Word: sst
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Second, the federal government has underwritten a large part of this cost--and therefore a large part of the risk if the project fails--while Boeing, the company to which the government awarded the contract, stands to make a large profit if the SST succeeds...
...Shurcliff doubts those particular claims, but booms invariably shatter windows, sometimes seriously undermine the foundations of buildings, and have even been responsible for deaths--three people in France died this summer when a boom caused their barn to collapse. Shurcliff estimates that the shockwaves from a fleet of 150 SST's flying across the U.S. alone would do one million dollars' worth of property damage...
...League members base their major argument against the SST on its noise, their success may well depend on another argument--economics...
...SST project has a tangled history, but three facts are most significant. First, it is overwhelmingly expensive; development costs alone, before production is scheduled to begin in 1974, are estimated at 4.5 billion dollars or more, more than twice the cost of the development of the atomic bomb. Each plane will sell for 40 million dollars...
Third, and most important to the League's purposes, the government apparently undertook the project in the interest of national prestige without considering how many people will be using the plane--and under what conditions--by the time it is operational. The government originally decided to build the SST in the early '60's as a direct response to British-French plans for the supersonic Concorde. The Concorde was viewed as an important challenge to American technological superiority, so important that solutions to basic questions about the SST were deferred so that no time would be lost in catching...