Concorde was a brilliant corporate welfare boondoggle that might have become profitable if the US aerospace corporates hadn't tried quite so hard to kill it by lobbying - successfully - for limited access to US airports.
It helped give Airbus a technological start, which was probably the only thing that allowed Airbus to become globally competitive.
So politically it wasn't necessarily a failure at all.
It's not easy to assess the true economic return on a megaproject, especially one that lasts for decades. Something that looks like a disaster on the profit and loss account can still provide big benefits.
The US space program is a more obvious example. The direct economic return on bringing a few rocks back and developing giant booster rockets wasn't great. But there were significant spin-off multipliers that provided a significant lift to whole sectors of the economy.
If you try to imagine the state of US computing and aerospace without Apollo, and British and French aerospace without Concorde, it should be clear the money wasn't just thrown away for nothing.
It helped give Airbus a technological start, which was probably the only thing that allowed Airbus to become globally competitive.
So politically it wasn't necessarily a failure at all.
It's not easy to assess the true economic return on a megaproject, especially one that lasts for decades. Something that looks like a disaster on the profit and loss account can still provide big benefits.
The US space program is a more obvious example. The direct economic return on bringing a few rocks back and developing giant booster rockets wasn't great. But there were significant spin-off multipliers that provided a significant lift to whole sectors of the economy.
If you try to imagine the state of US computing and aerospace without Apollo, and British and French aerospace without Concorde, it should be clear the money wasn't just thrown away for nothing.