62 years ago, on this day, June 5th, 1963, the administration of US President John F Kennedy,
“ announced a large-scale cooperative program between industry and government to build a commercial passenger aircraft that would travel faster than the speed of sound…. Over the course of the 1960s, however, Kennedy-era military-industrial aerospace projects fell out of favor with an increasingly skeptical public, and support for the SST waned.”
(Howe, 2014:45)
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 319ppm. As of 2025 it is 4xxppm, but check here for daily measures.
The broader context was the Cold War had almost gotten rather hot in October the previous year, and the generals wanted as many toys as they could get their hands on.
The specific context was the dreams of limitless power were still so very powerful – it would take defeat in Vietnam and a lot of “impact science” (not yet named so) for that to change – and really, it still hasn’t (Mars colonies, anyone?).
What I think we can learn from this is that while Kennedy was at the same time doing a certain amount of hand-wringing about “Conservation” things like SST, a Boeing dream in part, had a lot of weight. Politicians and their testeria eh?
What happened next The SST – with its sonic boom and ozone implications became a VERY hot potato. Eventually Congress imposed a moratorium (this was after Boeing had realised their blueprints were non-starters, and Concorde was having test flights). The Congress moratorium so enraged right-wingers that the Heritage Foundation (Project 2025 guys) got set up…
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What do you think? Does this pass the ‘so what?’ threshold? Have I got facts wrong? Interpretation wrong? Please do comment on this post, unless you are a denialist, obvs.
Also on this day: