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NASA’s aim to resurrect supersonic travel
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Can the space agency beat the boom to succeed where Concorde failed.
At Lockheed Martin’s super-secretive Skunk Works facility in the Mojave Desert in January, NASA unveiled a supersonic aircraft it claims won’t generate a sonic boom. The technological advancements created by the X-59 are hugely significant, given that non-military aircraft are banned from flying faster than the speed of sound over land – a rule that contributed to the early retirement of the Concorde. The X-59 can reduce the sonic boom to a quieter “thump”, compared to slamming a car door, because its tapered nose breaks up the shock waves traditionally created when an aircraft surpasses the sound barrier.
NASA’s deputy administrator, Pam Melroy, called the X-59 Quesst a major accomplishment.
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“In just a few short years, we’ve gone from an ambitious concept to reality,” she said. “NASA’s X-59 will help change the way we travel, bringing us closer together in much less time.”
There are, though, some drawbacks, including that the current model seats only one person despite being 30 metres long and 9 metres wide. The cockpit, too, is located halfway down the aircraft and, bizarrely, doesn’t have a window. Instead, pilots see through the ‘eXternal Vision System’ – a series of high-resolution cameras that feed into a 4K monitor. Nonetheless, commentators believe this could translate into something resembling a commercial airline in a little over a decade. “The X-59 is a unique experimental airplane, not a prototype – its technologies are meant to inform future generations of quiet supersonic aircraft,” said NASA.
The aircraft will take off for the first time later this year before attempting its first quiet supersonic flight. The tests will occur at Skunk Works before transferring to NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center in Edwards, California, which will serve as its base of operations. Afterwards, the aircraft will be flown over selected cities in the US to test out the effects of the quieter sonic thump on residents, taking in their feedback. Peter Coen, NASA’s Quesst mission integration manager, told journalists, “We’re definitely ready to write a new chapter in the history of supersonic flight, making air travel over land twice as fast but in a way that is safe, sustainable and so much quieter than before.”
NASA, then, is confident. But can it end the tyranny of distance for Australia? Here’s hoping.
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