NASA Wants To Get Supersonic With New Passenger Jet (networkworld.com)

coondoggie writes: NASA wants to put a supersonic passenger jet back in the sky that promises to a soft thump or supersonic heartbeat as the agency called it - rather than the disruptive boom currently associated with such high-speed flight. The 'low-boom' aircraft known as Quiet Supersonic Technology (QueSST) will be built by a team led by Lockheed Martin Aeronautics. It will cost $20 million to develop baseline aircraft requirements and a preliminary aircraft design.

Comments

Re: What's the market?

[ShanghaiBill]

Concorde operated profitably for quite some time.

No. This is wrong. The Concorde never even came close to being profitable. It received $8000 per passenger-trip in subsidies from British and French taxpayers. But as the costs continued to climb, even that wasn't enough, and the politicians decided that there was actually a limit on how much they were willing to tax poor and middle class people in order to subsidize filthy rich Concorde passengers.