NASA moves a step closer to supersonic passenger flights
(www.cnn.com)
from deconstruct@lemm.ee to technology@lemmy.ml on 27 Aug 2023 00:35
https://lemm.ee/post/5598916
from deconstruct@lemm.ee to technology@lemmy.ml on 27 Aug 2023 00:35
https://lemm.ee/post/5598916
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.
threaded - newest
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?
National Aeronautics and Space Administration
Atmospheric based
praisepursuits have always been within their purview. Space just gets all the press.Fair point. It’s still striking to me how much public money is being thrown at a project that will benefit just a handful of private citizens.
Why is it striking to you that A government funded by billionaires for billionaires is spending public funds on things that will only benefit billionaires?
<img alt="stonks-up" src="https://www.hexbear.net/pictrs/image/f8522e9d-81f3-400d-958d-9fd9bfecf6ab.png">
And you can add 1billion for the previous attempt
Climate science doesnt have much to do with spaceflight either. Are you complaining about that too?
I am. We have enough problems here, and there is an enormous amount of climate damage for every rocket sent to space.
Fair play to ya. fair play.
I like the technological idea, but not the idea of catering to the super rich by giving them convenience at the cost of increasing their carbon footprint by another order or magnitude. This is tax money funding toys for the parasitic criminal billionaires.
Technology filters down. Once upon a time only the rich could afford corrective lenses, but that wasn’t a waste of resources. How many of non-wealthy people will read this comment and wear glasses or contacts? I do. BEVs were limited to the wealthy at first too, and now are solidly affordable to much of the middle class: dependent more on their access to charging and their driving requirements than on their budget. The first residential fridges cost more than a brand new Model T when they came out: the inflation adjusted 1922 price was ~$13,000 today. Was inventing fridges worthless?
It’s NASA developing new technologies. New stuff starts off more expensive, which means it will start off limited to the wealthy. If you don’t want any new tech to come out that starts with rich people being the primary users, then you should go find your local luddite club to join.
"You should be thankful that the rich get to destroy the planet at the literal expense of the rest of us"
Don't you bootlickers ever get tired of the taste of leather?
This is wrong. NASA from the beginning was co-opted by the MIC owned by the original billionaires with a tissue thin veil about civilization advancement. Any discussion about super-sonic flight has already dismissed environmental impact and economic accessibility even if it’s ostensibly NASA doing it.
IF there was a supersonic capable flight technology that somehow wasn’t reliant on fossil fuels or other externalities and was cheap enough that a minimum wage worker could use them as often as they use the Subway in the top 10 largest cities in the world, then I’d be 100% behind it. But that isn’t the case, that is not the intended case, and that will never be the case.
First point there is carbon neutral jet fuel because NASA have been working of jet fuel chemistry for decades.
Secondly flying isn’t commuting, people don’t need to go to new cities twice a day but being cheap enough to allow people on minimum wage to have a holiday a few times a year would be a great benefit to all.
There will never be a fuel efficient way to travel at supersonic speeds using combustion technology. This is planet destroying tech. It won’t matter in 100 years when everyone is dead. This has no trickle down benefits, nor is it cutting edge. This targets an established market by trying to make it half tolerable for parasitic billionaires to further destroy the world. Supersonic commercial flight was done already. This is 1960’s technology with some CAD tools added. Trickle down, it did not. It did however prove exactly the market it is designed to enable. This is a toy for criminals that shouldn’t exist; the careless egomaniac destroyers of the World. This is only for the people that are constantly flying and have carbon footprints the size of small countries. It is criminal that this is developed at all right now. It is kind of interesting from an engineering perspective, but we are currently in the biggest deviation in earth’s climate since it has been tracked. We stepped over a cliff and have no clue when we’ll hit the bottom. The last thing we need is some stupid asshole that chose to make this problem enabled to make it worse.
Aviation is one of the smallest contributions to greenhouse gas emissions as-is: in 2016 it was 1.9% of global emissions.
The danger the rich pose to the planet isn’t being first in line for the second generation of supersonic transoceanic flights.
