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Boom: The XB-1 has been rolled out; soon it will soar.

The Concorde, the world's first supersonic airliner, landed for the last time 17 years ago. It was a beautiful feat of engineering, but it never turned a profit. So why should we believe that Boom Supersonic can do better now?

Blake Scholl, the founder and chief executive, turns the question on its head: How could it not do better? The Concorde was designed in the 1960s using slide rules and wind tunnels, whereas Boom Supersonic's planned airliner, the Overture, is being modeled in software and built out of ultralight materials, using superefficient jet engines. That should reduce the consumption of fuel per passenger-mile well below the Concorde's gluttonous rate, low enough to make possible fares no pricier than today's business class.

“The greatest challenge—it's not technology," says Scholl. “It's not that people don't want them. And it's not that the money isn't out there. It's the complex execution, and it's getting the right people together to do it, building a startup in an industry that doesn't usually have startups."

In October, Boom rolled out a one-third-scale model of the Overture called the XB-1, the point of which is to prove the design principles, cockpit ergonomics, flight envelope, even the experience of flight itself. The first flight will take place in the “near future," over the Mojave Desert says Scholl. There's just one seat, which means that the experience will be the pilot's alone. The Overture, with 65 seats, is slated to fly in 2026, and allowing for the time it takes to certify it with regulators, it is planned for commercial flight by 2029.

Test planes are hardly standard in the commercial aviation industry. This one is necessary, though, because the company started with a clean sheet of paper.

“There's nothing more educational than flying hardware," Brian Durrence, senior vice president in charge of developing the ­Overture, tells IEEE Spectrum. “You're usually using a previous aircraft—if you're a company that has a stable of aircraft. But it's probably not a great business plan to jump straight into building your first commercial aircraft brand new."

The XB-1 is slender and sleek, with swept-back delta wings and three jet engines, two slung under the wings and a third in the tail. These are conventional jet engines, coupled to afterburners—thrust-enhancing, fuel-sucking devices that were used by the Concorde, contributing to its high cost of operation. But the future airliner will use advanced turbofan engines that won't need afterburners.

Another difference from yesteryear is in the liberal use of virtual views of the aircraft's surroundings. The Concorde, optimized as it was for speed, was awkward during takeoff and landing, when the wings had to be angled upward to provide sufficient lift at low speeds. To make sure the pilot had a good view of the runway, the plane thus needed a “drooping" nose, which was lowered at these times. But the XB-1 can keep a straight face because it relies instead on cameras and cockpit monitors to make the ground visible.

To speed the design process, the engineers had recourse not only to computer modeling but also to 3D printing, which lets them prototype a part in hours, revise it, and reprint it. Boom uses parts made by Stratasys, an additive-­manufacturing company, which uses a new laser system from Velo 3D to fuse titanium powder into objects with intricate internal channels, both to save weight and allow the passage of cooling air.

Perhaps Scholl's most debatable claim is that there's a big potential market for Mach-plus travel out there. If speed were really such a selling point, why have commercial airliners actually slowed down a bit since the 1960s? It's not that today's planes are pokier—even now, a pilot will routinely make up lost time simply by opening the throttle. No, today's measured pace is a business decision: Carriers traded speed against fuel consumption because the market demanded low fares.

Scholl insists there are people who have a genuine need for speed. He cites internal market surveys suggesting that most business travelers would buy a supersonic flight at roughly the same price as business class, and he argues that still more customers might pop up once supersonic travel allowed you to, say, fly from New York to ­London in 3.5 hours, meet with associates, then get back home in time to sleep in your own bed.

Why not go after the market for business jets, then? Because Scholl has Elon Musk–like ambitions: He says that once business travel gets going, the unit cost of manufacturing will fall, further lowering fares and inducing even mere tourists to break the sound barrier. That, he argues, is why he's leaving the market for supersonic business planes—those having 19 seats or less—to the likes of Virgin Galactic and Aerion Supersonic.

Boom's flights will be between coastal cities, because overwater routes inflict no supersonic booms on anyone except the fish. So we're talking about a niche within a niche. Still, overwater flight is a big and profitable slice of the pie, and it's precisely on such long routes that speed matters the most.

