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.
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.
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.
The website blasted me in the ass with ads, while simultaneously begging for donations
Yeah but with the pictures on the phones, we actually end up with more picture per picture with this method.
Yo dawg, I heard you like pictures
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”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eC3Fl7Bt4qQ
Nasa has a video up now
Please don’t. We need to be reducing air travel, not increasing it. Go invent a quiet supersonic train or something.
the transatlantic railway is feeling less and less like a funny absurdist joke by the hour
Let’s get started on the Snowpiercer too
What is your plan for intercontinental travel? Increased ship travel, taking a week and burning massive amounts of crude fuel oil? Just cut off the Americas and Australia from Europe, Africa and Asia for non-commercial purposes? The supersonics have mostly been used for trans-atlantic and trans-pacific travel.
Less and more efficient airplanes. Supersonic aircraft will consume more fuel.
Let’s get weird with blimps
These kinds of comments only say it’s wrong; they never make a valid contribution to finding a solution.
The guy you’re replying to or the nonce suggesting we shelve all transportation technology and only use trains?
sailing and solar power exists, and i’m pretty dang certain we could get an ocean liner to cross the atlantic in less than a week with modern tech. Also probably still less emissions than air travel considering how absurly much fuel that uses.
There is a reason the tall masted rigged ships disappeared for regular travel; most people don’t want to take a month to cross the ocean in close quarters. Cruise ships are the closest analog to a long haul jet, and are no better to twice as CO2 producing than the airline travel, and the fuel they burn is the lowest grade fuel oil with the worst additional pollution. If you are moving across the ocean, or even just traveling, most people won’t be able to pilot their own sailing yacht and take 15-30 days to do it.
That is not said often enough, thank you !
I’m trying to fight the downvoters, you were on -3 when I saw your comment.
Looks like it worked, thanks ! My turn now ^^
That’s called a hyperloop, nobody liked the idea.
I think the next innovation will be slow electric powered lighter than air travel. Airships may be the future.
That and these new supersonic planes, they’re already happening. Boom supersonic is currently testing their demonstration plane based on this nasa project.
That’s called a hyperloop, nobody liked the idea.
I think the next innovation will be slow electric powered lighter than air travel. Airships may be the future.
That and these new supersonic planes, they’re already happening. Boom supersonic is currently testing their demonstration plane based on this nasa project. Their next step is to build a supersonic business class jet.
Oh bug off! We need faster travel for a long time now!
Being self centered like this is why we’re screwing up our planet.
The planet is fine.
We’re in the middle of the 5th mass extinction, it’s caused by humans. Climate change is just now starting to actually take effect, and we’re locked into many decades of increased disasters and loss of habitable land as the population careens into absolutely record numbers. I could keep going.
The planet is fine though. It’s not the first extinsion, it’s not the last. All previous ones were caused by some type of living creature as well.
the planet is fine, sure, but do you want to live on the surface of venus? i would personally find that somewhat lethal and prefer being able to breathe the air without immediately dying from carbon monoxide poisoning
So that’s what you should talk about - you don’t care about the planet, you care about yourself. I don’t care how would you feel on the surface of the Venus, I want my fast planes!
need
i agree, we need to invest in more high speed railways
That too!
We need faster travel?
Yes
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.
That’s what we really need right now. Faster air travel for fewer people.
But how else will the ultra-wealthy jet over to their summer homes in new Zealand when wet bulb temperatures exceed human survival in the Northern Hemisphere?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Looks to me like a climate change accelerator for rich people. Fewer people per flight, spending more fuel to go faster.
Pleas explain why you think either of those things are true.
Supersonic jets already exist and use dramatically more fuel to carry fewer passengers. Making them not work this way would be an amazing breakthrough that would have merited some mention in the article.
Because of the high fuel use and limited space, this technology will be only used by the ultra-wealthy and will considerably accelerate climate change. It is an absolutely disastrous use of public funds.
the coefficient of drag goes up exponentially the faster you go. As for fewer people, I used my eyes to see that there’s not a lot of room for passengers.
