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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.
like the Concord did. This is just more disgusting Republican corporate welfare.
More pork for Lockheed Martin.
that promises to a soft thump or supersonic heartbeat as the agency called it
That one flew over our editors' heads.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
they already have their planes thank you very much.
I don't understand why a superjet for rich people is something that should eat a single cent of NASA's budget. If it makes sense, let the private sector build it. There is science that needs doing. Lay off with this vanity shit.
...and what sort of fuel economy will it get?
Boeing failed with the SST, due to anticipated fuel costs not meeting market needs. Similarly with the Concorde, which couldn't operate profitably.
Sure, there are some rich folk who would pay for short flight times, but the mass market is price conscious. The problem with supersonic flight is not sonic booms, but efficiency.
Finally, why is NASA wasting taxpayer money designing passenger aircraft for the civilian market?
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Note that this submitter, "coondoggie," is none other than Michael Cooney, author of TFA. He has a history of submitting his own articles to Slashdot. Is that kosher? On Wikipedia, for example, self-promotion is forbidden.
== KKK.
The regulatory barriers had more to do with concorde being a foreign invention. No reason to block a US design.
Nullius in verba
The only thing any of us should "promise to a soft thump" are our heads hitting our desks after we all get aneurysms trying to figure out how the hell to parse these inane and poorly edited summaries.
$20 million is what it cost nowadays to piece together shredded blueprints and then translate them from French to English.
Why bother with that? The Russians already stole them, just find a KGB guy who needs a retirement.
Forget supersonic. New York to Tokyo at mach three is still a five hour flight. Suborbital is what I want.
With the tendency for government drones to think up "cute" acronyms I think they missed a great opportunity in naming this one. In only a few seconds I came up with a better name, the Silent Over-Flight Testing Jet...
the SOFT Jet.
Not a good idea? Reply with one better, this could be fun.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
With all the fun description in the article I did not see any mention of how many people can fly on this. I was never able to fly on the Concorde, though I have walked through the one on display at the USS Intrepid. Walking through it one thing that I noticed immediately was how small it actually was; it took about as many passengers as a large EmbraerJet - and far fewer than a 747 or even 737.
I don't want to try to oversimplify aeronautical engineering - and I am certainly not an aeronautical engineer myself - but in the current economy it certainly seems that something this expensive will only be viable if it can take a larger number of passengers than the Concorde could.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Even a former NASA Administrator has said of NASA, NO Budget, NO Mission and NO Vision.
Well, looks like NASA just lived up to that by dredging up the Boing SST from the 1960s!
Recruiter: "What's your name son?"
Loozer: "Loozer!"
Recruiter: "Where you from son?"
Loozer: "Loozer!"
Recruiter: "You pass son, step forward!"
Ha ha
Ha ha
1-3 person pilotless, lying in 'coffin' wearing VR headset to eliminate claustrophobia. Use just 25-50g/s fuel (1-2MW heat) vs 7kg/s of concorde (300MW). Small power use=tiny boom noise.
-Small ramjets just as efficient as big ramjets (unlike gas turbines), Small turboramjets have good efficiency as most of compression not done by turbomachinery. Use small gas turbine or more efficient IC engine to fly to altitude and dive to accelerate through sound barrier and ignite turbo-ramjet.
-Enables supersonic flight overland without annoying people (low power/small boom).
-Enables use of efficient designs that don't compromise efficiency to minimise boom.
-Enables use of more efficient unconventional Oblique Flying wing design that is not possible within space constraints of airport due to large wingspans for 100-200 person design.
-No volume/weight wasted on galleys, toilets, aisles, overhead lockers, emergency doors, cockpits. Passengers/cargo can be higher proportion of takeoff weight.
-2-3x as many passenger miles per day per 'seat' as subsonic aircraft.
-Development costs at least an order of magnitude lower (possibly $1 billion), manufacturing costs per seat relatively low (possibly up to an order of magnitude) due to high manufacturing volumes, and over time is likely to result in very thoroughly debugged and safe aircraft.
-Small enough to incorporate a ballistic parachute for safety.
-Cost saving on flight crew.
-No long check-in delays or security required - could be flying within minutes of airport arrival.
-Could fly from smaller local airports. No inefficient hub/spoke design required.
-Maybe possible to use vertical supersonic catapult in mineshaft at airports (boom only propegates forwards) to increase speed further
-8000km range with kerosene, 10000km range with LNG, 20000km range with LH2
Likely 2-4x faster than subsonic flight (less wasted time at airports), at similar or lower cost.