This article appears in the January 2021 print issue as “Supersonic Travel Returns."

This article was updated on 5 January 2021.

Philip E. Ross is a senior editor at IEEE Spectrum. His interests include transportation, energy storage, AI, and the economic aspects of technology. He has a master's degree in international affairs from Columbia University and another, in journalism, from the University of Michigan.

So here we are in 2022 and where is the test flight?

The company’s Earth-2 supercomputer is taking on climate change

Kathy Pretz is editor in chief for The Institute, which covers all aspects of IEEE, its members, and the technology they're involved in. She has a bachelor's degree in applied communication from Rider University, in Lawrenceville, N.J., and holds a master's degree in corporate and public communication from Monmouth University, in West Long Branch, N.J.

Nvidia’s CTO Michael Kagan is an IEEE senior member.

In 2019 Michael Kagan was leading the development of accelerated networking technologies as chief technology officer at Mellanox Technologies, which he and eight colleagues had founded two decades earlier. Then in April 2020 Nvidia acquired the company for US $7 billion, and Kagan took over as CTO of that tech goliath—his dream job.

Nvidia is headquartered in Santa Clara, Calif., but Kagan works out of the company’s office in Israel.

At Mellanox, based in Yokneam Illit, Israel, Kagan had overseen the development of high-performance networking for computing and storage in cloud data centers. The company made networking equipment such as adapters, cables, and high-performance switches, as well as a new type of processor, the DPU. The company’s high-speed InfiniBand products can be found in most of the world’s fastest supercomputers, and its high-speed Ethernet products are in most cloud data centers, Kagan says.

The IEEE senior member’s work is now focused on integrating a wealth of Nvidia technologies to build accelerated computing platforms, whose foundation are three chips: the GPU, the CPU, and the DPU, or data-processing unit. The DPU can support the ability to offload, accelerate, and isolate data center workloads, reducing CPU and GPU workloads.

“At Mellanox we worked on the data center interconnect, but at Nvidia we are connecting state-of-the-art computing to become a single unit of computing: the data center,” Kagan says. Interconnects are used to link multiple servers and combine the entire data center into one, giant computing unit.

“I have access and an open door to Nvidia technologies,” he says. “That’s what makes my life exciting and interesting. We are building the computing of the future.”

Kagan was born in St. Petersburg, Russia—then known as Leningrad. After he graduated high school in 1975, his family moved to Israel. As with many budding engineers, his curiosity led him to disassemble and reassemble things to figure out how they worked. And, with many engineers in the family, he says, pursuing an engineering career was an easy decision.

He attended the Technion, Israel’s Institute of Technology, because “it was one of the best engineering universities in the world,” he says. “The reason I picked electrical engineering is because it was considered to be the best faculty in the Technion.”

Kagan graduated in 1980 with a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering. He joined Intel in Haifa, Israel, in 1983 as a design engineer and eventually relocated to the company’s offices in Hillsboro, Ore., where he worked on the 80387 floating-point coprocessor. A year later, after returning to Israel, Kagan served as an architect of the i8060XP vector processor and then led and managed design of the Pentium MMX microprocessor.

During his 16 years at Intel, he worked his way up to chief architect. In 1999 he was preparing to move his family to California, where he would lead a high-profile project for the company. Then a former coworker at Intel, Eyal Waldman, asked Kagan to join him and five other acquaintances to form Mellanox.

Alma mater: Technion, Israel’s Institute of Technology, Tel Aviv

Kagan had been turning down offers to join startups nearly every week, he recalls, but Mellanox, with its team of cofounders and vision, drew him in. He says he saw it as a “compelling adventure, an opportunity to build a company with a culture based on the core values I grew up on: excellence, teamwork, and commitment.”

During his more than 21 years there, he said, he had no regrets.

“It was one of the greatest decisions I’ve ever made,” he says. “It ended up benefiting all aspects of my life: professionally, financially—everything.”

InfiniBand, the startup’s breakout product, was designed for what today is known as cloud computing, Kagan says.

“We took the goodies of InfiniBand and bolted them on top of the standard Ethernet,” he says. “As a result, we became the vendor of the most advanced network for high-performance computing. More than half the machines at the top 500 computer companies use the Mellanox interconnect, now the Nvidia interconnect.

