Future of Technology: Boom Supersonic sets a date to change the world
“When engineering iteration is quick and cheap, many more designs can be evaluated and a much better design can be discovered.”
—Blake Scholl, CEO of Boom
There are plenty of things engineers know how to do but haven’t managed consistently. Supersonic flight. Mass modular prefabricated construction. High-speed rail.
We’ve proven each is possible. The Concorde first flew more than 50 years ago. Prefab housing dates back to the 17th century. Japan’s first Shinkansen began service in 1964. Yet none of these capabilities became the global standard.
So what’s stopping us?
At CoLab, we believe the barrier isn’t engineering talent. It’s how engineering work gets done. Too often, process lags behind potential. Teams are capable of breakthrough achievements, but workflows prevent scaling them.
Boom Supersonic is tackling this head-on. The company has achieved supersonic flight five times in 2025, aiming to reintroduce passenger supersonic travel by decade’s end. CEO Blake Scholl credits not just aerospace innovation, but software-driven engineering practices that accelerate iteration and unlock better designs.
Let’s look at what Scholl and his team are doing and what engineering as a whole can learn. In a recent series of articles and a podcast interview, Boom CEO Blake Scholl explains his approach is about integrating software solutions with engineering practices to accelerate product development and iteration. This article summarizes them. You don’t have to wait for his ultimate message. It’s this:
We’re not going to keep advancing working the same old ways.
Future Technology: What’s really holding engineers back
“Most aerospace design tools and practices are stuck in the 1990s — with lots of custom engineering trapped in Excel spreadsheets and laborious handoffs from engineer to engineer. If something changes, re-running analyses becomes expensive and time-consuming, severely limiting the ability to iterate rapidly.”
—Blake Scholl, CEO of Boom
The pattern Scholl describes isn’t unique to aerospace. In a CoLab survey of 250 engineering leaders, 90% said they had experienced delayed launches due to late-stage changes.
That isn’t a talent problem. It’s a process problem.
Engineers know the frustration of knowledge locked in silos, feedback that never makes it back into the design cycle, and lessons learned that get lost. These are solvable issues. But they require new approaches.
As CoLab CEO Adam Keating has written: “Engineering teams don’t fail because they lack talent—they fail because knowledge is siloed, feedback gets missed, and past lessons don’t make it back into the design cycle.”
At CoLab, we’ve built our platform to tackle exactly this: modernizing design review to keep feedback connected, context preserved, and knowledge accessible.
Scholl’s point is the same. Aerospace hasn’t kept pace with digital tools. Processes are slow, disconnected, and manual. To unlock what engineers are truly capable of, workflows must evolve.
In our own research, 100% of engineering firms agreed they must adopt AI at scale within the next two years. Nearly half believe failure to do so could put them out of business. That’s the cost of waiting. Scholl’s approach shows the cost of acting is far less.
Future Technology: Relearning How to Build
“The magic of software has compounding effects within our engineering team. Great tools reduce rote engineering work, making jobs more enjoyable.”
—Blake Scholl, CEO of Boom
Scholl didn’t start his career in aerospace. This is what Scholl said on a recent podcast, while explaining why he started with Amazon instead of aerospace, his true passion: “I didn’t go to Boeing, or whatever, because nothing exciting was happening there. I went and studied computer science because that’s where innovation was happening.”
Now he’s bringing software’s principles back into aerospace. Scholl has embedded software engineers—often with little aerospace background—directly into hardware teams. Their shared philosophy: invent together.
That approach led to mkBoom, Boom’s in-house engineering software. As Scholl describes: “As our engineering code gets more sophisticated, better engineering analysis methods are integrated into mkBoom. This approach dramatically speeds engineering, allowing small teams to accomplish quickly what previously would have taken large teams and radically more time.”
We take the same approach with our system. We think it is exactly what teams should be doing today.
