Nasa awards initial design contract for new quiet supersonic passenger jet | Hacker News Reader

Nasa awards initial design contract for new quiet supersonic passenger jet

theguardian.com

61 pointsakiselev23 comments

Why are tax dollars paying for research on a commercial plane? Couldn't Lockheed, Boeing, and Airbus fund it themselves, even if they are giving grants to academic or other researchers?

Because Aeronautics comes before Space in NASA?

It's part of what NASA does, and it's a very good thing. If commercial companies are left to their own devices when it comes to things like airplanes, very very bad and damaging things happen like unchecked pollutants, urban noise, lack of safety, etc. It's very important for NASA and taxpayers to be a part of this process.

> Supersonic vehicle research addresses the development of tools, technologies, and knowledge to help eliminate today’s technical barriers to practical commercial supersonic flight: sonic boom, fuel efficiency, airport community noise, high-altitude emissions, structural weight and flexibility, airspace operations, and the ability to design future vehicles in an integrated, multidisciplinary manner.

http://www.aeronautics.nasa.gov/aavp/cst/index.html

> If commercial companies are left to their own devices when it comes to things like airplanes, very very bad and damaging things happen like unchecked pollutants, urban noise, lack of safety, etc. It's very important for NASA and taxpayers to be a part of this process.

Those sound like issues for regulators, not NASA.

On the contrary, several of these points are not as simple as regulation, but are issues requiring fundamental research.

NASA is about much more than space, and possesses cutting edge domain expertise in aerospace, which they are leveraging here. And the products of these investigations are more broadly available than if a similar result was captured by Boeing or Airbus, for example, where it would likely be a trade secret.

Companies should be charged for these externalities. Going to pollute? How many people a year will this kill? What is the economic cost of these deaths? Levy that sum on the companies. Very simple. Then lets see who funds the research into cleaner tech.

Probably mostly because there isn't a commercial proposition for supersonic passenger planes. Fuel is the biggest single cost driver in commercial aviation, and aircraft use more fuel per unit distance the faster they go. This is why passenger jets are slower today than they were in 1965.

I'm not sure why NASA's even bothering, unless the idea is to make supersonic aircraft for important government officials (cost being no object when tax dollars are used) and leave the the cramped cattle-car air travel to the plebes.

That's why this move is so curious to me. All the major commercial carriers are effectively competing on ticket cost at this point, so the demand is for cheaper-per-passenger aircraft, not faster ones. It seems like in terms of pure economics the most feasible supersonic aircraft would be small business jets where speed and comfort are already prioritized and clients are willing to pay the premium.

Maybe this is somehow related to possible spaceplane advancements in the more distant future?

Cheap and fast is nicer than cheap and slow.

I recently booked a holiday in Thailand. Its a long haul to get there. I ended up changing my initial choice of part of Thailand to visit because I could fly direct for much the same price if I went to another region. All other choices involved a pit stop in Dubai.

> Fuel is the biggest single cost driver in commercial aviation, and aircraft use more fuel per unit distance

> the faster they go. This is why passenger jets are slower today than they were in 1965.

True, but this is misleading: the fuel economy of planes today are enormously improved over their 1960s progenitors and this is only in part because of reduced speeds. Computational fluid dynamics, improved engine design, superior material properties, etc. have resulted in significant improvements in aircraft design and efficiency. All of these factors have resulted in massively cheaper and safer travel (which lower costs through risk-adjustment).

> make supersonic aircraft for important government officials (cost being no object when tax dollars are used)

The unit cost of a new Gulfstream G650 is $64.5 million. Sounds as if cost is no object for more than just government officials.

>True, but this is misleading: the fuel economy of planes today are enormously improved over their 1960s progenitors and this is only in part because of reduced speeds.

It's not misleading at all. The reason planes are slower today is because it saves airlines money. The other stuff is true, but irrelevant. The reason we are not going to get supersonic commercial aviation, and the reason the Concorde failed, is that it's just too expensive.

One of the major reasons for Concorde failing was the sonic boom. As that boom restricted the routes it could travel on. Not the expense of fuel as their is market for fast and luxury travel.

Their owners want safe and steady profit. They aren't interesting in taking risks.

The usual cash infusion to the US military-industrial complex?

We have an old supersonic passenger jet that had all of its development costs already absorbed. You can see it mounted on a pedestal at Charles de Gaulle airport. There was nothing wrong with the aircraft other than that the economy just wasn't there. Before addressing the technological challenges of supersonic passenger jets it'd be nice to first see why this time around the economy has changed so dramatically that it is feasible now when it was not in the past.

> There was nothing wrong with the aircraft other than that the economy just wasn't there.

Part of the reason that "the economy just wasn't there" is that commercial supersonic flight was (and remains) generally prohibited over the US, a policy directed at managing sonic booms.

That limited the potential market for SSTs, and critically cut out many of the potential routes on which there were passengers who would have been willing to pay the premium for high-speed flight.

This is directly aimed at that issue.

Supersonic flight isn't permitted over UK land either. Concorde got to the Irish Sea/Atlantic Ocean for the boom, and could do similar with the Atlantic or either side of Long Island. LAX to anywhere not in NA/Europe would also work.

And was Concord's sonic boom problem resolved... how exactly?

The point was, in case you missed it that the sonic boom is not what killed Concorde, but the business case did (that, and a chunk fallen off some other aircraft which led to a terrible crash that accelerated the end of the Concorde flights).

So you could fix the sonic boom and still not have a viable solution.

If modern technology can make an SST cheaper to operate, it might have a market where Concorde didn't. Concorde was cool but it was extremely expensive to operate. It burned fuel like crazy and required lots of fancy maintenance. Both could be substantially improved.

I'm skeptical of the viability of such a thing too, but I don't think Concorde's failure is much of a lesson by itself.

I'm pretty ignorant here—why does coming up with a design require $20M?

17 months of work by a team at Lockheed Martin. It doesn't seem unreasonable.

Hate to sound anti-innovation here, but wouldn't this hypersonic plane be significantly less fuel efficient than subsonic aircraft?

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