cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/10656840
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.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
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).
Explaining the configurations at Friday’s launch event, Nasa’s deputy administrator, Pam Melroy, said: “We made that decision to make it quieter, but it’s actually an important step forward in and of itself in advancing aviation technology.
“[With the] huge challenge [of] limited visibility in the cockpit, the team developed the external vision system, which really is a marvel of high-resolution cameras feeding an ultra-high-resolution monitor.”
Melroy added: “The external vision system has the potential to influence future aircraft designs where the absence of that forward-facing window may prove advantageous for engineering reasons, as it did for us.”
Addressing that ban at Friday’s launch event, Bob Pearce – Nasa’s associate administrator for its aeronautics research mission – said: “Grounded flight testing showed us it was possible to design an aircraft that would produce a soft thump instead of a sonic boom.
In the post-launch press conference, David Richardson, Lockheed Martin’s X-59 program director, said that taxi tests of the X-59 were expected to start around late spring or early summer.
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