jet age changed sports too.
Before the jet age,
when a trip across the country would take most of the day,
sports teams had to be clustered together in the East
out of practical necessity.
But when you can get across the country in six hours,
all of a sudden, we can bring major league baseball
and major league football coast to coast.
So next time you enjoy the big game, remember to give thanks to the jet.
Its speed made it possible.
And by the year 1969,
it seemed like progress in aerospace was accelerating.
In that year,
after having been a decade behind in the space race,
America landed a man on the moon for the first time
and brought him home safely.
In that same year, Concorde flew for the first time.
The faster than the speed of sound, supersonic airliner.
It seemed like we were on the cusp of a new era of progress
that we could look forward to space exploration and ultra-high speed travel.
Concorde and the supersonics were supposed to be to the passenger jet,
what it had been to the propeller aircraft before it
and what those aircraft had been to the railroad still earlier.
Aboard Concord, the seven-hour journey from New York to London
would shrink to just three and a half hours.
Fast enough that a New Yorker could do business in London
and be home in time for dinner.
You could fall in love with someone from another continent,
and it would no longer matter if the relationship was ''long distance.''
(Laughter)
Yet, somehow 50 years later,
moon rockets and supersonic airliners are found only in museums.
Concorde did fly for 27 years,
but its fares were sky high, like $20,000 New York to London round-trip.
If you could afford to fly it,
and it never changed mainstream transportation.
And so in 2003, Concorde retired with no plan to replace it,
and somehow the supersonic age had ended without ever really starting.
Isn’t this crazy?
Where else in technology do we have something,
lose it, and actually go backwards?
To make sense of this, it helps to turn to the history of progress in aviation
to see where big breakthroughs came from.
Now, many of you know the first airplane was invented by bicycle entrepreneurs
who yearned to be in the air
and thought there could be commercial potential for their invention.
But what is less well-known
is that the first practical airliner the Douglas DC-3
and the first jetliner, the de Havilland Comet,
were also built by relatively young founder-led companies,
i.e., these airplanes were built by startups.
(Laughter)
Now, envisioning the DC3,
Donald Douglas wanted a new airplane which more people could fly on,
which airlines can use to offer regular passenger service,
and for himself, he thought he could sell thousands.
That is, the requirement of a commercial success
necessitated the creation of a sustainable economic model.
These airplanes had to make sense for their passengers,
for their airlines and for their manufacturers.
Okay, well, what about supersonics?
Well, Concorde didn’t come from a startup or even from an established company.
It was a joint venture of two governments:
France and Britain.
After all, most joint ventures between the French and British
have been wars.
(Laughter)
So what was their goal?
Well, it wasn’t commercial success.
The year was 1962.
It was the height of the Cold War.
And supersonic development was about beating the other guys
into the supersonic age.
Indeed, in the 1960s, supersonic projects were launched by governments
in the U.S., in Europe, and in the Soviet Union.
The Soviets actually made it into the air first,
but their airplane had all kinds of problems.
(Laughter)
And after hauling around a couple of loads of mail,
they shut it down.
In 1971, the American supersonic competitor,
just funded by tax payers and built by Boeing,
was over budget and badly behind schedule.
So Congress pulled the plug, leaving just Concordes still coming.
Now, in America,
rather than embrace the Concorde, we chose to block it.
And the FAA imposed a literal speed limit over land in the U.S.
(Laughter)
A speed limit, really!
(Laughter)
So Concorde finally did arrive in 1976,
but it was stillborn.
We had rushed into the age of supersonics built it out of 1960s technology,
which wasn’t yet good enough
for economical or efficient supersonic travel.
The fares were too high,
the aircrafts were mostly empty,
and with transcontinental flights in the U.S. banned,
it had limited use.
Only 14 were ever built and entered service,
so there was no economy of scale.
And in 2003, the fleet was retired mainly for economic reasons.
They became expensive to maintain
and the airbus stopped making spare parts,
forcing both British Airways and Air France to ground their Concordes.
Now, as we stand here half a century later,
the FAA speed limit still stands,
and it’s had a crushing impact on progress.
You might think a supersonic renaissance would start with a small private jet
for people who can afford to pay for speed,
whose time is incredibly valuable.
But the problem is most of those people want to fly overland.
And so the developers of private jets couldn’t see a big enough market
to justify the development costs.
So thus, we’ve had half a century of no progress in speed.
Looking back, Concorde and Apollo share a common narrative.
Both were amazing and inspiring technological achievements.
But they were done in a pursuit of glory, not a commercial success.
And thus, when we quite literally planted flags,
we were free from the obligation to produce something of an enduring value.
These remarkable inventions looked like progress,
but their actual result was decades of stagnation and regression.
So, in 2007, after Concorde had retired,
I was working at a startup, an Internet startup in Seattle.
Remember, that year the iPhone had just come out.
And we were living in a world where our phones and computers
and our communications were all getting faster.
