AUSTIN (KXAN) — Imagine flying from Austin to New York in a couple of hours, or even to Dallas in about thirty minutes. A new project launching later this year by NASA could make it possible.
The Quesst Mission is the space agency’s attempt to develop a new supersonic jet that produces quiet sonic booms, traveling faster than the speed of sound.
“Right now, it takes about five and a half hours to get from New York to Los Angeles. If you were to find a plane like this, that’s going Mach 1.4 just a little over under 1000 miles an hour, then you could get there in about three and a half hours,” said NASA Aerospace Engineer Larry Cliatt.
Since 1972, supersonic flight over land has been banned in the United States. While commercial airlines like the Concorde proved that supersonic commercial air travel is possible, it can currently only occur within some corridors over the ocean.
NASA’s mission has developed the X-59. The supersonic plane has a unique design that eliminates excess curves and in the process reduces the volume of sonic booms.
“Future supersonic airplanes are probably going to be long and skinny,” said pilot Nils Larson. “That’s part of that special sauce.”
Creating sonic booms
A sonic boom is created when a supersonic jet breaks the sound barrier. Two booms actually occur when the plane breaks the speed of sound. The first happens when air passes over the front of the plane, and the second is when the air collides after it moves over the plane.
“Thunder is a sonic boom. There’s just a single boom. But for an airplane, you get a boom, boom,” Larson said.
On Tuesday, March 11, Larson and other members of the team spoke at South by Southwest. There, they explained how the plane muffles these sonic booms.
“It kind of gets rid of that startle, that very first boom, and maybe makes it more like a whomp instead versus a really sharp firecracker kind of bang that you’d get from that boom, boom,” Larson said.
According to Cliatt, the bigger the change in shape of the plane, the bigger the shockwave created.
“Every component of this airplane is going to emit a shockwave. And at the back of the airplane you have engines, you have tails, you have lifting surfaces, and all of that creates a very complicated problem to solve,” Cliatt said.
The X-59 eliminates these changes. At the front is a long 30-foot hollow nose, which tapers into wings and the tail. The engine is on the top of the plane, while the bottom is mostly smooth.
Mission details
Phase one of the project is completed. This phase included construction and testing of the design.
Phase two, set to begin this year, is when the plane will take flight. These flights will occur over the supersonic test range at NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center and Edwards Air Force Base in California.
Following these flights, phase three will involve going out into communities to see if people could hear the plane, and if so, what exactly they heard.
“Hopefully, they don’t hear them at all,” Cliatt said.
That phase is scheduled to run 2026 to 2028. Data is scheduled to be posted in 2030. The team hopes the research could lead to commercial bans being lifted and more supersonic planes in the air.
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