The danger the rich pose to the planet is them keeping coal and natural gas plants open longer because they personally profit from it. It’s them keeping their taxes low, reducing our ability to fund renewable energy. It’s them fighting tooth and nail against any new energy efficiency regulation (remember the incandescent lightbulb ban fight?) because it “hurts profits.” It’s them fighting against public transportation.
This? This isn’t even in the top 50 of their ills against the climate. The hate for the rich is well placed. Applying that hate to basic science is dangerously misplaced. The rich love when people push-back on funding science efforts.
The problem is that those emissions cause more warming at that altitude. So fly just above treetops, please. oncarbon.app/articles/non-co2-effects-aviation you need to at least triple it
If you flew above treetops, you’d consume considerably more fuel because of air friction.
Yeah, forgot the interrobang. But really, air travel is a problem. It needs to be minimized. Not increased. Especially not increased in amount of greenhouse gas emissions per distance flown per person
Holy shit you are dumb
=D
There are already ways of making jet fuel from captured carbon, as the chemistry continues to evolve we absolutely will see carbon neutral flights becoming more common.
I know doom feels good and I’m very susceptible to it myself but the reality is we’re probably going to make it through this, it kinda sucks really because it means we do need to plan for the future after all.
yes tech filters down. however this is unneeded imho. we need cleaner transport not faster.
I see where you’re coming from. Battery electric vehicles I think are a good example of trickle-down. It seems the R&D for electric cars affordable to wealthy people leads to new infra and tech for a changing power grid, buses, trains and bicycles.
But two examples you raised:
have clear quality-of-life and health benefits. Supersonic passenger flights feel more like a luxury and convenience compared to food preservation.
Hopefully in the development of reduced flight times between other sides of the world we perform research with impact beyond flight. Things like improved materials, fuel, aerodynamics that could be used for trains and trucks. I’m not an engineer but I hope it works like that!
Faster transportation is quality of life too. Just like cars were, or railroads before them. Yeah, this one is currently worthless for anyone that isn’t rich. But if it proves successful it will become useful for more of us. Like you say, there’s also just the material and other sciences being done to make it possible that will filter out elsewhere. So much of early space exploration was Cold War dick waving, and now think about how much we rely on satellites. I couldn’t navigate anywhere without GPS, personally…
People here take their hate of the rich (which is well placed) and aim it at all the wrong things. Don’t like the rich? Tax 'em more. That’s what I want. Higher income taxes and even a wealth tax on the top. And way more meaningful inheritance taxes. Instead they’re bitching about investments in science.
Agreed. To be fair, I can also see where the frustration comes from. We see “deals with the devil” being made, but the (disappointing?) reality is tech progress often looks like that. Flashy stories with pie-in-the-sky ideas get headlines and funding. Meanwhile the boring, difficult work continues on in the background. From the outside it seems non-sensical and inefficient: why couldn’t they just invest money directly into GPS research without all the military stuff? But, fortunately, some amazing stuff does come out of it too.
Ffs it’s nasa not blue origin. Do we really have to fight anti nasa shills now ffs, it really is like Nixon all over again after Trump ffs.
No, it’s much worse.
What an idiotic and short-sighted take. Research on supersonic aerodynamics is useful for far more than just toys for billionaires. Military applications, rocketry and astrophysics, for example. And even regular commercial aviation, because supersonic shockwaves are a major source of drag even at the speeds airliners fly at. Airlines would kill to have a fleet of planes that burn a few percent less fuel.
E: Also, much of the noise an airliner makes during takeoff comes from the sonic booms created by the engine fan blades going supersonic.
Ah yes, the old fallacy of the “I see no value in my life for this development therefore it is only catering to the elite” trope.
Kind of like computers or global communications, electricity…
Thankfully people like you are not smart enough to work in research and development. Otherwise we would all still be rubbing two sticks together to make fire.
Almost 60 years after the first fly of the Concorde
But we already had the Concorde… It stopped flying due to fuel costs and limited flight paths only allowed over oceans, no super sonic flying over land. Hopefully NASA has fixed these issues…
That’s the idea behind the prototype. The sonic booms are lessened so overland flights will be permitted.