Not OP:
The more you try to fly faster through any fluid (like earth’s atmosphere) the more drag you face. Hence you need a lot more energy (orders of magnitude more, possibly exponentially more). This equates to more fuel burn.
Also since you are going supersonic… you really cannot build big. Also, these things are quite expensive to build, maintain and run. Hence only the top 1% of folk could afford to fly in these things.
I’m no expert but I’ll take a stab at it. The faster you go the more drag you get on the fuselage that would need to be compensated for with more fuel (unless some neat mechanic helps to mitigate that). Take a look at a conventional jet airplane and you’ll notice it’s capable of holding passengers from nose cone to tail reasonably well due to its cylindrical shape. The X-59’s design has some very interesting geometric features that would give less internal volume for passengers (unless it can be modified to improve for this).
If that’s not reasonable enough then just look at the kinetic energy equation, KE=1/2mv^2. Compared to a velocity of a jet airliner going at 900km/hr versus this plane’s Mach 1.4 (roughly 1500 km/hr) it takes roughly 2.78 times more energy to move a vehicle at that speed (not accounting for drag, energy efficiency, etc.). Is it worth spending roughly 2.78 times more fuel to get to a place 1.67 times faster?
Please explain why you don’t think either of those things are true.
well, that’s 5 answers and no reply from you, i assume you’re busy campaigning to ban short-haul flights?
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.
.
They are still in the prototype stage. If they can prove the physics on small planes, they can scale up for commercial ones.
They can’t scale up without scaling up their costs. Proving the physics is easy (because concorde already did some of the hard work). It’s quite challenging to convince anyone that this is nothing but posterity for rich people.
This design may minimize the sonic boom, but that boom cannot be eliminated. “Artist’s impression” image shows … absolutely no room for passengers. This is a design test aircraft focused solely on minimizing shockwave noise. Any passenger plane based on this design is going to be very low capacity, and wholly unable to pull up to a jet bridge at any airport.
This is a technology demonstrator to understand the acoustics of sonic booms. Passenger versions would likely look very different, just incorporating the information gathered from this project.
Why, that is exactly what I said!
No, you said it wouldn’t work as a passenger aircraft. You sound like a naysayer.
Actually, a lot of people including me would naysay even if it is viable. Because this stuff is for rich wankers who don’t need another excuse to burn down planet earth in their search for the next money making scheme.
No, you said it wouldn’t work as a passenger aircraft.
I said no such thing. What I said was:
Any passenger plane based on this design is going to be very low capacity, and wholly unable to pull up to a jet bridge at any airport.
Any passenger plane based on this design is going to be very low capacity, and wholly unable to pull up to a jet bridge at any airport.
I was addressing this, that passenger designs based on this design may not look anything like this airplane. So the constraints of the demonstrator won’t necessaraly carry over to the actual vehicles.
In order to minimize sonic booms, the design must feature an incredibly long, thin nose. That’s what precludes such an aircraft from pulling up to a gate. There’s just not enough room.
If such a passenger plane goes into production, it would need to be hand in hand with airport redesign, and the aircraft would still have a low passenger capacity. Any passenger aircraft with a reasonable capacity would need to be enormous. It’s going to use more fuel to get to M1.4, which will still keep ticket prices high. That means these will be for wealthy people only, if they’re even economically feasible at all.
The concorde (or the knock off, i forget which) had a nose cone that moved, so something like that could be potentially designed for the new aircrafts design too
Please explain why you think that principles learned here cannot inform designs at scale. Do you think it’s the small size of the aircraft which reduces the sonic boom?
To be fair about the jet bridge thing, I’ve definitely been at some pretty major airports (read “SeaTac”) and gone out onto the concrete to board a small plane. The jet bridge is not a deal breaker
Look at boom spersonic’s jet designs: https://boomsupersonic.com/
They’ve already sold future planes to several airlines. It’s happening.
