In July, Lockheed Martin completed the build of NASA’s X-59 test aircraft, which is designed to turn sonic booms into mere thumps, in the hope of making overland supersonic flight a possibility. Ground tests and a first test flight are planned for later in the year. NASA aims to have enough data to hand over to US regulators in 2027.
I’m interested to see how this plane performs compared to the Concord. It’ll be interesting to find out how bad the maintenance will be.
Also the criticism and the “whatabout other important things” people commenting here should know that more than one type of research can be performed at the same time. This is an aerodynamics problem. The other problems related pollution from engines, fuel sources, and environmental impact are also being worked in parallel. A planet of 8 billion people is able to work on many problems and ideas in parallel without having one be a detriment over another. It’s not like an aeronautical engineer can be repurposed to be a fuel chemist!
From Wikipedia I see that they plan to get it up to 16.8km or 55k feet high. This means that drag will basically not be an issue anymore at the cost of higher take off fuel.
Very interesting to see how this pans out since it would create direct flights between Sydney and New York.
My question now is about whether the the elimination of drag will save more fuel than getting the plane this high up into the sky.
I mean look, it’s cool that they’re doing this and all, and the idea or a trans Atlantic flight in 3 hours is neat for sure … but air travel is already really damn fast, could we focus on making it less shit in other ways?
Can we get the carbon footprint down so it doesn’t contribute so much to the end of the world?
Can we cut fuel costs significantly so it doesn’t have to be so miserably expensive?
Good news, they’re building a really cool new facility in washing state which uses carbon captured from the air to create jet fuel, the big idea is when the wind is blowing hard and there’s spare power from turbines they ramp up sequestering carbon from their air and the process of turning it into jet fuel meaning they can make use of power that would otherwise be over capacity by creating carbon neutral jet fuel.
The air force tested it in all their engines and it works great, of course it’ll take time to build the faculty and surrounding infrastructure but it’s a huge development, especially as it’s not a hugely complex tech so we might well see it evolved into being relatively cheap to build - maybe even we’ll see airports making use of their vast amounts of surface area with solar panels and creating carbon neutral jet fuel in site - would be a huge infrastructure saving and create more of a market for carbon which could drive carbon capture projects.
One exciting possibility is an experimental faculty in Cambridgeshire, UK which burns biomas to generate power and uses a fraction of that power to capture carbon from the burnt material - it appears to be a really effective way of pulling carbon from the air so if automated construction and management allow us to get the costs down to a point where it rapidly pays for itself while also making power and collecting carbon then we could well see something like that built at every airport in the world.
This would vastly reduce the carbon footprint of air travel to make it far better than other options for long and medium journeys while also reducing cost by cutting the need for hugely expensive oil mining and refining infrastructure, plus they’d have to remove eco taxes from air trave.
Tl;Dr - they’re already working on that, if we manage to make flying carbon neutral then a faster turn around time on jets is also a good thing ecologically and costwise because we could have less of them in fleets meaning resource costs are lower.
Instead of more luxury boondoggles for the rich, funded with tax money from people who will never afford it, how about we focus on decarbonizing air travel for the commoners? Fuck supersonic flight, use public money to develop a hydrogen powered regular speed transoceanic airliner so that regular people can have a sustainable long haul air travel option instead of making the carbon footprint of the rich even higher.
The Concorde was a “luxury boondoggle for the rich” and it failed hard. Nobody wants a repeat of that which is why the new goal for supersonic travel is to become cheap and quiet.
Specialization of Labor is what society is built upon, and it actually allows society to work on multiple problems all at once.
“Engineer” is not a magical term. The people working on improving aerodynamics can’t just stop doing that and switch gears to focus on chemistry, materials, process improvements, or software.
Complaining that these engineers aren’t fixing the pollution from air travel is like complaining that they aren’t delivering the mail, preventing shoplifting, or solving the Hollywood strikes.
Great it’s cool research though and should continue, if you want to bitch about wasted taxes go comment on military threads and comment there where billions are wasted on shit contracts that never materialize due to incompetent base mangers who can’t distinguish vapor ware proposals from real tech. Don’t bitch about scientific research that’s just fucking dumb.
If NASA was a profitable enterprise, it wouldn’t require external funding, and Lockheed and co would be doing that research themselves to keep that profit for themselves.
NASA isn’t like CNSA or Roscosmos in that they don’t make their own rockets. It exists first and foremost to funnel money to aerospace contractors by either directly contracting with them or providing R&D in cases where cost/risk is greater than expected profit.