That's what they're trying to solve, the sonic boom. The spike in the front is supposed to reduce the boom, which hopefully leads to legal supersonic overland travel.
However, time and time again, the market showed that people value the price tag over anything else. The Concorde didn't make it, the A380 isn't looking good. Anything with a high operational cost doesn't seem like it would last, especially with push for greener tech.
yeah i experienced a sonic boom once, obama came to seattle and a small private plane accidentally entered the restricted airspace, that was one too many. even if its lessend its not gonna be pleasant to be under.
They’re promising a perceived 75 dB level, equivalent to the volume of a dishwasher. Sonic booms are normally about 110 dB or about a jackhammer or a rock concert
And it’s not like you’d hear it all the time, just once in a while and only if you’re in the flight path.
will it reduce the air pressure difference on the ground? i was in a building and it moved. i felt it. sound is only one problem.
https://www.nasa.gov/centers/dryden/pdf/120274main_FS-016-DFRC.pdf
Yes, they would reduce the overpressure. By how much I’m not sure, but that’s part of the research.
I guarantee it will be louder than that. Unless the flight path is directly over a senator’s house or an historic golf club (where donors play), it will be too loud.
Literally make the flight path over the richest part of town or I won’t believe it.
NASA has no control of flight paths. The FAA also doesn’t specify sonic-boom allowed flight paths. They just outright ban it (with a few exceptions) for any boom that could reach anywhere in the US.
FAA also doesn’t want to deal with people complaining about sonic booms like they did back in the 50s when this all started (they received tens of thousands of complaints) so they have an interest in making sure NASA lives up to their promises.
We need bullet trains, not more passenger jets.
I wonder if research into sonic boom physics could translate over to high speed aerodynamics generally, to include the useful models for high speed trains.
Lack of high speed rail isn’t caused by lack of knowledge about how to do it. High speed rail exists in some places, just not the US.
Because the USA is 2892 miles wide. Even a 285 mph bullet train, which is the fastest train in the world, would take 10 hours to cross the United States, and that’s at absolute max speed, with no stops, which isn’t how trains operate. Realistically it would take a few days to cross the United States, as opposed to 5 hours in an airplane, or a couple of hours in a hypersonic jet. Trains are great, especially for more relaxed travel, or moving lots of goods, but they’re not a final solution for countries this size.
<img alt="" src="https://i.imgur.com/zPS0M4o.jpg">
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.
If it’s there (and not terrible), people will use it. Will it break even on the costs? Maybe. Maybe not. Still worth it, however.
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.
Spain and china managed just fine. Rail costs way less than 20 lane highways.
Actually just regular passenger trains that have priority over freight trains would be a great step forward
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.
The railroads should be nationalized and new ones built over highways.
Ok, come back when you aren’t living in a fantasy land.
It’s amazing how out of touch with reality so many people on this platform are. It honestly feels like there are a lot more kids on Lemmy than there were on Reddit. They’re smart kids, but kids lack real world experience, and it shows.
Sounds like you’ve never participated in civil disobedience. Shame.
The freight railroads aren’t good at what they do. It would be much easier to run passenger services (and improve their own operations) if they ran trains that actually fit within their own passing loops, but they desperately want to reduce the number of people they have to pay to run their trains. Both would also benefit from better maintained infrastructure with upgrades such as electrification and more double tracking, but the railroads don’t want to spend any more money than absolutely necessary to keep their (mostly) running.
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.
Well you still need to figure out the sonic boom too, ffs you anti science people are fucking morons.
Just call FFS, we don’t need this.
america will do anything but invest in public transport huh
Or it’s own people. Which is stupid, because the brain drain will catch up technology wise.
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 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.
that's actually a very good point
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.
Airplanes are public transportation though
I mean ig but u know what I mean
trains, busses and shit
l
Trans and busses and shit can cross oceans?
Not with that attitude.
Use them where they make sense, they can still eliminate many flights.
Are you going to ride the bus from NYC to L.A.?
nah but a high speed train
It would still take you 2-3 days, assuming normal operation with stops along the way. If the fastest train that exists on the planet right now ran from NYC to L.A. and was able to go from 0 to top speed instantly, and maintain that speed the entire trip, it would still take 10 hours to get there. Trains don’t operate that way though, so realistically it’s 3 days worth of travel. It’s almost 3000 miles to cross the USA.
