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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.
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
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
Concord is a variety of grape. Indeed, there can be some expensive wines out there. This story is about fast planes, however. Maybe you mean the Concorde?
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.
I'm not a Republican and I flew on the Concorde.
I remember most of the passengers being Hollywood types, and Rod Stewart flying to New York for his weekly haircut (no shit).
His article still needs to be voted up, theoretically. So either an editor did it, or enough people liked it.
So, I don't see why he can't submit his own article. Most promotion is self-promotion anyway.
wow AC, way to be Overly pedantic.
Forget supersonic. New York to Tokyo at mach three is still a five hour flight. Suborbital is what I want.
Refrigeration is only for the wealthy. Automobiles are only for the wealthy. Indoor plumbing is only for the wealthy. Computers are only for the wealthy. Going to college is only for the wealthy. Electric cars are only for the wealthy.
Ethanol subsidies are just corporate welfare. Windmill subsidies are just corporate welfare. Solar panel subsidies are just corporate welfare. Electric car subsidies are just corporate welfare. Government backed student loans are just corporate welfare. CFL subsidies are just corporate welfare.
Isn't it funny on how the definition of "wealthy" and "corporate welfare" changes depending on the who, when, and where? There's plenty of evidence that what is now a luxury that only the 1% could afford will eventually become affordable for the other 99%.
Oh, and let's pick on just the Republicans because the Democrats NEVER give free stuff to corporations.
If there is something to complain about with government spending then I can give much better examples than funding NASA to research high speed flight. Researching high speed flight is EXACTLY the kind of thing that NASA was created to do.
Go soak your head.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
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.
I would agree with most of what you say until you get to "Researching high speed flight is EXACTLY the kind of thing that NASA was created to do." Technically, NASA was created because of Sputnik and had nothing to do with anything but the space race.
But ignoring that point. Isn't the US about free market capitalism. Doesn't that mean that those that risk capital benefit from the success of taking that risk? Government funding of the project removes the risk, but Lockheed still gets the reward. Now government funding makes sense when there is low return so nobody takes the risk such as certain medical research, infrastructure projects, etc. But that is not the case with this. Government funding of this is like government funding of an oil pipeline. Surely the private sector can do this on their own.
If one truly values capitalism as an economic system, then how can this be seen as anything other than corporatism, which is basically corporate welfare.
It turns out proof by juxtaposition is not valid.
Also the "Republican" guy is a nutcase.
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.
Aeronautics
aeronautics
ernôdiks/
noun
noun: aeronautics
the science or practice of travel through the air. Especially at High Speed.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
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.
There's plenty of evidence that what is now a luxury that only the 1% could afford will eventually become affordable for the other 99%.
The SST makes sense only over global distances. New York to Beijing. San Francisco to Tokyo. The question is whether the market for a 6 to 8 hr. SST flight is strong enough to bear the premium above the mass market or business class fare for the 16 hr. airbus.
While I agree that there is a lower limit on the distance such an aircraft would make sense I do not agree that it must be so large. A flight from MSP to ORD is 1:20 according to Google Maps, that's not where a supersonic transport would be used.
What might get people to buy tickets is a SFO to NYC flight that takes 2 or 3 hours instead of 5 to 7. But it is more than just the time in the air that determines travel time. What really kills short hop flights and supersonic transport is the wait times at airports. TSA checkpoints, the rarity of flight choices, and how sensitive flight times are to weather and other circumstances makes travel by air lengthy, inconvenient, and therefore expensive.
I think we will see cheap and speedy air travel only when the federal government realizes that their are greater threats to our lives than religious nutjobs with suicidal tendencies. I should be able to drive to the airport and buy a ticket to Chicago on the spot for the next flight that leaves. I should not have to reserve a seat in advance, show a government issued ID, or take off my shoes. I can understand a need for some security, we don't want people bringing gas cans and live chickens on the plane. I'm not sure we should even need metal detectors since I see no need to take people's pocketknives and knitting needles. Pat downs and full body scanners don't make sense on matters of security regardless. Anyway, perhaps that is a rant for another time.
