I thought Concorde failed commercially because it couldn't get approval to fly over the US elsewhere over land because of sonic booms. I know reentering spacecraft cause sonic booms but thought that they occur high enough to not cause the same problems on the ground.
It failed because trading slightly shorter flight time for much higher cost was not worthwhile. Instead, airliners have been optimized for cost reduction and efficiency at high subsonic speeds.
I am aware that airlines today fly slower than 50 years ago, to improve fuel efficiency. That said, all orders except the British and French flag carriers' were canceled because of the overland bans, correspondingly greatly increasing the per-unit cost of those that were sold. I think the NYC-to-London/Paris routes were (slightly) profitable; were there no overland bans, are there really no other routes that Concorde could also have flown?
Not sure why you're getting downvoted, this was definitely a key factor that made Concorde into a niche product.
It's not that customers preferred slower and cheaper flights over Concorde—they didn't, Concorde had very healthy average occupancy rates and operating the flights was very profitable for BA and Air France (they got the planes for free, of course).
It's that you can't fly a 1960s plane forever and you also can't amortize the design and development cost of new models with the only addressable market being first class customers travelling between the East Coast and a couple of European capitals (and this was directly caused by the overland flight restrictions).
It was cancelled because Boeing were late and over budget; by the time they started work on a prototype, Concorde was already being shown at airshows, and the US Senate voted to stop throwing more money at them. Sonic booms were at most one contributing factor among many to that senate vote.
Concorde was also late and over budget. And until Congress defunded the 2707, it had more pending orders from more airlines than Concorde did. Sonic booms weren’t the only reason for the cancellation but they were probably the single biggest reason.
Also, Concorde wasn’t even the first supersonic airliner—that was the Tupolev Tu-144.
I thought Concorde failed commercially because it couldn't get approval to fly over the US elsewhere over land because of sonic booms. I know reentering spacecraft cause sonic booms but thought that they occur high enough to not cause the same problems on the ground.