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In launch event on Friday, agency shared plans to test over US cities to see if it’s quiet enough by engaging ‘the people below’
Nasa has unveiled a one-of-a-kind quiet supersonic aircraft as part of the US space agency’s mission to make commercial supersonic flight possible.
In a joint ceremony with Lockheed Martin Skunk Works in Palmdale, California, on Friday, Nasa revealed the X-59, an experimental aircraft that is expected to fly at 1.4 times the speed of sound – or 925mph (1,488 km/h).
The aircraft, which stands at 99.7ft (30.4 metres) long and 29.5ft wide, has a thin, tapered nose that comprises nearly a third of the aircraft’s full length – a feature designed to disperse shock waves that would typically surround supersonic aircraft and result in sonic booms.
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pretty neat that the image of the plane for the article is shot from so close that you can only see 1/3 of it, but to be fair it does include the screens of people’s phones as they take a picture of the thing. kind of like going to a concert.
The website blasted me in the ass with ads, while simultaneously begging for donations
It’s proportions make it hard to frame it for an article headline picture. This is cropped to show a colorful array of the fun parts: cockpit, landing gear engine intake with a clear X-59. It’s like trying to make a cover picture feature a pencil.
This other article uses a dramatic background to fill the space. It’s from NASA though, so they’re not limited to the conference. They don’t have to have their own picture to say “I was there”
Haha I wonder about the ungodly amount of fuel it burns.
Saudi Arabia is going to love this news.
https://theguardian.com/environment/2023/nov/27/revealed-saudi-arabia-plan-poor-countries-oil
Old news now. The evil in the hearts of humans will be our collective undoing.
I’m not so sure it’s their hearts, those are full of blood. It’s more like a system that incentivises people to make immortal decisions for profit.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eC3Fl7Bt4qQ
Nasa has a video up now
Now the fuel efficiency problem needs to be reckened with. The sonic boom was the main reason why supersonic planes were shelved but poor fuel efficiency was the other 800 pound gorilla in the room.
Pierce said the X-59’s job would be to “collect data from the people below, determine if that sonic thump is acceptable and then turn the data over to US and international regulatory authorities in hopes to then lift that ban”.
Why can’t commercial airlines fund the project, then? Why is NASA investing public money to deregulate private industry?
Huh? NASA is providing thought leadership to expand the possibilities of human travel, but has no interest in running a commercial airline.
Many technologies you use every day started as NASA research
Why are tax dollars going to something that will only benefit a small percentage of people and will cause relatively bad environmental damage.
Are you aware what NASA stands for?
I personally am happy some of my tax dollars go towards advancing science.
The reason we have issues in society…homeless people, lack of universal healthcare, etc is not because we find NASA, it’s via mismanagement of the funds we have, and bad politics, etc. None of which are NASAs fault or purpose.
NASA does a huge amount of environmental research as well. But part of their team focuses on experimental flight, and this is a product of that.
I’m happy to fund science too, but this isn’t the time to develop even more fuel-intensive commercial travel options.
Nasa is always researching supersonic/hypersonic travel, that’s what a space agency does.
It would be hard to list ALL of the ways that research benefits you.
Yeah but it doesn’t usually research how to make commercials transportation way less fuel efficient.
“The New York Times looked at the same comparison in the late 1970s when rising fuel prices were causing major difficulties for Concorde. It concluded that Concorde used four times the amount of fuel of the 747, based on a New York to Paris flight. These comparisons are even worse when looking on a per passenger basis – Concorde, of course, only took 100 passengers, compared to well over 400 on the 747-400.” source
Planes are already a bad source of pollution, this makes it 8 times worse. Awful.
It’s researching how to make “any” supersonic vehicle quieter… You know NASA does have a whole fleet of supersonic vehicles, but they can’t operate them anywhere over land in the US. It’s literally illegal to fly a supersonic vehicle over populated areas (most of the US).
You act like this technology is only applicable to commercial passenger liners, but it’s literally all supersonic aircraft.
“Nasa unveils quiet supersonic aircraft in effort to revive commercial flights”
Title of the article and this post.
Ohh, does the headline changes all the facts in my statement?
These are advances in physics. Understanding the sound created by sonic booms is really understanding the nature of airflow and shockwaves in the supersonic regime. This is critical scientific development for NASA this could lead to more efficient rockets, and space planes as well as more efficient engines.
Did you know that the F1 engine that powered the Saturn V suffered from 1 major problem? Combustion instability, due to acoustic disturbances in the combustion chamber. Because of this they had to turn shut down at least 1 engine early in every launch. Understanding supersonic shockwaves is exactly the kind of thing that could have solved that problem.
A headline changes nothing.
The first A in NASA is aeronautics. They just do the science. I would say deregulation is a fairly strong word here. It’s more like they’d be updating the laws to reflect modern tech.
This is literally how every expensive R&D project gets done. Private companies won’t dump this kind of money into good R&D, but the government will because they don’t care about ROI.
Except this ignores the existence of bell labs, you know the private R&D lab with ten Nobel prizes and a laundry list of inventions that quite literally shaped our modern world.
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Deregulate is not the same as engineering a solution to solve the problem that was previously solved by regulations.
The assumption that all regulations are good now, and in perpetuity, is the issue here. Deregulation of shite or outdated regs is a good thing ffs.
It’s insane to me that the word seems so opaque to people.
This is probably defense spending, tbh.
American is a Socialist country for those wealthy enough.
This is outsourced to Lockheed Martin so it’s basically just using Nasa to fund the military even more. There is nothing commercially interesting about this. It’s all military planes.
Well, this might be missile research.
I would be disappointed if the prototype isn’t nicknamed Pinocchio.
This is pretty amazing! This thing could take people from Los Angeles to NYC in 3 hours. The science behind the noise baffling is really cool.
Wouldn’t suborbital flight be a lot more fuel efficient?
Not likely. Jet engines are crazy efficient compared to rockets.
And as far as I know there are only 2 or 3 companies who are even attempting to make a fully reusable rocket, and it’s really hard.
(Those companies being SpaceX and Stoke aerospace, but Stoke is a long way off. Relativity space was going to do full reusability, but I think they dropped the plan.)
Wasn’t somebody developing an engine with two modes, an air breathing one and a rocket one?
Because suborbital flight is nowhere as hard as reaching a stable orbit (even LEO) and if your vehicle can operate in air-breathing mode most of the way up it needs not be anywhere as heavy since it doesn’t need to take that much oxidizer along.
What I’m talking about here is a problem around the same order of complexity as an intercontinental ballistic missile, not the same order of complexity as a space shuttle.
S.A.B.E.R. was the project name I believe, synergetic air breathing rocket engine.
Basically you intake air at lower speeds and transition to LOX when necessary.
