Boom Supersonic turned a Rolls-Royce breakup into a jet-engine and power-turbine business

Rolls-Royce's board chaos ended Boom's outsourced engine strategy

Blake Scholl describes outsourcing Boom's supersonic engine to Rolls-Royce as "one of the most disastrous decisions I ever made." A deal had advanced to Rolls' board in early 2022, but the board fired the CEO at that meeting and left him in place without a successor, leaving no one willing to make decisions. Behind the scenes, the relationship was falling apart through 2022 even as Boom publicly kept up appearances, including a show at the Farnborough Air Show and new partner announcements.

Momentum appeared to build when American Airlines, following United, placed a pre-order in August. Scholl hoped this would pressure Rolls to commit, but instead Rolls "ran to the press without warning me and broke up with us publicly." He later concluded Rolls had proposed an engine based on a next-generation platform it had secretly stopped developing, meaning it could not have delivered what it promised.

Boom became "unfundable" before deciding to build its own engine

After the public breakup, Scholl says no partner or airline would talk to Boom, and reporters confronted him directly, asking why every engine company said they weren't working with Boom. The team explored several paths at once, including hiring a contract engineering team made up of former Pratt & Whitney supersonic engineers who had quit after Pratt tried to consolidate offices.

Scholl credits a talk by Brian Chesky, describing Airbnb's approach to crisis, with giving him the confidence to commit: "look within yourself and say, what were we always supposed to be? And become more of that." He says this felt like Chesky was telling him to build the jet engine in-house.

"It turns out to be the best thing we ever did." — Blake Scholl

Building its own engine unlocked "boomless" supersonic flight

Scholl explains that flying at a sufficiently high altitude lets a sonic boom curve upward and never reach the ground, but this requires strong "transonic" performance from both airframe and engine — something the Rolls engine could not deliver. Once Boom controlled its own engine design, the team optimized continuously. Rerunning simulations ahead of XB-1's first supersonic flight, they discovered they had already solved the sonic boom problem roughly six months earlier without realizing it, purely by optimizing the engine.

Scholl says the Rolls breakup occurred in 2022, engine work began that June, the design was unveiled by year-end 2022, and XB-1 did not fly supersonic until early 2025 — a timeline he attributes partly to limited financial resources forcing Boom to choose between priorities rather than pursue them simultaneously.

The same engine became a power-turbine business for AI data centers

Scholl recalls that in 2022 his engineers noted a supersonic engine resembles a power turbine because both require continuous full-power operation in high-temperature environments. The idea sat unused until March 2025, when he saw discussion of an AI-driven energy shortage and a multi-year turbine backlog. He texted Sam Altman asking if a 40-megawatt natural gas turbine would be wanted; Altman replied he wanted "as many as you can make, as fast as you can make them." Boom's chief engineer told him the team already had a technical plan but hadn't believed there was a market.

Removing the fan and adding a generator converts the jet engine into a 42-megawatt turbine, which Scholl says is a convenient modular size for data centers, allowing operators to combine units ("that's 24 units") for larger capacity. Boom raised funding on this strategy at the end of last year, ending what Scholl called a "paycheck to paycheck" existence.

Scholl argues hard tech isn't more capital intensive, just differently proven

Scholl contends hard tech companies like SpaceX or Anduril haven't consumed more venture capital than software companies like Uber or Airbnb, but that proving product-market fit is harder because you can't test demand for a supersonic jet by shipping one. He also notes investors pattern-match against history: Douglas Aircraft, founded in 1921, was the last entrepreneur-founded commercial aircraft company before Boom, making the category appear unfundable.

He says living paycheck to paycheck made Boom less capital efficient, since the team couldn't make long-term decisions. The power-turbine pivot removed that constraint and let Boom hire supersonic engineers to work on turbines, something he says a standalone power company could never attract: "No one wants to say I'm working on a turbine, but I'm working on a jet."

Scholl says Boeing and the defense industry stopped innovating, and Boom aims to fill that gap

Scholl traces US energy production per capita to a flattening trend after 1971, coinciding with reduced nuclear buildout and regulations like the National Environmental Policy Act. He argues incumbent turbine and jet-engine makers benefit from scarcity and have no incentive to innovate, noting GE's current mid-sized turbine, the LM6000, is based on a 747 engine from 1971. He also says Boeing hasn't designed a new airplane since 2004, blaming a shift toward short-term financial metrics after it acquired McDonnell Douglas.

He links the decline to a 1973 US ban on supersonic commercial flight and to defense innovation stalling after the Cold War, when aircraft programs became what he calls "corporate welfare." Scholl says Boom intends its flexible, digitally manufactured production to serve as a commercial industrial base that could pivot to defense needs quickly if required, and says younger engineers are now choosing aerospace again, partly due to Elon Musk's influence on the industry's visibility.