NASA to begin historic new era of X-Planes | Hacker News Reader

NASA to begin historic new era of X-Planes

nasa.gov

152 pointsastdb51 comments

All really interesting & immediately commercially useful. So why aren't these research projects being funded by Boeing, Lockheed etc? Why are we using NASA as the R&D division of commercial companies?

Shouldn't NASA's role be more blue-sky research for things we don't know yet are feasible or possible?

The quiet supersonic transport is potentially commercially viable, but without a demonstration that the technique actually works in flight, the size and risk of the investment necessary to try it have seemed to be too large for the private sector. (The concept has been out there for a while.)

Another motivation is a desire to understand the design principles and behavior of such concepts at a deep and general level. That's not usually something industry does—often industry's level of analysis and experimentation is just "good enough" to get a job done. If that gets repeated a few times, it leads to both wasted effort and a proliferation of mediocre designs. (As another example, that motivation also drove the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics—NASA's predecessor agency—to undertake an exhaustive study of airfoils. NASA still undertakes quite a bit of research from a similar perspective.)

I saw a discussion about a supersonic jet company on HN not too long ago.

http://boom.aero/

Discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11329286

As far as I've heard so far, they aren't planning to develop a low-boom design any time soon. Their first planes will be conventional from that perspective. (That's confirmed by a post by their founder, Blake Scholl, in that discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11329634.)

This is basically how R&D works these days. The government (very frequently the military) assumes the risk of very high risk research and farms that work out to national labs, government research institutions, large research universities, then the most promising looking avenues are trickled down to industry, lower tier research universities, industrial research labs, etc.

At some point, all the science will get done and the work will slide over to more engineering type work and we'll end up with a neat plane/gun/database/internet/drug/medical test/etc.

It's one way to package development subsidies to private players. One of the reasons could be to minimise trade agreement disputes the kind of "Airbus got x€ of direct subsidies!" versus "But Boeing got x$ subsidies!"?

This makes me think of that idlewords talk[0], where the intro talks about the failure of the Concorde. The fact that you could fly to NY in 3 hours instead of in 7 made not much of a difference, because with the airport travel time included, you're still going to end up losing a day...

Though here they seem to be focusing on effectiveness rather than speed, so that's good. Just interesting to think about the fact that faster planes are only useful at this point if they're much, much faster.

[0]:http://idlewords.com/talks/web_design_first_100_years.htm

Concorde didn't fail because there wasn't a market for fast travel between cities like London and New York. British Airways had no trouble filling them (at super-premium prices), and it's Concorde operations were quite profitable.

The real problem was that there was no market for expensive planes that couldn't operate over land routes, or from many airports, because of the extreme noise and environmental concerns.

If supersonic passenger planes are ever going to be a reality again then these are the things that need to be addressed, and thankfully it seems NASA realises this.

I had never heard that Concorde was "quite profitable"; to the contrary, I believe it was heavily subsidized by its operators' respective governments as a point of national pride. e.g.:

http://www.nytimes.com/1981/01/09/business/france-extending-...

http://articles.latimes.com/1987-12-01/business/fi-25795_1_s...

Development of the Concorde aircraft itself was heavily subsidised. But in service, it was profitable - at least for British Airways:

On average Concorde made and operating profit of £30-50 Million a year for British Airways in the boom years where many passengers were travelling first class. British Airways reportedly received £1.75 Billion in revenue for Concorde services against an operating cost of around £1 Billion. Air France made a much smaller profit.

Source: http://www.concordesst.com/retire/faq_r.html

Let's see. You leave for a London airport at 6am London time. You've finally gotten off the train, checked in, gotten through security and are at your boarding gate by 7:30am. Your flight takes off at 8. You fly for three hours landing at 6am NYC time. You take a train into the city, grab a bagel and coffee and are ready for your 8am meeting. That's not quite what I'd consider loosing a day.

