The Tech demonstrator being tested has three J85s from a F5 That is literally one tenth the thrust of a Concorde with four Olympus engines.
if their plane is to be as big and fast as Concorde it would need three engines of 40-43,000 lbs thrust DRY The most powerful engine available is the PW100 with 28,000 dry and the US won't let PW sell those as we need them all for the F-35.
I predicted they never build a full scale prototype after this demonstrator.
Does supersonic flight even make sense. I'm no physicist, but I think as you go up in speed air resistance increase is squared. So you are just dumping fuel in an engine so an idiot can cut a couple hours off his flight from NYC to London.
With military, the more fuel spent means less time between landings and in air refueling.
Besides, Im sure companys make way more profit from government money on research and development, than production.
Concorde made sense for 27 years, from 1976 to 2003, but suddenly, it become "non ecological", "highly expensive", "carbon footprinting" etc. We have relatively large planet, and there always will be real demand for fast travel from one continent to another. Even for short flights I will definitely prefer to pay more for 2 hour flight, than marinating for 4 hours. And fuck fuel economy.
For military, supersonic speed also made a lot of sense from many angles from passive defence to success of sudden attack. There are no any reason to abandon supersonic flights for military, except the situation where all that "potential enemies" are just an actors in a dumb spectacle with single producer who don't want humans to have an ability to travel fast.
Hundred percent. And governments, suddenly don't want people travelling fast.