Copyright jalopnik
Commercial supersonic travel just got one step closer to reality, as Lockheed Martin has just made its first successful flight with the X-59 prototype for NASA's Quiet Supersonic Technology (QueSST) mission. The goal here is to reduce the disruptive and destructive sonic boom down to a much softer thump. This maiden flight hasn't tested that capability just yet; this was a simple, low-altitude flight at a gentle (and subsonic) 240 mph, per The War Zone. Everything went great, clearing this baseline of airworthiness and setting the X-59 up for high-speed tests to come. Even in the heyday of the Concorde, supersonic travel was never allowed overland because sonic booms were not considered acceptable over populated areas. NASA (which, lest you forget, is an aeronautics as well as a space administration) is trying to solve that problem with a more advanced plane design, as opposed to any brand-new technology. The X-59 is extremely long and thin: at 100 ft long in total, the nose alone is 38 ft, and the wingspan is only 30 ft. This dart-like shape helps spread out the sonic boom, dampening its impact. On top of that (literally), the single engine, similar to what's on an F/A-18, is mounted above the fuselage so that its own shockwaves aren't pointed at the ground. Put all that together, and the hope is that the X-59 will be able to cruise at 55,000 ft at Mach 1.4, yet only create 75 PLdB of noise. That's the equivalent of a car door closing. There's a lot more testing to go, but if the X-59 can actually demonstrate all that, then suddenly commercial supersonic becomes a feasible business model with overland routes.
