Technology
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High speed rail can be cost effective. High speed planes however cannot.
The amount of air resistance at higher speeds is insane. Instead of relying on wing lift for efficiency the entire aircraft has to remove all wings and it literally becomes a missile.
Efficient planes have long wings to create lift and cruise at lower speeds. This is the opposite where all lift is generated from the fuel.
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.