In July, Lockheed Martin completed the build of NASA’s X-59 test aircraft, which is designed to turn sonic booms into mere thumps, in the hope of making overland supersonic flight a possibility. Ground tests and a first test flight are planned for later in the year. NASA aims to have enough data to hand over to US regulators in 2027.
Instead of more luxury boondoggles for the rich, funded with tax money from people who will never afford it, how about we focus on decarbonizing air travel for the commoners? Fuck supersonic flight, use public money to develop a hydrogen powered regular speed transoceanic airliner so that regular people can have a sustainable long haul air travel option instead of making the carbon footprint of the rich even higher.
how about we focus on decarbonizing air travel for the commoners? Fuck supersonic flight
No fuck you peasant, we gonna have the rich flying in supersonic flightrs and there’s nothing you can do about it
Flying used to be a “luxury boondoggle for the rich” same with a lot of things that we view as common today.
We aren’t functioning on the same timescale or known factors as the Wright Brothers were.
The Concorde was a “luxury boondoggle for the rich” and it failed hard. Nobody wants a repeat of that which is why the new goal for supersonic travel is to become cheap and quiet.
This is the focus of the Sustainable Flight Demonstrator, so it’s not like NASA isn’t working on that problem too for what it’s worth.
I mean look, it’s cool that they’re doing this and all, and the idea or a trans Atlantic flight in 3 hours is neat for sure … but air travel is already really damn fast, could we focus on making it less shit in other ways?
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Can we get the carbon footprint down so it doesn’t contribute so much to the end of the world?
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Can we cut fuel costs significantly so it doesn’t have to be so miserably expensive?
Good news, they’re building a really cool new facility in washing state which uses carbon captured from the air to create jet fuel, the big idea is when the wind is blowing hard and there’s spare power from turbines they ramp up sequestering carbon from their air and the process of turning it into jet fuel meaning they can make use of power that would otherwise be over capacity by creating carbon neutral jet fuel.
The air force tested it in all their engines and it works great, of course it’ll take time to build the faculty and surrounding infrastructure but it’s a huge development, especially as it’s not a hugely complex tech so we might well see it evolved into being relatively cheap to build - maybe even we’ll see airports making use of their vast amounts of surface area with solar panels and creating carbon neutral jet fuel in site - would be a huge infrastructure saving and create more of a market for carbon which could drive carbon capture projects.
One exciting possibility is an experimental faculty in Cambridgeshire, UK which burns biomas to generate power and uses a fraction of that power to capture carbon from the burnt material - it appears to be a really effective way of pulling carbon from the air so if automated construction and management allow us to get the costs down to a point where it rapidly pays for itself while also making power and collecting carbon then we could well see something like that built at every airport in the world.
This would vastly reduce the carbon footprint of air travel to make it far better than other options for long and medium journeys while also reducing cost by cutting the need for hugely expensive oil mining and refining infrastructure, plus they’d have to remove eco taxes from air trave.
Tl;Dr - they’re already working on that, if we manage to make flying carbon neutral then a faster turn around time on jets is also a good thing ecologically and costwise because we could have less of them in fleets meaning resource costs are lower.
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Just what we needed, another pointless carbon-guzzling ride to amuse the undeserving rich.
america will do anything but invest in public transport huh
How about bitch about the actual wasteful military spending instead of scientific research into physics and understanding the dynamics of sonic booms. Nasa has like .1% of the military budget ffs.
US defense budget was 752.9B for 2022, whereas NASA’s was 24.8B
So NASA’s funding amounts to 3.29% of the Defense budget (about 1/30)
https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/atoms/files/fy2022_budget_summary.pdf
I agree with you, but it’s nice to nail down the numbers
Or it’s own people. Which is stupid, because the brain drain will catch up technology wise.
We can tell it’s already effecting you by trying to suggest nasa is a waste, when we spend 100 times it’s budget on wasted military contracts or the fact we do have a tax bracket that allows someone to even become a billionaire instead of taking back excessive wealth stolen from workers in predatory labor markets. There are other areas we should be getting this money for the public and it sure as hell shouldn’t be from aeronautic or space research ffs.
