Comment by constantcrying

>Standing up a new orbital rocket company was not really an option in 2000.

Airbus is the only company in the world which has actually managed to get off the ground in that market. And only because they were essentially a state run business which were subsidized to the extreme, until they actually managed to get into the market.

COMAC in China is trying to do the same, infinite subsidies in the hope of competing.

>If Boeing can deliver 400 aircraft a year, why can't a startup deliver 6 in the next six years. I don't mean 6/year. I mean take 6 years to build your first 6. Or maybe it takes 12 years to deliver the first 6.

It is not like they aren't trying, but it is extremely hard. You absolutely need massive amounts of funding and an investor which basically does not care how big of a money pit your company is.

One major reason for this is that modern airliners aren't that much of an engineer problem, but they are a gigantic management and integration problem. Typical start up approaches do not work.