1y ago

NASA exploring potential for supersonic passenger jet which could fly from London to New York in 90 minutes

news.sky.com NASA exploring potential for supersonic passenger jet which could fly from London to New York in 90 minutes

NASA's X-59 research jet is designed to travel faster than sound while muffling the resulting sonic boom. The space agency is exploring whether the plane's tech could also apply to future commercial airliners - allowing travellers to cross the Atlantic at speeds greater than 1,500mph.

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Everyone complaining that the Concorde was not viable doesn’t understand what nasa is supposed to do. The reason Concorde wasn’t profitable is because in order to make a supersonic airliner, they had to make trade offs between performance, efficiency, capacity, and things like runway selection and route selection, and those trade offs made it impossible to turn a profit.
NASA does not have a profit motive, it exists outside of the system of profit. It exists to push forward our understanding of aeronautics and space, they’re not in it to make something viable so they can sell it. They think they’ve figured out how to make the sonic booms quieter and they’d like someone from industry to help fund the next round of research, so they do things like business feasibility studies. (they’re not entirely outside the system of profit after all)
But the primary goal here is to study ways to mitigate sonic booms, that’s the big thing
- If sonic booms could be reduced to a quieter level, I wonder how it would affect the design and operation of future military aircraft, whether they would feel like they were more free to fly at supersonic speeds over populated areas and whether they would fly supersonic more frequently (this could be doubtful because it would use up more fuel and create more wear on aircraft components, driving up fuel and maintenance costs).
  
  Are fuel and maintenance costs something heavily consider though?
  
  for detection purposes, the sonic boom isn't all that important for military aircraft, which are usually detected by light (either radio or infrared) and most of the time they don't fly over populated areas anyway (and when the do frequently, they usually care about things other than civilian comfort)
  tldr maybe but it would probably be like 10th on the list of priorities, it'll make its way in around the edges but not fundamentally change it

17 comments