• 25 Posts
  • 2.62K Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: October 25th, 2022

help-circle














  • I think you misunderstood what I meant by the word modern, I should have worded myself better, but what I meant is that even if prices were reduced significantly to 5-10 thousand dollars per ticket as compared to a current day valuation of the approximately 60,000 dollars that a 20,000 dollar concorde ticket would have cost in 1985… who is able to afford that price?

    It doesn’t matter what technology comes into play, bringing the price of a suborbital liner to modern day airfare prices would be impossible. 5-10 thousand dollars from 60 thousand is already an astronomical drop. What customers have 5-10 thousand dollars lying around for a single flight?

    There is no economy of scale for a niche luxury product with more economical alternatives. You have an incredibly small subset of customers, and dropping the price from 10 thousand to 8 thousand isn’t going to drive up business at all. Especially when a one way flight from New York to Beijing is 400-1,500 dollars, and as has been shown through endless industry studies, the primary concern for airline customers is by far price.


  • I know all this. Nothing you mentioned prevents Chinese companies from making bad or speculative investments. Regulatory authorities are not going to step in just because one company invested into a bunk project that went nowhere. Hundreds of companies go bankrupt in China every week, and hundreds more are formed, as it would be a bureaucratic nightmare for the central economic office to micromanage the investments of individual firms. Speculative venture capital is also not “gaming the system” as insider trading and short selling are, and the entire point is that there is a high risk to those investments.

    I don’t see how you describing China’s mixed command economy is at all relevant to a small startup firm taking a risk on a single aircraft frame. A bird in a cage can still choke itself on a poor investment and die.