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.

  • Ben Hur Horse Race@lemm.ee
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    10 months ago

    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.

  • Landsharkgun@midwest.social
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    10 months ago

    Please don’t. We need to be reducing air travel, not increasing it. Go invent a quiet supersonic train or something.

    • Swedneck
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      10 months ago

      the transatlantic railway is feeling less and less like a funny absurdist joke by the hour

    • Narauko@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      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.

      • llii@feddit.de
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        10 months ago

        Less and more efficient airplanes. Supersonic aircraft will consume more fuel.

      • HollandJim@lemmy.world
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        10 months ago

        These kinds of comments only say it’s wrong; they never make a valid contribution to finding a solution.

        • R0cket_M00se@lemmy.world
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          10 months ago

          The guy you’re replying to or the nonce suggesting we shelve all transportation technology and only use trains?

            • R0cket_M00se@lemmy.world
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              10 months ago

              Oh good, he has too many upvotes for me to assume but I figured.

              It’s such a shame, you’d think these communities would be about how advancement is always good due to it unlocking new possibilities. For example, maybe this aircraft will open up doors in hypersonic flight that could be used to make more efficient SSTO model and get us less dependent on fossil fuels for chemical rockets via traditional means. Or allows materials science to make a leap forward that revolutionizes fusion.

              To just say “why are we doing this?” Is an absolutely insane perspective for R&D and a fundamental misunderstanding of the way we develop technologies.

              • HollandJim@lemmy.world
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                10 months ago

                I think part of the issue is that the fine granularity of Lemmy (or the other place we don’t speak of) doesn’t lend easily to broader topics but instead seems to pull in “only THIS” or “only THAT” binary thinking. Only bikes or only trains or only trams doesn’t help when you need to cross continents.

      • Swedneck
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        10 months ago

        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.

        • Narauko@lemmy.world
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          10 months ago

          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.

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      10 months ago

      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.

      • Cocodapuf@lemmy.world
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        10 months ago

        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.

          • awwwyissss@lemm.ee
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            10 months ago

            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.

            • Aux@lemmy.world
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              10 months ago

              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.

              • Swedneck
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                10 months ago

                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

                • Aux@lemmy.world
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                  10 months ago

                  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!

      • Swedneck
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        10 months ago

        i agree, we need to invest in more high speed railways

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    10 months ago

    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.

    • LibertyLizard@slrpnk.net
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      10 months ago

      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?

  • AbouBenAdhem@lemmy.world
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    10 months ago

    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?

    • GBU_28@lemm.ee
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      10 months ago

      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

      • awwwyissss@lemm.ee
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        10 months ago

        Why are tax dollars going to something that will only benefit a small percentage of people and will cause relatively bad environmental damage.

        • GBU_28@lemm.ee
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          10 months ago

          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.

          • awwwyissss@lemm.ee
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            10 months ago

            I’m happy to fund science too, but this isn’t the time to develop even more fuel-intensive commercial travel options.

        • Cocodapuf@lemmy.world
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          10 months ago

          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.

          • awwwyissss@lemm.ee
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            10 months ago

            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.

            • Cocodapuf@lemmy.world
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              10 months ago

              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.

              • awwwyissss@lemm.ee
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                10 months ago

                “Nasa unveils quiet supersonic aircraft in effort to revive commercial flights”

                Title of the article and this post.

                • Cocodapuf@lemmy.world
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                  10 months ago

                  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.

    • DistractedDev@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      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.

    • Artyom@lemm.ee
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      10 months ago

      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.

    • Steve@startrek.website
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      10 months ago

      Deregulate is not the same as engineering a solution to solve the problem that was previously solved by regulations.

      • PsychedSy@sh.itjust.works
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        10 months ago

        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.

    • Linkerbaan@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      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.

  • blazera@kbin.social
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    10 months ago

    Looks to me like a climate change accelerator for rich people. Fewer people per flight, spending more fuel to go faster.

    • 4am@lemm.ee
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      10 months ago

      Pleas explain why you think either of those things are true.

      • LibertyLizard@slrpnk.net
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        10 months ago

        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.

      • blazera@kbin.social
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        10 months ago

        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.

      • eskimofry@lemmy.world
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        10 months ago

        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.

      • Someonelol@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        10 months ago

        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?

      • Swedneck
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        10 months ago

        well, that’s 5 answers and no reply from you, i assume you’re busy campaigning to ban short-haul flights?

  • AwkwardLookMonkeyPuppet@lemmy.world
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    10 months ago

    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.

    • Cocodapuf@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      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.)

      • Aceticon@lemmy.world
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        10 months ago

        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.

        • R0cket_M00se@lemmy.world
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          10 months ago

          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.

    • Kage520@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      They are still in the prototype stage. If they can prove the physics on small planes, they can scale up for commercial ones.

      • eskimofry@lemmy.world
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        10 months ago

        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.

  • Nougat@kbin.social
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    10 months ago

    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.

    • JohnDClay@sh.itjust.works
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      10 months ago

      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.

        • 4am@lemm.ee
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          10 months ago

          No, you said it wouldn’t work as a passenger aircraft. You sound like a naysayer.

          • eskimofry@lemmy.world
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            10 months ago

            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.

          • Nougat@kbin.social
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            10 months ago

            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.

        • JohnDClay@sh.itjust.works
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          10 months ago

          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.

          • Nougat@kbin.social
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            10 months ago

            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.

            • LanternEverywhere@kbin.social
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              10 months ago

              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

    • 4am@lemm.ee
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      10 months ago

      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?

    • BiggestBulb@kbin.run
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      10 months ago

      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