Key Takeaways

  • Boom severed its partnership with Rolls-Royce after realizing legacy aerospace conglomerates cannot match the speed and custom specs required for supersonic flight.
  • Blake Scholl brought engine production entirely in-house, making the most complex components like turbine blades and vanes directly from raw materials.
  • Co-locating digital design tools with physical factory equipment allowed Boom to build full engine cores and run them on its own test stands.
  • Building custom propulsion hardware opened a second revenue line: adapting the core engine architecture into 42-megawatt ground turbine generators for AI data centers.

The High Cost of Outsourcing Core Tech

When Boom Supersonic started, conventional aerospace wisdom dictated one rule: airframe startups do not build their own engines. Jet propulsion requires deep metallurgical knowledge, extreme precision, and billions in specialized equipment. Scholl initially followed the playbook and contracted legacy giant Rolls-Royce.

It failed. The partnership collapsed because established suppliers move on decade-long cycles and protect existing product lines rather than optimize for radical airframes.

“One of the dumbest things I ever did was try to outsource our engine development to a big old company,” Scholl said. “And that plan didn't work out. And we broke up with Rolls-Royce very publicly and people said we were doomed.”

The breakup forced a hard decision. Boom could abandon supersonic commercial flight, or it could do what modern aviation experts said was financial suicide: design, cast, machine, and test its own engines from scratch.

Co-Locating Design and Factory Floors

Legacy aerospace operates through sprawling, disconnected supply networks. Engineering teams in one state draw parts on screens, then ship blueprints to machine shops across three continents. When a component fails a thermal run, redesign cycles take months.

Scholl scrapped that model. Boom adopted digital design and digital manufacturing under one roof, treating hardware development like modern software development.

“So we decided to do the thing everyone said was really impossible to make our own engine from scratch to pair perfectly with the airplane,” Scholl said. “So our philosophy is that engineering and manufacturing have to work together.”

By uniting design and production, Boom eliminated the traditional vendor handoff. Engineers sit steps away from where metal gets cut. When a tolerance needs tightening on a high-pressure turbine blade, the design team updates the digital file and the manufacturing floor runs a new physical test piece the same day.

“So we are manufacturing our own engines at scale starting from raw materials then going to the parts including the most difficult ones like blades and veins and then assembling them and then running on our own test stand,” Scholl explained. “And if we want to re-industrialize America, we need to invent the next generation manufacturing technology here and use that to build the most incredible new products, not just try to bring back what we lost to China.”

Controlling the propulsion stack yielded an unexpected dividend. The core turbine design built for supersonic flight scales directly to industrial power generation. Boom packaged the technology into 42-megawatt ground turbine generators, opening a massive parallel market supplying dedicated power to electricity-starved AI data centers.

What to Do With This

Audit your primary product dependencies this week. Identify the single third-party supplier whose delivery schedule or roadmap dictates your release cadence. Calculate what it costs in delays, compromise, and vendor margin to keep that dependency alive, then map the exact talent and tooling required to build a minimal prototype of that component in-house.