Also NASA has created endless bits of research that benefit everyone and the economy, the fact I’m typing this from my phone is only really possible because NASA ‘wasted’ money going to space.
By investing into research of this airplane, the bulk of the costs are going to be manhours.
How is paying engineers going to cause brain drain?
We need bullet trains, not more passenger jets.
Actually just regular passenger trains that have priority over freight trains would be a great step forward
In North America.
For the EU the biggest issue is all of the national operators being insane in different ways that makes it harder and more expensive than it should be to cross borders by rail a lot of the time.
You don’t want that unless you want the cost of virtually everything to increase.
Don’t fuck with the infrastructure that keeps every corner of a country running on a day to day basis.
Sounds like you’ve never participated in civil disobedience. Shame.
The railroads should be nationalized and new ones built over highways.
Ok, come back when you aren’t living in a fantasy land.
Price per km of track goes up exponentialy the faster you want to go, which means they will either have expensive tickets or will be unprofitable.
The rail network should be a service not a for profit organisation
Still, someone has to finance it. In the worst case you have a high speed rail network with high operationg costs that nobody uses, but taxpayers still need to maintain.
I swear if firefighting wasn’t currently publicly funded, you’d argue against making it publicly funded because it might not be profitable
Just move some defence budget into the rail network.
Wait, I’ve seen this one
I’m interested to see how this plane performs compared to the Concord. It’ll be interesting to find out how bad the maintenance will be.
Also the criticism and the “whatabout other important things” people commenting here should know that more than one type of research can be performed at the same time. This is an aerodynamics problem. The other problems related pollution from engines, fuel sources, and environmental impact are also being worked in parallel. A planet of 8 billion people is able to work on many problems and ideas in parallel without having one be a detriment over another. It’s not like an aeronautical engineer can be repurposed to be a fuel chemist!
JFC, can we have a carbon tax already?
Whose going to be able to afford this? Air fare is already expensive.
Also, why is NASA doing this with tax dollars?
Is this stupid or am I stupid and missing something obvious?
I’d hate to live in a world where just because something isn’t immediately useful it shouldn’t be researched.
Being able to demonstrate the ability to suppress a sonic boom would be huge.
Nah, there must be a reason to fund research. Then, publicly funded research must align with the public’s good.
I imagine the same was asked when jet planes were first invented, now look at where we are.
NASA is likely doing this with tax dollars because private industry has little reason to push forward research that does not yield an immediate ROI. Not yielding an immediate ROI is a very myopic driver of priorities.
In the west, jet engines were developed to kill fascists and communists. The ROI was good.
I don’t see the parallel
Are you claiming that the idea of the jet engine, prototyping, and finalization of the jet engine was entirely sparked by what you’re referring to? I would argue that there’s a long line of research leading up to what you’re referring to that would’ve resulted in the questions you’re asking.
Yes, I am. Although the concept of a jet engine was known about for a long time it was only prototyped and finalized for the war effort. Since the Germans knew they were going to war first, they had a head start and finished first.
Everyone else launched reactionary programs. The goal of America’s program was to kill fascists, but they didn’t finish before the war’s end. Afterwards they pivoted to communists.
And what of the folks who developed the concept of a jet engine?
The Egyptians? What of them?
Nevermind the increasingly feasible steps between the Egyptians and the folks of WW2, I imagine even the Egyptians had some naysayers commenting on the lack of practicality for the little spinning ball. Where was the ROI there?
What would’ve happened if whoever invented precursors, at any stage, of modern jets listened to naysayers whose main argument was “the common man cannot afford this”?
NASA does a lot of aviation experiments actually. They’re not making an airliner, they’re just making a test vehicle to learn how to reduce sonic boom noise.
This way NASA can get 95% of the way with research/design then they can sell it cheaply to a chosen private sector firm who can make all the money.
Which firm? I’d pay attention to where memebers of Congress are investing
We definitely can’t afford this.
Thus will only further drive the climate catastrophe
This is not for regulars doing 9-5 jobs. Its for the elite class , not for peasants.
A quarter billion dollars to build just a prototype and retread the Concorde fiasco with all its attendant environmental destruction. What does this have to do with exploring space, which is what I thought was NASA’s mission?
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