Just because buses and trains don’t make sense for trans continental journeys, doesn’t mean they can’t be used for shorter journeys. There’s a bunch of areas in North America where is does make sense and could eliminate many flights.
That’s true. They’re talking about building a high speed rail from Portland to Seattle right now, and I think that would be awesome. Decades ago California spent billions to build a high speed rail from Fresno to San Francisco, which would have solved a lot of problems for both cities, but as far as I know, they never even laid a single mile of track.
There are technologies already starting to roll out which will make flying the least ecologically damaging means of public transport for long and medium length journeys, I wrote a comment about it already but they’re building a faculty that turns captured carbon into jet fuel it’s really clever stuff.
yeah but captured carbon gas is stupid expensive, and I imagine it'll be worse for jet fuel. porsches recaptured carbon gas is like $40 a gallon
The first computers cost millions and the one I’m holding in my hand is basically worthlesss. capture and conversion are both fairly simple processes so we will see a lot of reduction in cost once engineering pathways are established especially when tied to excess power generation from renewables - instead of wasting excess capacity divert it to a nearby carbon capture plant.
If a system like this manages to make fuel cheaper than standard fuel types then we’ll see them spring up everywhere, it could be a total game changer. Worse ways there’s an expensive alternative for use cases where electric planes aren’t feasible and we learn a lot about atmospheric carbon in the process.
The air force have been doing studies and they’re really keen on it, fuel security is the main reason but it wouldn’t have got this far if it wasn’t at least somewhat economically viable.
I agree with you 100% that it will get cheaper, though I think that gas will soon be something only rich people can afford for their fancy cars. the rest of us peasants will be stuck with our shitty electric cars
Public transportation is run by the State.
So there are very few countries where trains or buses are public transport?
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)
defense.gov/…/the-department-of-defense-releases-…
www.nasa.gov/sites/…/fy2022_budget_summary.pdf
I agree with you, but it’s nice to nail down the numbers
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?
NASA invented much of the modern age.
And take a look around. Maybe they shouldn’t have the reigns.
People fly first class, people fly businees class. Some have the money.
Also, for some, the time saved is worth much more than what the ticket costs, especially in business (expensive consultants?).
The resulting aircraft/technology can be sold to commercial aviation and/or be used for military purposes
NASA stands for National Aeronautics and Space Administration, so it’s kinda in scope
Concorde wasn’t profitable in the long run. Nowadays with video conferencing, even less people need to show up to a transatlantic business meeting.
Unlikely this makes financial sense.
Great it’s cool research though and should continue, if you want to bitch about wasted taxes go comment on military threads and comment there where billions are wasted on shit contracts that never materialize due to incompetent base mangers who can’t distinguish vapor ware proposals from real tech. Don’t bitch about scientific research that’s just fucking dumb.
Chill mate I’m not even from the US. There still is no practical use for this.
A commercial passenger plane should not be the subject of government research.
The science behind minimizing a sonic boom is not just applicable to commercial planes, ffs stop trying to kill science and research fucking idoits.
Yeah but that was decades ago.
Without the boom, these planes can fly possibly more profitable routes, for example, drawing parallels is hard with such a time-distance
.
Sold at a loss?
Huh? What kinda question is that?
I know right? Of course it’s sold at a loss, that’s why NASA is paying Boeing to do the research.
Can’t have Boeing waste money on R&D, that would hurt their shareholders.
How would you know? It hasn’t been sold yet.
If NASA was a profitable enterprise, it wouldn’t require external funding, and Lockheed and co would be doing that research themselves to keep that profit for themselves.
NASA isn’t like CNSA or Roscosmos in that they don’t make their own rockets. It exists first and foremost to funnel money to aerospace contractors by either directly contracting with them or providing R&D in cases where cost/risk is greater than expected profit.
A similar relationship exists with publicly funded universities selling patents to pharma.
The fact that it’s not profitable overall doesn’t mean there can never be any profit from anything.