The instant that the name Lockheed showed up, we knew for a fact that this is simply a means of siphoning $20 million of US taxpayer money into the wallets of Lockheed Execs. Before they're through, they'll invest the $20 million into getting $100 million to finished the project "they underestimated the complexity of" and by that, it means that they couldn't figure out how to split $20 million between more than 2 crooks.
Lockheed can't do anything for under a billion dollars. The breakdown is $50 million to do the job and deliver and $950 million into the pockets of people employed entirely by lockheed to suck more money out of the federal budget.
Lockheed is probably the #1 reason we were never able to advance further in the space program before SpaceX and others came around. Lockheed and Boeing have absolutely no interest in building the future. They only ever cared about building bank accounts. When was the last time Lockheed actually managed to do anything related to space without going 20 times over budget and more often than not simply cancelling the project? With how many times Lockheed has screwed NASA, when will the tax payer demand that NASA finds a more reliable source?
Yes I know Lockheed is probably one of the only companies big enough to handle these projects... but make a new X-Prize. Put $20 million in the account for the winner. It certainly worked for space... even now, NASA has been able to move most of their launches away from Russia and rockets are launching more and more reliably every day by a company which is agile and doesn't bitch after every step "We need more money". Bezos will be there before long as well. Bigelow will build space stations. Who the hell needs Lockheed or Boeing in space anymore... they don't even remember which way to point to find it.
So put together another X-Prize... grab the attention of the next Musk wannabe and build a new aircraft industry that is agile and brilliant. Using Lockheed or Boeing is just asking to kill it.
in a nutshell, what we have here is discourse on 'how not to talk about aeronautics & space' and especially not 'just steppin' out to chase after a ride in the vomit comet for reals'
because i don't even
For 20M you aren't getting anything more than a quotation for initial research on potential development cost and a drunken scribble on the back of a napkin (preliminary design).
The end product is going to have a cost per unit well over 20M, to believe the development cost is going to be 20M would be wildly naive.
Look at the cost of a typical executive jet, let alone a commercial jet.
maybe you're jumping the shark on the topic i had read into, and that is the democratisation of information that public visits to places like SpaceX put out there for 'idiot's to be amazed'
but hey it's well interesting r&d talk, and whatever the big government carrot is that the poster is dangling for us mere mortals to feast on is pretty tasty at least.
Last I'd heard, that project went belly up after their initial design work at the Lockheed Skunkworks.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
I can see the headlines now... when a test plan crashes... "Low Boom Goes Boom", and the WIRED magazine headline "Why the LBFD is a BFD" and the Register will say something that is cockney slang that makes you feel stupid, but want to drink beer.
Maybe I blame my concern on that famous paratrooper bread-baking-warrior turned software entrepreneur Joel Spolsky who recommended putting your tech workers in a quiet setting so they can "get in the zone" to get their coding done?
How come we agonize over booms from high-flying supersonic aircraft but door slams, loud, frequent, startling door slams are part of the office environment that no one seems to think is a big deal, especially in a college-campus building?
I seem to think this started in the mid 1980's when office PCs became commonplace along with the concern of them getting stolen from offices. The "U" never had security guards at the front gate, so locking the door or chaining stuff down is your only hope of equipment not walking out the front door.
Ka-chunk. Ka-chunk. Ka-chunk-ka-chunk-ka-chunk-ka-chunk when some lame-oid instructor from another department halfway across campus uses a classroom by your office, closes the door and then doesn't open it again when class lets out. Every person leaving the room has to let the door slam.
I am open to suggestions on technological fixes. There are some ancient Sargent door closers that I wish I knew how to "hack", but there are no instructions on the Web and I don't want to open a screw and bleed damper fluid all over the floor. Then there are the door handles and latches with so much clearance and slop and metal slapping against metal in their internals that I am at a loss what to do.
Ask help from Facilities Management? Ha! Those guys would bang garbage can lids outside your office doors for the pure fun of how it made you feel -- if their supervisors would give them time off to do it.
But this problem appears to be both mechanically and socially harder to fix than the SST, which they simply outlawed from overflight.
The mig-21 is a famous, small, mass produced Soviet fighter from the 1950s. There are lots of used mig-21s, and parts lying around for cheap. Use many of those parts to make the quiet supersonic airplane, that can carry people. How many people will it carry? I don't know. It will probably require a foreign pilot to fly it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concorde
I should add - not only arguing about an analogy but about one I've shown is irrelevant.
The F-35 has problems due to excessive compromise which is nowhere near the issue here with the supersonic transport design.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...