Planes that fly faster than the speed of sound create thunderous supersonic booms.
But with NASA’s X-59 plane, that could change.
The space agency plans for the aircraft’s first flight in 2025, an endeavor that seeks to turn the booms to “barely audible” thumps and make supersonic flight possible over land. Over a half-century ago, the U.S. banned commercial planes from flying at supersonic speeds over the nation, but NASA’s Quiet SuperSonic Technology mission, or QueSST, seeks to change that.
“Kudos to NASA for working on this. For trying to find a real solution,” Bob van der Linden, an aviation expert and supervisory curator at the Aeronautics Department of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum, told Mashable when NASA revealed the sleek plane last year.
Though the economic case and demand for future supersonic flights remains uncertain — flying at such high speeds burns bounties of fuel and drives higher ticket prices — it would revolutionize flight. A passenger could speed from Los Angeles to New York City in just two and a half hours. (Seats on the 1,300 mph Concorde plane, retired in 2003, were too expensive for most passengers, at some five times the cost of flying on a 747, which is largely why the plane commercially failed. It also couldn’t legally fly over land, which limited the Concorde’s routes.)
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NASA awarded the aerospace company Lockheed Martin, which also makes U.S. fighter jets, a $247.5 million contract to build the X-59 craft, and as the images below show, the plane is in its final testing stages before taking flight over the California desert. Lockheed posted the image below on Jan. 24, showing burning gases shooting out the back of the engine. NASA noted in December that it was now running afterburner engine tests, which gives an aircraft the thrust it needs to reach supersonic speeds of over some 767 mph.
The X-59 aircraft will zoom at 925 mph some 55,000 feet above several U.S. communities to gauge the 100-foot-long experimental craft’s ability to quell the unsettling supersonic booms.
Afterburner tests on the X-59 plane performed at Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works facility in Palmdale, California.
Credit: Lockheed Martin Corporation / Garry Tice
How to tame a sonic boom
To quell the booms an aircraft makes when breaking the sound barrier, engineers employed a number of design innovations on the X-59:
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Overall Shape: The X-59’s sleek, elongated structure, with a particularly long nose, is designed to “spread out” the shockwaves made when the craft collides with atmospheric molecules. If it works, the plane won’t send out violent shockwaves. “Instead, all people will hear is a quiet ‘sonic thump’ — if they hear anything at all,” NASA explained.
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Engine: The plane’s single, powerful engine is on top of the craft, where the rumble won’t be directed toward Earth‘s surface.
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Cockpit / Windscreen: The X-59 is extremely skinny, so narrow that the cockpit, located over halfway back on the plane, has a constricted view of what lies ahead. There’s not a forward-facing window. Fortunately, there’s a solution: NASA’s eXternal Vision System (XVS) provides a high-definition display of the world beyond. “A 4K-monitor serves as the central ‘window’ allowing the pilot to safely see traffic in their flight path,” NASA said.
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Wings: Engineers built the aircraft with “swept back” wings, a design meant to reduce drag.
After the first test flights in 2025, Lockheed Martin will transfer the plane to NASA. Then, after acoustic testing over California’s Edwards Air Force Base and Armstrong Flight Research Center, NASA will fly the X-plane over select U.S. cities in 2026 and 2027.
Stay tuned. The X-59 might fly above you.
