Oh, sure we did. Fighting wars in places like that is called "doing things in your interest". Countries that do things that aren't in their own interest don't last long.
" The best infrastructure on the ehicle is an ELECTRIC DRIVETRAIN, there is practically NO ADVANTAGE to fuel cells over ICES and MANY DISADVANTAGES, namely cost and robustness (what happens when your feull cell stack freezes)?"
One word: "batteries". Solve that, and you might be right. But, uh, when a lot of the guys from my old group spent a year at Ford in 1991-92, trying to do the systems work on a straight electric, that little bugaboo kept biting them. After which, people started chatting about fuel cells...
"In other words, if oil didnt exist and we were looking for a great energy carrier, mankind would invent gasoline as the perfect one for vehicles"
Would man then locate all the raw materials for gas underneath the most politically unstable part of the planet, or just bury it somewhere near Salina, KS for centrality of access?
"Aeorspace Engineers are quite capable of designing large passenger jets that fly over MACH 1. That alone doesnt make the Concorde pay its own way."
The Concorde runs them old, old, old Olympus engines, and fuel specifics have come a looooong way since then (think supersonic fanjets). And Concorde was making money up until the crash. Boeing tried the Transonic route with the Sonic Cruiser but decided that dispatch frequency and seat rpm was more important than just 2/10ths more Mach. But I think the real problem with SST's is simply environmental laws, specifically international ones. But mitigating sonic boom is a big research area now (narrowing the footprint, lowering the intensity), and perhaps in the near future we'll see some good results there. Of course, you won't hear the booms anymore, more like a nice muffled "whump", but it won't last long...and the nice little spotted owl will go right back to sleep. I would expect to see Supersonic corporate jets making their way into the fractional fleet not too far off in the future. Speaking of Supersonic Fan Jets, here's a really nice one that I did a little work on a long, long time ago, and far, far away: The TFE-1042!
It's not engineering it's economics that drives the viable solution
And good engineering makes for good economics.
Nighty nite.