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BS Blake Scholl On The Social Radars

“One of the most disastrous decisions I ever made was to try and outsource development of a semi-custom supersonic engine to a big established company. And looking at it now with clear eyes, it's just so colossally stupid. Can you imagine SpaceX succeeding had Elon given the engine to some legacy rocket company and decided to build only the rocket?”

The Social Radars · Startups & Venture · November 2026

“One of the most disastrous decisions I ever made was to try and outsource development of a semi-custom supersonic engine to a big established company. And looking at it now with clear eyes, it's just so colossally stupid. Can you imagine SpaceX succeeding had Elon given the engine to some legacy rocket company and decided to build only the rocket?” — Blake Scholl, The Social Radars

Context

Asked about the moment a major engine maker backed out as Boom's supplier, Scholl says the real mistake was ever outsourcing the engine. Boom went on to build its own.

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Transcript

The Social Radars Around 00:46 into the episode
Carolynn Levy

Shift you.

Jessica Livingston

You remember that analogy? Oh, that was in Blake's first podcast episode. So I want to, I want to hear more about what happened

Blake Scholl

there. Yeah. So one of the most disastrous decisions I ever made was to try and outsource development of a at least semi-custom supersonic engine to a big established company. And looking at it now with clear eyes, it's just so colossally stupid. Can you imagine SpaceX succeeding had Elon given the engine to some legacy rocket company and decided to build only the rocket? But so this, I think this was never going to work, really.

Jessica Livingston

Why did you do

Blake Scholl

it? So my original thought, when the company was founded, I was planning not to do it. And we actually, our first employee was an engine designer. And like week two into his jointing. So the company is tiny at this point. We're like four or five people. And he's like, oh, the Rolls engines are more…

Jessica Livingston

Oh my.

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

More from The Social Radars

“If you go by the state-of-the-art GE mid-sized turbine, it's called the LM6000. It is based on a 747 engine from 1971. … Boeing last built a new design airplane in 2004. … The entire time all of you have been alive, Boeing has built zero new airplanes. All they do is take the old ones and tweak them, and they don't even do that competently anymore.” — Blake Scholl, The Social Radars “One of my regulatory theories is that most regulations have two pieces. They have a moral cover story, like we must ban supersonic flight because sonic boom is really bad, or nuclear power is scary. But if you follow the money, you find there's some lazy incumbent that doesn't want to work hard.” — Blake Scholl, The Social Radars