At 30 meters long, 10 meters wide and with a pointy nose, the X-59 is NASA’s promise to kick-start a new age of super-sonic flights — a plane that would allow people to fly from one continent to another continent, across oceans, in just hours.
With the dimesions of a blue-whale, the X-59 could be a spaceship or a military jet fighter.
This is a “new chapter” in supersonic flight, said the space agency’s Peter Coen, integration manager for the “Quesst” mission.
What are supersonic flights? They are aircrafts that can travel at speed greater than the speed of sound. While they are incredibly fast, they also generate shock waves accompanied by a deafening eplosion-like sound. The shockwaves are so strong, they can shatter glass.
Efforts to roll out commercial supersonic jets — like the Corcorde — failed as they were very loud, too expensive to operate and just inconvenient to integrate with the existing system.
How is X-59 different? The first step is to showcase how the X-59 is quieter than its ancestors, and then get regulators to lift a ban on faster-than-sound flight over land.
They are calling it Quiet SuperSonic Technology — because it’s the stuff that should enable the X-59 to produce a mere sonic “thump” rather than an ear-splitting sonic “boom” as it reaches its highest speeds.
NASA has a 70 year history of studying supersonic flight.
It says it has spend years developing the new airplane with partner Lockheed Martin, using the latest in wind-tunnel testing, advanced computer simulation tools.
Text by: Zulfikar Abbany
Edited by: Sushmitha Ramakrishnan
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