A similar relationship exists with publicly funded universities selling patents to pharma.
Just because a river flows south doesn’t mean you couldn’t find an eddy in the currents that flows north for a few seconds.
But the water still has nowhere to flow but south. If the cost was less than expected return, these companies would do this research internally. Even if for just one moment, one tiny aspect of the program did make a profit, it wouldn’t change the nature of the system.
But we’re not talking about the nature of the system here, we’re talking about this specific instance.
And I don’t agree they’d necessarily do it internally, sometimes talent is the biggest blocker, not money. They can contract out a team of highly qualified engineers from NASA for a project here and there, when they need it. Hiring people is extremely expensive and having those people do nothing between projects is even more so.
we’re not talking about the nature of the system here, we’re talking about this specific instance.
If I buy a million lotto tickets that have a 50% payout, it would be incomplete if not deceptive to point at one ticket and say “Well you might win 100 bucks, we don’t really know” instead of “the reason they’re selling you those tickets is because the risk and expense is greater than the payout.”
Hiring people is extremely expensive and having those people do nothing between projects is even more so.
That’s still an example of NASA eating an expense of R&D while Lockheed gets the profits.
I imagine the same was asked when jet planes were first invented, now look at where we are.
NASA is likely doing this with tax dollars because private industry has little reason to push forward research that does not yield an immediate ROI. Not yielding an immediate ROI is a very myopic driver of priorities.
They were in development in various countries simultaneously, Spain would have likely gotten there first if not for Franco. Germany did manage the first jet fighter and bomber though, with Britain not long after
Everyone was developing them, more or less. The thing is, the enemy doesn’t usually share their tech with you so you’ve got to develop programs independently.
Are you claiming that the idea of the jet engine, prototyping, and finalization of the jet engine was entirely sparked by what you’re referring to? I would argue that there’s a long line of research leading up to what you’re referring to that would’ve resulted in the questions you’re asking.
Yes, I am. Although the concept of a jet engine was known about for a long time it was only prototyped and finalized for the war effort. Since the Germans knew they were going to war first, they had a head start and finished first.
Everyone else launched reactionary programs. The goal of America’s program was to kill fascists, but they didn’t finish before the war’s end. Afterwards they pivoted to communists.
Nevermind the increasingly feasible steps between the Egyptians and the folks of WW2, I imagine even the Egyptians had some naysayers commenting on the lack of practicality for the little spinning ball. Where was the ROI there?
What would’ve happened if whoever invented precursors, at any stage, of modern jets listened to naysayers whose main argument was “the common man cannot afford this”?
I understand what your trying to say, I just don’t think it’s true. The capitalist class came up with the intermediate steps, for profit, during the industrial revolution.
I don’t think NASA sells their research, pretty much anyone can take it and make their own variant. So it’ll probably be an aviation startup that will try to run it like a tech company, collect a billion dollars and deliver vaporware (or if we’re lucky, something extremely dangerous like the oceangate sub) before eventually going bankrupt.
NASA does a lot of aviation experiments actually. They’re not making an airliner, they’re just making a test vehicle to learn how to reduce sonic boom noise.
We can tell it’s already effecting you by trying to suggest nasa is a waste, when we spend 100 times it’s budget on wasted military contracts or the fact we do have a tax bracket that allows someone to even become a billionaire instead of taking back excessive wealth stolen from workers in predatory labor markets. There are other areas we should be getting this money for the public and it sure as hell shouldn’t be from aeronautic or space research ffs.
Also NASA has created endless bits of research that benefit everyone and the economy, the fact I’m typing this from my phone is only really possible because NASA ‘wasted’ money going to space.
It would still take you 2-3 days, assuming normal operation with stops along the way. If the fastest train that exists on the planet right now ran from NYC to L.A. and was able to go from 0 to top speed instantly, and maintain that speed the entire trip, it would still take 10 hours to get there. Trains don’t operate that way though, so realistically it’s 3 days worth of travel. It’s almost 3000 miles to cross the USA.
Just because buses and trains don’t make sense for trans continental journeys, doesn’t mean they can’t be used for shorter journeys. There’s a bunch of areas in North America where is does make sense and could eliminate many flights.
That’s true. They’re talking about building a high speed rail from Portland to Seattle right now, and I think that would be awesome. Decades ago California spent billions to build a high speed rail from Fresno to San Francisco, which would have solved a lot of problems for both cities, but as far as I know, they never even laid a single mile of track.
There are technologies already starting to roll out which will make flying the least ecologically damaging means of public transport for long and medium length journeys, I wrote a comment about it already but they’re building a faculty that turns captured carbon into jet fuel it’s really clever stuff.
