Blake Scholl

You can't find 100 people that want to drop 20 grand to go somewhere all at the same time.

That's why they only ever had 14.

I think it was not the company.

The French and British governments spec'd it.

I think this is a big piece of what went wrong in aerospace in the 1960s.

One of my controversial opinions is that Concorde killed supersonic flight.

It never should have existed.

And Apollo killed space exploration.

And it also should not have gone to the moon in 1969.

And a lot of people, and I loved Concorde and I loved Apollo, but I don't think they helped us.

And if that seems like a crazy thing, just notice it's 2025 and we can't fly supersonic and we can't land on the moon.

So these things that we were told in the 1960s were the harbingers of great progress didn't pan out the way it was predicted.

So why?

And I think the answer is that for the first 50 years, from the Wright brothers forward, innovation in aerospace was commercially driven.

You're building a commercial airplane that passengers got to be able to afford to fly on, that airlines want to operate profitably.

Nobody would build a machine unless they at least believed it was going to make economic sense.

Then if you're building military machines, they had to make sense for that mission.

There was a commercial hand saying it's got to make sense, or there's a military hand saying it's got to make sense.

Either way, something's keeping us grounded.

In the 60s, we pivoted to Cold War era national prestige as the motivation.