Wake up at 4. Take the subway to the train station at 4.45. Reach the train station at 5.15, half an hour earlier in case of subway problems, and walk through the statin to fund the platform. Take the 5.50 train, reach the airport at 6.35. Check-in at 6.55. Go through security early, queue 40 minutes because it's Monday morning, it's 7.35. Submit yourself to the random terrorist check because you look like below 30 years old and in a hurry. It's 7.50. Run through the airport because you're at gate 167. You get your flight and be at work by 2pm, babbling because you woke up at 4 and sweaty because you've almost missed your flight. You'd believe you could reduce the margins for the subway, train, check-in, morning queue and terrorist check, but since you never know when they happen, they might happen all at once (anecdotic experience: I almost missed a SYD-LON flight and I systematically get terrorist-checked), and you don't want to come back to your boss saying you've missed your $3000 flight.

Get driven to the airport in the limo, express check in and security checks for first class passengers, quick coffee/breakfast in the first class lounge and board at your leisure, arrive at work happy and relaxed... That's why Concorde worked.

Concorde tickets, adjusted for inflation, often ran around $8-10k. No Concorde passenger would be taking the subway/train. They would use a fast private driver -- chances are they could even get some shut-eye in the car.

After too much international travel, I like the idea of taking a sedative and have your staff ship you comatose as cargo so you just wake up fully rested in bed at your new location.

Given the comically unrealistic seating arrangements in cattle class, I'd genuinely prefer to have a sleeping pill and a cargo coffin.

I suspect this is a lot like surgery. Less anasthetic and more activity means you're physically healthier when you get done with the process, even if it's more painful.

The user experience would be like teleporting making an Uber feel prehistoric. When its that good it could be irresistible despite drawbacks like... chance of death and such.

So in other words you're travelling even faster. I'm almost certain that if Concord flew today you'd get express security (even "premium economy" gives you that for international flights). Also in some places taking the train is much faster than driving due to traffic.

In NYC, and I assume London some people are taking a helicopter to the airport which is going to be even faster than a train.

EX: 99$ tacked onto a 8-10K ticket it cheap. Bump that to say ~1k if they are picking you up directly and it's still in line with a Concord flight. http://onemileatatime.boardingarea.com/2015/01/21/gotham-air...

Emirates for example has airport transports (Usually S-class or equivalent) included in tickets that cost less than a third of that.

At both Heathrow and JFK you boarded British Airways's Concorde flights from Concorde Room, a premium lounge with a directly attached jet bridge to the plane. (These live on as BA's lounges for first class passengers; even at Heathrow Terminal 5 from which Concorde never had a chance to operate. But they're nothing special. Lufthansa operates a dedicated terminal for their first class passengers at Frankfurt.)

In other words, ground services were and are a key component of a premium travel offering, and can effectively shave a ton off the total travel time. Concorde flights predate the now-common practice of bundling chauffeured limousine rides with premium airfare, but you have to expect that the average Concorde passenger had adequate arrangements in place for their airport transfers.

I've only flown Concorde in the easterly direction, with none of the "chase the sun" appeal. But if you're accustomed to the drudgery of the regular JFK-LHR redeye, a breakfast in Concorde Room at 8 am, a very nice lunch at Mach 2.0, and wheels down in London before 5 pm is comparatively a very agreeable way to spend the first half of a work day.

As a general guide you should aim to arrive: Long-haul and El Al: three hours before scheduled departure European flights: two hours before scheduled departure UK and Ireland flights: 90 minutes before scheduled departure.

http://www.heathrow.com/departures/checking-in

If they say they need you 3 hours before, that means that they need a bit less time to process everybody, say 2.5 hours.

Now, the only thing they need is that the queue doesn't run dry during those 2.5 hours. That means half the passengers can arrive 1 hour 15 minutes later, one in five about 2 hours later. If you are one of them, you help those coming early in the sense that they are less likely to have to waste time waiting in the check-in queues than in the slightly less annoying areas behind it (and of course, the early-comers help you to spend that hour in even less annoying circumstances)

And of course, assuming they have the capacity to process all passengers leaving every day, large airports could parallelize processing over multiple check-in queues, get processing time down to 30 minutes or so (using 6 check-in queues and a smart way to distribute load across them), and ask you to be there 60 minutes before departure.