One day, my girlfriend was stuck on a slow, horrifically delayed flight,
and while I waited for her, I started to wonder,
"Whatever happened to faster travel?"
That day, I set a Google alert on supersonic jet
because I figured a breakthrough had to be right around the corner.
And I wanted to be the first to know when I could break the sound barrier,
But it was crickets.
There was no credible effort to build a supersonic jet
that I could ever fly on,
just some crazy sci-fi concepts that wouldn’t work
and some talk of a private jet for billionaires.
Nothing I could use, so I started to think.
Could one start a company to build supersonic jets?
Could I start a company to build supersonic jets?
I thought the answer would be no; the challenge seemed so daunting.
After all, the American speed limit was still on the books,
limiting the market.
And intercontinental airplanes are amongst the most complicated things
ever built by humanity.
They take years to develop, billions to come to fruition,
and only a handful of gigantic multinational corporations can build them.
But about three years ago, I decided I have to look at it anyway.
I thought I would do a couple weeks of research
and get this supersonic craziness out of my system.
But what I found instead was something really surprising and very exciting.
It turns out that while we haven’t had a speedup in 50 years,
we have had a half century of progress
in basic technology for building airplanes.
Today, we have dramatically better methods for optimizing aerodynamics.
We have new materials like carbon fiber composites.
And we completely changed the way we built jet engines.
Now they’re more fuel efficient and quieter.
And it turns out
if you take all these other technologies and put them together,
you can build a new-generation supersonic airliner,
one that it costs 75% less to operate than Concorde.
That means you can buy a ticket,
New York to London round-trip for about $5000.
I know what you’re probably thinking:
that still sounds very expensive, and it is.
But it’s about what we pay in business class today,
which is a very large market.
And I looked at this and thought, "Man, that’s a foothold.
That could be a jumping-off point
for a more mainstream Renaissance in speed."
So what would we have to do to do this?
Well, we have to create
the first new commercial aircraft startup in 50 years -
excuse me, in 95 years.
(Laughter)
Sounds easy, right?
But the reality is that’s what it takes,
so that’s what we decided to take on at my company, Boom.
We started working on this seriously about three years ago,
on the first new supersonic airliner in 50 years.
And I’m so proud;
we’ve completed the design of the first prototype,
and we are about 18 months away from flying it, right here in Denver.
(Applause)
So the prototype is little, but here is the first production aircraft:
The Boom Jet.
It seats 55 people;
it will take you from New York to London in time to make an afternoon meeting
and home in time to tuck your children into bed.
It’ll save you a whole day round-trip across the Atlantic,
two days across the Pacific.
And thanks to globalization,
there’s been an explosion of international travel,
so that means we can focus on routes
like New York to London, San Francisco to Tokyo,
Seattle to Shanghai, that are mostly over water
and we need not be blocked by the speed limit.
And thanks to progress and fuel efficiency,
there is no environmental downside either.
The carbon impact is about the same
as flying business class in subsonic today.
So I would like to invite you to imagine with me:
in a world where the red-eye flights shrink to just three to four hours,
and those excruciating 15, 16, 17 hour hauls
become simple overnights,
where will you choose to go?
There will be new opportunities to experience
the people, places, and cultures our planet has to offer.
In the supersonic age,
the world will quite literally feel smaller.
A donor heart can find its way to a recipient 5,000 miles away.
Sydney, Australia will feel as accessible as Hawaii is today.
World leaders, when they have differences,
can gather in the same room to resolve them.
My children might get to know their grandpa.
Now, I must hasten to say this is hard,
and we still have many challenges ahead.
But I’m inspired to go to work every day precisely because the mission is big,
that we are working on something
that will add to the sum of human progress,
something that governments and multinational corporations
haven’t been able to do.
We are often told, as entrepreneurs, as individuals
to think globally but to act locally,
to find a small piece of a big problem, which is possible for us to take on.
But what if this is a bad advice?
What if the truth is that individuals and startups
can take on big missions and actually succeed?
What if the bigger, the more audacious, the more inspiring the mission,
actually the greater the odds of success?
And a key idea:
big ideas attract great people.
At Boom, we’ve been able to build an amazing team
from places like Space Acts, Virgin Galactic, and Gulfstream
precisely because we’re working on something big and inspiring.
And with those kinds of people
a challenge that might seem intractable suddenly becomes possible, even likely.
Internally at Boom,
we call our first airplane Model A
because it’s the first step in a long series of aircraft.
Overtime we’re going to build larger airplanes
that are more advanced and more fuel efficient,
further driving down the cost of speed.
I believe in a future
where we can get anywhere in the world in four hours for $100.
(Applause)
Now, this is hard.
(Laughter)
But we don’t need to break the laws of physics;
it’s possible.
And it’s possible in our lifetimes.
And when that happens,
we will no longer be citizens of a city or a country,
but we can all simply live on Earth.
Thank you very much.
(Cheers) (Applause)