Another key that Scholl talks about is “vertical integration” which is essentially owning everything you need to build a product. By collapsing iteration cycles, Boom has cut costs while improving speed. Scholl notes: “Vertical integration collapsed our iteration cycle from months to days—and with it, engineering costs dropped too.”
At CoLab, we agree iteration speed is critical. But not every company can pursue full vertical integration. It’s a huge cost to take on. That’s why our software focuses on accelerating collaboration across distributed teams by capturing all feedback in one place, cutting down delays, and letting engineers iterate faster without waiting weeks for disconnected responses.
The principle is the same: better tools, faster iteration, more enjoyable engineering work.
Future Technology: How Boom says it improved the Concorde
“XB-1 is the world’s first independently developed supersonic jet, breaking the sound barrier for the first time in January 2025. It was designed, built, and flown successfully by a team of just 50 people.”
—Blake Scholl, CEO of Boom
Scholl has heard plenty of reasons why supersonic flight “won’t work.” He isn’t interested. Instead, he’s proving otherwise.
In January 2025, Boom’s XB-1 plane broke the sound barrier. Scholl now confidently states that by the end of 2029, passengers will once again be flying faster than sound.
Notably, he didn’t get there by reinventing aerospace materials or physics. His breakthrough came from reframing the problem with modern tools.
As he explained on the Skift Travel Podcast: “It’s software. It’s not about the airplane, it’s about how you fly the airplane.”
On sonic boom, long cited as an insurmountable challenge, Scholl explained: “It’s actually way easier than everyone claimed it would be. There are these physics…called Mach cutoff where the boom actually refracts in the atmosphere. It makes a gigantic U-turn and never reaches the ground.” (click here for a full explanation of how this works).
His overall description of the XB-1 is telling: “This is a 787, 20-year-old technology-level airplane. We shrank it down. We made it long and skinny. We gave it the right kind of wing and we put four engines instead of two so we can go twice as fast. Technologically, that’s it. There’s no new science. There’s no new materials. It’s state-of-the-art, but it’s not past state-of-the-art.”
In other words: the difference wasn’t what was built, but how. By applying new methods, the Boom team unlocked capabilities others assumed were closed. That mindset is one every engineer should embrace.
Future Technology: What to ultimately learn from Boom
“The Slacker Index…measures how much time your engineers spend not engineering and building, because they’re waiting. Waiting for parts. Waiting for suppliers. Waiting for test windows.”
—Blake Scholl, CEO of Boom
Scholl’s “Slacker Index” is simple: total lead time ÷ actual working time. It reflects his frustration with wasted engineering potential. Talent idles not because of lack of ideas, but because of waiting, whether it be on feedback, parts or processes.
His own motivation came from that frustration. “I was yearning to work on something that would matter,” he said on the podcast. “And I kept thinking, why is no one doing this supersonic jet thing? There’s got to be a good reason. It’s probably a terrible idea or impossible. And I just want to know for myself. But instead, what I found was basically nobody else had looked carefully. Nobody had run the math. Nobody had looked at it from first principles with modern technology.”
That line — “first principles with modern technology” — is the real lesson. Boom succeeded not by chasing hype, but by revisiting old problems with new tools.
At CoLab, we share that philosophy. Every engineer knows the power of feedback and multiple perspectives. Modern tools make it easier than ever to connect those insights and learn from them. If technology helps us do that, we should run toward it.
We can’t guarantee Boom’s supersonic program will succeed. But we can say this: their progress shows what’s possible when first principles meet modern technology.
That’s the same belief that drives us at CoLab. Supersonic flight is just one example of capabilities that engineers have had for decades but haven’t scaled. The barrier has never been imagination. It’s been iteration speed, feedback quality, and disconnected workflows.
Boom Supersonic is proving that with better tools and modern approaches, barriers fall. Engineers can build faster, smarter, and with fewer limits.
At CoLab, we believe that’s the path forward for every engineering team. Whether it’s supersonic flight, prefab housing, or new products not yet imagined, the principle remains the same: if engineers have the right tools and connected processes, they can unlock the future.
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