I do not really see why they do not do that. There used to be a problem getting luggage on board the right plane, but with modern luggage processing, all bags end up on the same conveyer belt, anyways.

I usually arrive two hours early for long-haul international flights, and an hour early for domestic (or short-haul). Based on arrivials to the gate, I'm pretty sure others have lot smaller margins.

NASA's previous X-Plane initiative seemed to end without making any substantial change to civil (non-military) aviation.

We could really use small jets out here in sparsely-populated Western USA. Eclipse Aviation got very close, then ran out of money. How much money would be required to start them up again?

We need new engines. My 1966 Cessna 172 required leaded AV gas, which is as rare -- and as damaging -- as the tears from a weeping unicorn.

Why invest in supersonic transport? We need low-end disruption, not high-end incremental improvements.

> We need new engines. My 1966 Cessna 172 required leaded AV gas, which is as rare

Frankly, not an arena where NASA is needed.

In Europe turbo-diesels are popular for retrofit because they happily consume Avtur ( kerosene ) which is cheap and plentiful. I've seen a few 172s with Thielert TD engines. There was also a project to install a TP100 turboprop but I'm not sure how that's progressing.

The fact that Cessna is still hawking a derivative of a 1947 airframe with an engine that isn't much fresher is more indicative of their attitude than any lack of advances in low-end aerodynamics. Look at the Stallion to see what they could be delivering, instead:

http://www.aircraftdesigns.com/specifications.html

200 kts for 2,200 nm, seating for four people.

At the small-end we need disruption of the big-three ( Cessna, Piper, Beech ) manufacturers, with technology that exists but they don't bring to market. Projects such as the 177 and Starship show that they had the technology, they just didn't have the incentive to change.

> without making any substantial change to civil (non-military) aviation.

Having known a bunch of aerospace people: this is in the works, it's just that we won't see it come out for a while because civil aero moves really slowly in an attempt to guarantee safety. Not "high probability of safety", not "we're pretty damn sure", guarantee. The levels of paranoia and conservative use of technology they get to are unbelievable. It's been roughly one military design generation, and only half a civilian generation, since the 1998-2000 crop of X-Planes. The military just got done deploying the delta-winged and fully-autonomous fruits of the 1998-2000 crop of X-Planes, which means that civilian aerospace is going to start working on it in another two or three years, will have designs in ten, and will start selling in fifteen.

The main goals are efficiency and pollution, and eliminating the supersonic boom is a secondary goal.

"Goals include showcasing how airliners can burn half the fuel and generate 75 percent less pollution during each flight as compared to now, while also being much quieter than today’s jets – perhaps even when flying supersonic. " "Meanwhile, other experimental aircraft also are under consideration, including those with novel shapes that break the mold of the traditional tube and wing airplane, and others that are propelled by hybrid electric power. "

> The main goals are efficiency and pollution, and eliminating the supersonic boom is a secondary goal.

The supersonic boom should be one of the top priorities, also. Just look at this well-known video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=annkM6z1-FE , you can't have that happening over populated territory, meaning land.

Adding to that, just wanted to say that airplanes' sound pollution is a real and damaging thing. My parents live in a remote Eastern European village but, apparently, the skies over their house is a commercial airplane highway, as there were moments when I could count 6 or 7 of them up in the sky at the same time, including a big, white whale which looked like an A380. Anyway, it's not fun when it's 5 in the morning, you're surrounded by the four thick walls of your parents' house but you can still hear the airplane flying above your house at 30,000 feet.

My neighbours with fast sports cars and massive SUVs don't see fuel costs as a big part of their transport choice. If they had any sense they would drive Priuses, Teslas and sensible Hondas, but they don't.