“Most of the cloud providers, such as Facebook, Azure, and Alibaba, use Nvidia’s networking and compute technologies. No matter what you do on the Internet, you’re most likely running through the chip that we designed.”

Kagan says the partnership between Mellanox and Nvidia was “natural,” as the two companies had been doing business together for nearly a decade.

“We delivered quite a few innovative solutions as independent companies,” he says.

One of Kagan's key priorities is Nvidia’s Bluefield DPU. The data center infrastructure on a chip offloads, accelerates, and isolates a variety of networking, storage, and security services.Nvidia

As CTO of Nvidia for the past two years, Kagan has shifted his focus from pure networking to the integration of multiple Nvidia technologies including building BlueField data-processing units and the Omniverse real-time graphics collaboration platform.

He says Nvidia’s vision for the data center of the future is based on its three chips: CPU, DPU, and GPU.

“These three pillars are connected with a very efficient and high-performance network that was originally developed at Mellanox and is being further developed at Nvidia,” he says.

Development of the BlueField DPUs is now a key priority for Nvidia. It is a data center infrastructure on a chip, optimized for high-performance computing. It also offloads, accelerates, and isolates a variety of networking, storage, and security services.

“In the data center, you have no control over who your clients are,” Kagan says. “It may very well happen that a client is a bad guy who wants to penetrate his neighbors’ or your infrastructure. You’re better off isolating yourself and other customers from each other by having a segregated or different computing platform run the operating system, which is basically the infrastructure management, the resource management, and the provisioning.”

Kagan is particularly excited about the Omniverse, a new Nvidia product that uses Pixar’s Universal Scene Description software for creating virtual worlds—what has become known as the metaverse. Kagan describes the 3D platform as “creating a world by collecting data and making a physically accurate simulation of the world.”

Car manufacturers are using the Omniverse to test-drive autonomous vehicles. Instead of physically driving a car on different types of roads under various conditions, data about the virtual world can be generated to train the AI models.

“You can create situations that the car has to handle in the real world but that you don’t want it to meet in the real world, like a car crash,” Kagan says. “You don’t want to crash the car to train the model, but you do need to have the model be able to handle hazardous conditions on the road.”

Kagan joined IEEE in 1997. He says membership gives him access to information about technical topics that would otherwise be challenging to obtain.

“I enjoy this type of federated learning and being exposed to new things,” he says.

He adds that he likes connecting with members who are working on similar projects, because he always learns something new.

“Being connected to these people from more diverse communities helps a lot,” he says. “It inspires you to do your job in a different way.”

The Omniverse platform can generate millions of kilometers of synthetic driving data in orders of magnitude faster than actually driving the car.

Nvidia is investing heavily in technology for self-driving cars, Kagan says.

The company is also building what it calls the most powerful AI supercomputer for climate science: Earth-2, a digital twin of the planet. Earth-2 is designed to continuously run models to predict climate and weather events at both the regional and global levels.

Kagan says the climate modeling technology will enable people to try mitigation techniques for global warming and see what their impact is likely to be in 50 years.

The company is also working closely with the health care industry to develop AI-based technologies. Its supercomputers are helping to identify cancer by generating synthetic data to enable researchers to train their models to better identify tumors. Its AI and accelerated computing products also assist with drug discovery and genome research, Kagan says.

“We are actually moving forward at a fairly nice pace,” he says. “But the thing is that you always need to reinvent yourself and do the new thing faster and better, and basically win with what you have and not look for infinite resources. This is what commitment means.”

Standard handsets on Earth, in some locations, will soon connect directly to satellites for remote roaming

Lucas Laursen is a journalist covering global development by way of science and technology with special interest in energy and agriculture. He has lived in and reported from the United States, United Kingdom, Switzerland, and Mexico.

Lynk Tower 1 launched in April 2022, deploying the world’s first commercial cell tower in space.

The next generation of cellphone networks won’t just be 5G or 6G—they will be zero g. In April, Lynk Global launched the first direct-to-mobile commercial satellite, and on 15 August a competitor, AST SpaceMobile, confirmed plans to launch an experimental direct-to-mobile satellite of its own in mid-September. Inmarsat and other companies are working on their own low Earth orbit (LEO) cellular solutions as launch prices drop, satellite fabrication methods improve, and telecoms engineers push new network capabilities.

