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