If I can get on a plane with such little hassle then I'd quite likely fly more often. If more people fly then the tickets will get cheaper, if tickets get cheaper then more people will fly. If tickets get cheaper then there is more "room" (economically speaking) for things like supersonic passenger aircraft.
Faster airplanes would be nice and I do believe that there is a market for them but the most effective way, IMHO, to shorten travel times by air is to improve the mechanics of the modern airport, not that of the modern airplane. If we can get that fixed then we might see supersonic flights make sense for not just transatlantic and transcontinental distances but also for interstate travel.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
This is just more disgusting Republican corporate welfare.
From a Democrat administration? Seriously, this is not partisan politics, this is NASA trying to get money for the Aeronautics portion of their name.
PS: If it is American, it is an SST, not some French word. We were smart enough to kill the boondoggle before building a prototype the last time, and you can expect this will die in the womb, too.
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."
All of your examples of corporate welfare ARE corporate welfare.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Concorde was also the first generation supersonic airliner... There were already plans for a model B Concorde which had improved range and reduced fuel consumption. If more of them had been sold to other airlines then there would have been continued development and improvements, just like there have been with sub sonic aircraft.
Concorde is basically 1960s technology and was never developed any further before being retired in 2003, look how far other fields have come in that time? If Concorde had continued development then the current models would be very different.
Concorde's engines were actually extremely efficient, what let it down relative to sub sonic aircraft was the capacity of the aircraft. A single Concorde flight used less fuel than a 747 doing the same route and took half the time, but the 747 carried 4 times as many passengers. The engines were also most efficient at mach 2 and were terribly inefficient at lower speeds.
Also Concorde didn't lose money, BA ran it profitably at least (not sure about AF).
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
It was very briefly Concord because of a hissy-fit that Harold Macmillan threw.
Then Tony Benn (Minister for Technology) put the e back on the end at it's launch.
It is, and always has been, officially, Concorde.
Somebody should tell NASA. From their very own vision statement they say:
What Does NASA Do?
NASA's vision: We reach for new heights and reveal the unknown for the benefit of humankind.
To do that, thousands of people have been working around the world -- and off of it -- for more than 50 years, trying to answer some basic questions. What's out there in space? How do we get there? What will we find? What can we learn there, or learn just by trying to get there, that will make life better here on Earth?
It would seem that funding commercial airline products does not fit with that.
The US is not about free market capitalism. We give lip service to it, the talking heads point out the other party ruining it, but in reality most if not all industries have gamed the system. It is now about socializing the costs as much as possible and privatizing the profits. This is near end game capitalism and its ugly as fuck.
I agree totally. The US left capitalism back in the 1980s and shifted to corporatism, which is the politically correct term for fascism. Nobody wants to admit that the US has become fascist because of the ties to Nazi Germany. But it is/was a most efficient mechanism to have a robust economy. Of course, only those at the top benefited and the common workers (middle class) became more like serfs.
To bad Lincoln was wrong at Gettysburg when he stated "... a government of the people, by the people and for the people shall not perish from the earth..." It most certainly has.
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.
It seems slashdotter's aren't the only ones who disagreed about the "E"
Quoted from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/....
Naming:
Reflecting the treaty between the British and French governments that led to Concorde's construction, the name Concorde is from the French word concorde (IPA: [kkd]), which has an English equivalent, concord. Both words mean agreement, harmony or union. The name was officially changed to Concord by Harold Macmillan in response to a perceived slight by Charles de Gaulle. At the French roll-out in Toulouse in late 1967,[26] the British Government Minister for Technology, Tony Benn, announced that he would change the spelling back to Concorde.[27] This created a nationalist uproar that died down when Benn stated that the suffixed 'e' represented "Excellence, England, Europe and Entente (Cordiale)." In his memoirs, he recounts a tale of a letter from an irate Scotsman claiming: "[Y]ou talk about 'E' for England, but part of it is made in Scotland." Given Scotland's contribution of providing the nose cone for the aircraft, Benn replied, "[I]t was also 'E' for 'Écosse' (the French name for Scotland) — and I might have added 'e' for extravagance and 'e' for escalation as well!"[28]
Concorde also acquired an unusual nomenclature for an aircraft. In common usage in the United Kingdom, the type is known as Concorde without an article, rather than the Concorde or a Concorde.[29][30]
TODO create witty sig.