Just because a river flows south doesn’t mean you couldn’t find an eddy in the currents that flows north for a few seconds.
But the water still has nowhere to flow but south. If the cost was less than expected return, these companies would do this research internally. Even if for just one moment, one tiny aspect of the program did make a profit, it wouldn’t change the nature of the system.
But we’re not talking about the nature of the system here, we’re talking about this specific instance.
And I don’t agree they’d necessarily do it internally, sometimes talent is the biggest blocker, not money. They can contract out a team of highly qualified engineers from NASA for a project here and there, when they need it. Hiring people is extremely expensive and having those people do nothing between projects is even more so.
If I buy a million lotto tickets that have a 50% payout, it would be incomplete if not deceptive to point at one ticket and say “Well you might win 100 bucks, we don’t really know” instead of “the reason they’re selling you those tickets is because the risk and expense is greater than the payout.”
That’s still an example of NASA eating an expense of R&D while Lockheed gets the profits.
taxpayer money is free, no there’s no loss to begin with
That is what companies like Boeing and Lockheed are for.
NASA has no business making airplanes for rich passengers.
This is not for regulars doing 9-5 jobs. Its for the elite class , not for peasants.
Back to work peasant!
NEVER!
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.
We definitely can’t afford this.
Thus will only further drive the climate catastrophe
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
Weren’t jet engines developed by the Germans to kill the Allies?
Both sides developed jet engines. The allies didn’t get them into a fighter until after the war though.
They were in development in various countries simultaneously, Spain would have likely gotten there first if not for Franco. Germany did manage the first jet fighter and bomber though, with Britain not long after
Everyone was developing them, more or less. The thing is, the enemy doesn’t usually share their tech with you so you’ve got to develop programs independently.
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”?
I understand what your trying to say, I just don’t think it’s true. The capitalist class came up with the intermediate steps, for profit, during the industrial revolution.
This is the only way to remain competitive when the US’ largest rivals are able to tap state funding for research.
You don’t see the military applications of large-scale supersonic flight?
Then it goes from “waste of money” to “actively bad”. God knows the last thing the US needs are new technologies with “military applications”
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
I don’t think NASA sells their research, pretty much anyone can take it and make their own variant. So it’ll probably be an aviation startup that will try to run it like a tech company, collect a billion dollars and deliver vaporware (or if we’re lucky, something extremely dangerous like the oceangate sub) before eventually going bankrupt.
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.
I’m pretty sure one of the A is for aeronautic - it’s kinda what they do, the n is for naughty tho so maybe that’s why?
Just last month I heard of United’s own supersonic plan ‘Boom’. Concerning name aside I am interested to read more about the tech behind it.
what if concorde but more technology
Techbro concorde.
Elon Musk’s jumping onboard any second now.
We need faster ways to destroy the atmosphere!
Wait, I’ve seen this one
Just what we needed, another pointless carbon-guzzling ride to amuse the undeserving rich.
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.
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.
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.
Tankie - “Ermegurd look at captialdumism be so wasteful with experdumental fly machine”
Also Tankie - “Hurr durr make moar shitty tank for glorious workers, no need make food”.
oh god
how can you be so based?
No fuck you peasant, we gonna have the rich flying in supersonic flightrs and there’s nothing you can do about it
They can do both.
Specialization of Labor is what society is built upon, and it actually allows society to work on multiple problems all at once.
“Engineer” is not a magical term. The people working on improving aerodynamics can’t just stop doing that and switch gears to focus on chemistry, materials, process improvements, or software.
Complaining that these engineers aren’t fixing the pollution from air travel is like complaining that they aren’t delivering the mail, preventing shoplifting, or solving the Hollywood strikes.
Yate Haugan
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?
Can we get the carbon footprint down so it doesn’t contribute so much to the end of the world?
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.
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!
From Wikipedia I see that they plan to get it up to 16.8km or 55k feet high. This means that drag will basically not be an issue anymore at the cost of higher take off fuel.
Very interesting to see how this pans out since it would create direct flights between Sydney and New York.
My question now is about whether the the elimination of drag will save more fuel than getting the plane this high up into the sky.
JFC, can we have a carbon tax already?