In the 60's and 70's, the battle for producing a supersonic aeroplane was held by 3 main rivals, United States, with 2 projects from Boeing, Douglas and Lockheed; Europe with a British-French project and the URSS that was developing in secret their prototype, Tupolev Tu144.
Although the battle was tense, the model from the URSS, the Tupolev TU144, was the first one to take off on the 31st of December 1968, followed by the famous Concorde. Despite many efforts, the American projects never had the change to fly.
Very shortly, after the Concorde first flight, the environment defenders started their plans to stop the supersonic airliner from flying over the American continent, where the most profitable routes were located, claiming that the sonic BOOM was harmful of those who were supposed to hear it regularly, like people living close to airports or supersonic routes. Later rumours that the American industry was behind the plans to stop the Concorde because of their fails with their projects of a supersonic airliner, even there were rumours saying that they were supporting economically the ecologist in their protest.
The suborbital flights could be the future of commercial aviation
Technology was the key to motivate the production of the Concorde, and at the end of the 90's there was a similar situation: technology was able to bring supersonic airliners back to reality, able to fly at several times the speed of sound and at altitudes almost out of the Earth's orbit, avoiding chemical and noise pollution. NASA has been experimenting with new models like the X-43A, created to test the liability of its power source called SCRAMJET. The bad news is that despite all efforts, here were many problems and fails that demanded more extensive investigations.
It was not until 2 years ago when new brands were able to launch new project promising commercial aviation at very high speed. One of the biggest project is the Icon II that will be able to carry 120 passenger at a speed of 1600 km/h with a range of 9000km. It will be only a matter of time until these marvellous machines will be flying over us or taking us on holidays from London to New York in only 3-4 hours of flight.