First in a series on lessons learned at Boom on how to develop hardware quickly and efficiently
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—compared to the hundreds or even thousands that would have been employed by a traditional big aerospace company. And we did this with roughly a tenth of the budget that would traditionally be required. People have marveled at how our small team of just 50 people at Boom designed, built, and successfully flew the XB-1, the world’s first independently developed supersonic jet. And we did this with about a tenth the capital as any other supersonic program.
Yet, reflecting on our journey, we realized if we’d known from day one what we know now, we probably could have built XB-1 three times faster for a third of the budget. We're carefully harvesting these development lessons learned for the Overture airliner and the Symphony engine—and our goal is to make both the most efficient large aircraft and engine developments ever.
How? Of course, foundational elements like assembling a small, exceptional team were key—but there are some non-obvious lessons learned. Beneath each of these is an underlying design philosophy that values iteration—and seeks to reduce the cost of iteration, allowing us to get to hardware faster and improve our designs quickly.
In this initial post, we'll dive deep into the first critical lesson: how we build our own engineering software, deploying software engineers into hardware engineering teams.
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.
At Boom, every engineer is expected to code and to leverage AI. We've taken the unconventional approach of embedding software engineers—typically with high curiosity but little or no aerospace experience—directly within our hardware teams.
The culture of these teams is critical, based around a philosophy we call "invent together." The software engineers are expected to learn the hardware discipline they're supporting and build tools that automate design workflows. Similarly, the hardware engineers are expected to learn to code and contribute engineering code within software frameworks. The central goal is to reduce cost of each engineering iteration and make engineering analysis easily repeatable. Additionally, we build software engineering best practices—like automated unit testing and continuous integration—into our hardware development workflows.
This close approach gave rise to mkBoom, our proprietary airplane design software. Initially created in a simpler form for XB-1, mkBoom has evolved significantly and is now pivotal to designing our Overture airliner.
mkBoom fully automates whole aircraft level design analysis, including weights, propulsion, and aerodynamics. We can literally define an airplane parametrically in a configuration file and press a button. In a matter of minutes we have a complete quick-and-dirty analysis of how the whole aircraft performs—as mkBoom flies the aircraft through a full simulated mission (takeoff, climbout, acceleration, cruise, descent, landing). Overnight, mkBoom can run higher-fidelity simulations for a more exact understanding of performance. As our engineering code gets more sophisticated, better engineering analysis methods are integrated into mkBoom.
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