NASA's aeronautical innovators are gearing to break the sound barrier once more, but this time in a totally different fashion that may one day allow all of us to fly at speeds equal to or faster than any of the X-1 pilots who flew supersonically.
"That first supersonic flight was such a tremendous achievement, and now you look at how far we've come since then. What we're doing now is the culmination of so much of their work," Catherine Bahm, an aeronautical engineer at NASA's Armstrong Flight Research Center in California, said in a press release statement.
The X-59, the heart of NASA's Quesst project, which aims to make commercial supersonic flying over land possible, is seen in this illustration from Lockheed Martin, the company NASA hired to design, construct, and carry out the aircraft's initial flight tests. The first flight is scheduled for 2023.
All About the X-59
Bahm manages the Low Boom Flight Demonstrator project. Her crew is in charge of creating the X-59, a NASA experimental aircraft that serves as the centerpiece of Quesst.
NASA hopes to show through Quesst that the X-59 can fly faster than sound without producing the generally audible sonic booms that led to the 1973 moratorium on supersonic flying over land.
According to the space agency, the X-59 will be flown over a number of communities as part of the plan to see how residents respond to the softer "thump" it makes, assuming they notice anything at all. Regulators will be informed of their responses and may then write new regulations to lift the restriction.
NASA claims that when this occurs, it will be yet another historic turning point in aviation, which could usher in a new era where travelers could board a supersonic plane at breakfast time in Los Angeles to book a reservation for lunch in New York City.
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A Sonic Boom from the Past
It is worth noting that a sonic boom erupted over California's high desert for the first time 75 years ago.
It has been reported that a small team of scientists from the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), which was NASA's predecessor organization, were the first to hear the thunder crack coming from the Bell X-1 rocket plane as it was traveling faster than the speed of sound on the ground below.
On October 14, 1947, the joint X-1 team of NACA, the Air Force (which had just been founded that year), and Bell engineers and pilots broke the sound barrier, which some had claimed was impossible to crack.
And after more than seven decades, NASA hopes that with its Quesst project, they will be able to break the sound barrier for the second time but in a completely different way.
The targeted date for X-59's first flight will commence early next year, according to NASA.
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Written by Joaquin Victor Tacla
