Technology
This is the official technology community of Lemmy.ml for all news related to creation and use of technology, and to facilitate civil, meaningful discussion around it.
Ask in DM before posting product reviews or ads. All such posts otherwise are subject to removal.
Rules:
1: All Lemmy rules apply
2: Do not post low effort posts
3: NEVER post naziped*gore stuff
4: Always post article URLs or their archived version URLs as sources, NOT screenshots. Help the blind users.
5: personal rants of Big Tech CEOs like Elon Musk are unwelcome (does not include posts about their companies affecting wide range of people)
6: no advertisement posts unless verified as legitimate and non-exploitative/non-consumerist
7: crypto related posts, unless essential, are disallowed
view the rest of the comments
Given that China has high speed rail all across the country, I suspect that there's going to be little market for short flights. I would expect this sort of a plane would go all the way to the edge of space where it doesn't need to worry about air density.
That's going to cost a lot of fuel, maintenance and spare parts. Rebranding an ICBM as a passenger plane is not that big an invention.
The high spees rail is much more impressive as it can be used by the general population. Whereas these top speed planes will only be for the elites.
It's not really an ICBM, it's likely a hypersonic glide vehicle. I imagine people building this stuff have thought of obvious things like cost of fuel and parts before trying to build it. Maybe it will work or maybe it won't, I think we'll learn something interesting one way or another.
I also don't think it'll just be for elites. All successful technology becomes cheaper over time, and it sounds like they're explicitly building a large capacity vehicle here. I imagine it's going to be a long haul vehicle that could go anywhere in the world in about an hour.