How about bitch about the actual wasteful military spending instead of scientific research into physics and understanding the dynamics of sonic booms. Nasa has like .1% of the military budget ffs.
I wonder if research into sonic boom physics could translate over to high speed aerodynamics generally, to include the useful models for high speed trains.
Because the USA is 2892 miles wide. Even a 285 mph bullet train, which is the fastest train in the world, would take 10 hours to cross the United States, and that’s at absolute max speed, with no stops, which isn’t how trains operate. Realistically it would take a few days to cross the United States, as opposed to 5 hours in an airplane, or a couple of hours in a hypersonic jet. Trains are great, especially for more relaxed travel, or moving lots of goods, but they’re not a final solution for countries this size.
Interesting thought; I’d hope so. Maybe some material physics/chemistry research that makes some stuff cheaper for trains (I’m not an engineer so totally out of my depth here).
Efficient High-speed rails are already possible and have been since the 70s, it’s not a lack of science that stops them from being a thing, it’s a lack of desire from government officials being paid by private interests to do things less efficiently because people are getting paid.
Still, someone has to finance it. In the worst case you have a high speed rail network with high operationg costs that nobody uses, but taxpayers still need to maintain.
It’s amazing how out of touch with reality so many people on this platform are. It honestly feels like there are a lot more kids on Lemmy than there were on Reddit. They’re smart kids, but kids lack real world experience, and it shows.
The freight railroads aren’t good at what they do. It would be much easier to run passenger services (and improve their own operations) if they ran trains that actually fit within their own passing loops, but they desperately want to reduce the number of people they have to pay to run their trains. Both would also benefit from better maintained infrastructure with upgrades such as electrification and more double tracking, but the railroads don’t want to spend any more money than absolutely necessary to keep their (mostly) running.
For the EU the biggest issue is all of the national operators being insane in different ways that makes it harder and more expensive than it should be to cross borders by rail a lot of the time.
But we already had the Concorde… It stopped flying due to fuel costs and limited flight paths only allowed over oceans, no super sonic flying over land. Hopefully NASA has fixed these issues…
That's what they're trying to solve, the sonic boom. The spike in the front is supposed to reduce the boom, which hopefully leads to legal supersonic overland travel.
However, time and time again, the market showed that people value the price tag over anything else. The Concorde didn't make it, the A380 isn't looking good. Anything with a high operational cost doesn't seem like it would last, especially with push for greener tech.
yeah i experienced a sonic boom once, obama came to seattle and a small private plane accidentally entered the restricted airspace, that was one too many. even if its lessend its not gonna be pleasant to be under.
They’re promising a perceived 75 dB level, equivalent to the volume of a dishwasher. Sonic booms are normally about 110 dB or about a jackhammer or a rock concert
And it’s not like you’d hear it all the time, just once in a while and only if you’re in the flight path.
will it reduce the air pressure difference on the ground? i was in a building and it moved. i felt it. sound is only one problem.
Overpressure
Sonic booms are measured in pounds per square foot
of overpressure. This is the amount of the increase
over the normal atmospheric pressure which surrounds
us (2,116 psf/14.7 psi).
At one pound overpressure, no damage to structures
would be expected.
Overpressures of 1 to 2 pounds are produced by
supersonic aircraft flying at normal operating altitudes. Some public reaction could be expected between 1.5 and 2 pounds.
Rare minor damage may occur with 2 to 5 pounds
overpressure.
As overpressure increases, the likelihood of structural
damage and stronger public reaction also increases.
Tests, however, have shown that structures in good
condition have been undamaged by overpressures of
up to 11 pounds.
Sonic booms produced by aircraft flying supersonic at
altitudes of less than 100 feet, creating between 20 and
144 pounds overpressure, have been experienced by
humans without injury.
Damage to eardrums can be expected when overpressures reach 720 pounds. Overpressures of 2160
pounds would have to be generated to produce lung
damage.
I guarantee it will be louder than that. Unless the flight path is directly over a senator’s house or an historic golf club (where donors play), it will be too loud.
Literally make the flight path over the richest part of town or I won’t believe it.
NASA has no control of flight paths. The FAA also doesn’t specify sonic-boom allowed flight paths. They just outright ban it (with a few exceptions) for any boom that could reach anywhere in the US.
FAA also doesn’t want to deal with people complaining about sonic booms like they did back in the 50s when this all started (they received tens of thousands of complaints) so they have an interest in making sure NASA lives up to their promises.
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