Therefore, is it not possible to have supersonic jets for the likes of captains of industry, sports and other mega stars? Small, supersonic private jets? I can see a market for that. Lewis Hamilton would be first in the queue as would those Gulf 'sheikhs' that have small fleets of Boeing planes.

Just for comparison the Concorde (which used engines based on a military bomber) used around 5x as much fuel as an A380 to transport passengers over the same distance - so there is a lot of room for improvement.

Economically I don't think there will ever be a market for the speed alone to command paying a much higher ticket price, but maybe technologies can be developed that will mean supersonic aircraft are as efficient (or more so) than subsonic aircraft.

The assets of Eclipse were bought out, and the ~259 unfinished EA500 airframes were completed and sold.

Then a new model, the EA550 was built by the new company.

What killed Eclipse was gross mismanagement, lack of funding to cover that, and Cessna's Mustang.

The low-compression engine in a 1966 Cessna 172 doesn't require leaded fuel; there are at least two supplemental type certificates available to legally run it on unleaded auto fuel. The lead is in the fuel as an octane booster, and is required by the high compression, higher horsepower engines much further up the food chain which are increasingly being replaced in the marketplace with Jet-A fueled turboprop engines (or even in some rare cases by Jet-A burning diesels).

Leaded 100LL avgas is certainly going away...

http://www.autofuelstc.com/approved_engines_airfames.phtml

https://swiftfuels.com/

I've been following this program since the beginning and I'm very excited. This could be the future of high speed air travel -- because it could reverse laws against overland travel.

AS i look at the rendering on this plane, all i could think of is "gee, this eerily looks like the SX from black & mortimer"

http://images.gibertjoseph.com/media/catalog/product/cache/1...

I thought NASA bought X-Plane (a flight simulator from Laminar Research) to revitalize it as Lockheed Martin did something like that with Microsoft Flight Simulator. Oh well...

You just wait for VR adoption - I'm pretty sure there's going to be a big revival of sims of all sort.

What is an X-Plane? I assumed something like a Star Wars X-Wing, but it doesn't look like it at all.

NASA name for eXperimental Planes of all kinds, testing new designs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_X-planes

Pure black screen on mobile

What mobile / os / browser? Working great on Android with latest chrome.

Black on Firefox for Android (Nexus 5).

More and more pages don't load correctly on Firefox(e.g Google Finance stock pages)

Same, black screen, FF on Android 4.3.

Looks like they've got some x-planing to do.

NASA's original mission was to put an American on the moon. Fifty years later, and it's still going strong, churning out projects to justify its existence. Perhaps it's time for the US government to let the likes of Milner and Hawking take the front of the stage.

NASA stands for National Aeronautics and Space Administration. It was formed from a pre-existing agency, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), that did amazing work advancing the field, and that work never stopped within NASA.

Also, to be clear: between Milner's two (fantastic) projects, he has committed $200 M, to be spent over roughly a decade. NASA's budget is about $19,000 M annually. For fast, efficient progress we need both—large amounts of government resources as well as private-sector funding of ideas that NASA and NSF are overlooking or not prioritizing for whatever reason.

So do I understand correctly that you're saying that NASA should keep running indefinitely because they're spending $19B/pa? Isn't the logic here reversed?

No. Your claim was that the government should let Milner et al. "take the front of the stage." Their work is fantastic, but it is focused on some narrow but important topics. There is a vast amount of other progress continually being made by NASA. For a healthy ecosystem, we need both sorts of actors (along with others) building on each other's efforts.

The job of the DOD is to run the military. The job of the EPA is to protect the environment. What is the job of NASA? I'm arguing that there is no such thing, and the $19B could be better spent on other uses (perhaps even by the NSF).

This specifies NASA's job:

http://history.nasa.gov/spaceact.html

(That's actually the original 1958 version. It's been amended occasionally since, but that will give you the gist.)

There are specific things I would alter about NASA's current course (including killing two projects worth a total of about $3 B per year) and I would amend the National Aeronautics and Space Act to alter its long-term trajectory regarding human activity in space, but much of NASA's job has been clear for decades.

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