LEO satellite systems such as SpaceX’s Starlink and Amazon’s Kuiper envision huge constellations of satellites. However, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission just rejected SpaceX’s application for some of the US $9 billion federal rural broadband fund—in part because the Starlink system requires a $600 ground station. Space-based cell service would not require special equipment, making it a potential candidate for rural broadband funds if companies can develop solutions to the many challenges that face satellite-based smartphone service.

“The main challenge is the link budget,” says electrical engineer Symeon Chatzinotas of the University of Luxembourg, referring to the amount of power required to transmit and receive data between satellites and connected devices. “Sending signals to smartphones outdoors could be feasible by using low Earth orbit satellites with sizable antennas in the sky. However, receiving info would be even more challenging since the smartphone antennas usually disperse their energy in all directions.”

“From a nerdy engineering perspective, what’s happening is that network architectures are diverging.” —Derek Long, Cambridge Consultants

The typical distance from a phone to an LEO satellite might be 500 kilometers, at least two orders of magnitude more than typical signal-transmission distances in urban settings, so the dispersion of the phone’s power would be at least eight times greater, and would be further complicated by the phone’s orientation. It is unlikely that a satellite-smartphone connection would work well when the handset is inside a building, for example.

Lynk Global’s initial offering, which it predicts will be available in late 2022, is narrowband—meaning limited voice calls, texting, and Internet of Things (IoT) traffic. That might not allow plutocrats to make 4K video calls from their ocean-faring yachts, but it would be enough for ship insurance companies or rescue services to remain in contact with vessels in places where they couldn’t be reached before, using off-the-shelf cellular devices. AST SpaceMobile’s is aiming for 4G and 5G broadband service for mobiles.

AST satellites will use a phased-array antenna, which consists of many antennas fanned out around the satellite. Each portion of the antenna will transmit within a well-defined cone terminating at the Earth’s surface; that will be the space-to-Earth equivalent of a cell originating from a single ground base station. The company plans for an initial fleet of 20 satellites to cover the equator and help fund the launch of subsequent satellites providing more global coverage.

The size of the coverage zone on the ground should exceed the limited size of those created by Alphabet’s failed balloon-based Project Loon. Broader coverage areas should allow AST to serve more potential customers with the same number of antennas. The low Earth orbit AST is experimenting with yields round-trip signal travel times of around 25 milliseconds or less, an order of magnitude faster than is the case for higher-orbit geostationary satellites that have provided satellite telephony until now.

Plenty of behind-the-scenes technical work remains. The relatively high speed of LEO satellites will also cause a Doppler shift in the signals for which the network will have to compensate, according to a recent review in IEEE Access. New protocols for handoffs between satellites and terrestrial towers will also have to be created so that an active call can be carried from one cell to the next.

The international telecoms standards group 3GPP began providing guidelines for so-called nonterrestrial networks in March in the 17th iteration of its cellular standards. “Nonterrestrial networks” refers not just to LEO satellites but also high-altitude platforms such as drones or balloons. Nonterrestrial networks will need further updates to 3GPP’s standards to accommodate their new network architecture, such as the longer distances between cell base stations and devices.

For example, Stratospheric Platforms earlier this year tested a drone-based network prototype that would fly at altitudes greater than 18,000 meters. Its behavior as part of a 5G network will differ from that of a Lynk Global or AST satellite.

“From a nerdy engineering perspective, what’s happening is that network architectures are diverging. On the one hand, small cells are replacing Wi-Fi. On the other hand [telecom operators] are going to satellite-based systems with very wide coverage. In the middle, traditional macrocells, which are kind of difficult economically, are being squeezed,” says Derek Long, head of telecommunications at Cambridge Consultants. The company has advised Stratospheric Platforms and other companies working on nonterrestrial networks.

If telecom operators succeed, users won’t even notice their space-age smartphone networks.

“When you buy a phone, you expect it to work. Not just where someone says it will work, but everywhere. This is a step toward making that a possibility,” Long says.

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