Very well then. Konchord it is.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Of course my examples are corporate welfare, but people tend to view them as otherwise because it fits their view of what governments should do. My examples of corporate welfare are tolerated or encouraged because they meet some "greater good" for the nation. I can make the case that funding supersonic flight research also has a "greater good".
If supersonic flight research fails to meet the greater good requirement then I can argue that my examples from my previous post do as well. If someone wants to kill the ethanol subsidy sacred cow then I suggest we just line up all the sacred cows for slaughter. Let's get the government out of the "greater good" business and back to things like raising armies, building roads, running a postal service and so forth as spelled out in the US Constitution.
There's one thing that separates silent supersonic aircraft from things like light bulbs, electric cars, windmills, and ethanol. Silent supersonic aircraft has a direct military application. Don't you think that the USAF and USN would love to have a supersonic stealth fighter jet or bomber? I would bet that a number of nations operate listening posts that keep an ear out for a sonic boom to indicate military aircraft are approaching, since no commercial supersonic aircraft exist any more. We can make a supersonic jet that is nearly invisible to radar but we don't yet have a technology that will silence that sonic boom if the aircraft exceeds Mach 1.
There are different kinds of "corporate welfare" in existence. Some are within the powers delegated to the federal government, others are not. We can keep the supersonic aircraft research at NASA, where it will be open to the public, or we can move it to DARPA, where it will stay as a military secret for a very long time.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
In the sense that a limo driver that takes in more than he spends on gas makes a profit, assuming someone gave him the car.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
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.
NACA was created in March 1915. That's a lot of forethought to face Sputnit in 1957.
NASA was created from NACA as a direct response to Sputnit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Listening for an aircraft surely relies on the speed of sound.
A supersonic aircraft is (by definition) faster than sound.
Then surely listening can only tell you that a supersonic aircraft has already passed you and can not give any information about an approaching aircraft.
You know there are a lot of us who take such flights many times a year. There is a market. We know because people paid it for the old SST, which was profitable if you leave out the R&D cost that did balloon a bit.
If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?
The aircraft is moving faster than sound, not faster than light. Put up a perimeter of listening posts around where you'd expect the aircraft to attack and if/when a sonic boom is heard then counter measures can be planned.
For example, if you are defending your coasts from approaching supersonic aircraft then you can place your first layer of sonic boom detecting buoys at about 1500km out from the coast. A plane approaching at Mach 1 will still give you one hour of warning. Place some other buoys at intervals in between and you can detect speed, altitude, and direction and any changes in speed, altitude, and direction.
These same buoys can be listening in the water for surface and submerged threats, as well as other tasks military and otherwise, so it's not like these would be single purpose devices. This idea is not new, I recall seeing this as a plot element in a Cold War era movie which tells me that this has been at least theoretical for a long time.
Regardless if the noise of the aircraft is from a sonic boom or not the desire to keep them quiet is always a matter of stealth. It's just that getting an aircraft that is both quiet and fast is really hard, and certainly worthy of some research by the government to develop better future military aircraft.
Also, we can turn this around. The more we know about how a supersonic aircraft with a suppressed sonic boom would sound then the better we can get at detecting them.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
Good point - initial detection by sound and then relayed at the speed of light. The communications links might be vulnerable but I'm sure they'd have methods to allow for that.
If communication with the buoys is lost due to jamming of the signal, or destruction of the buoy, then that alone is indicative of a potential attack.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...