DECEMBER 18, 2019 BY EVAN GOUGH

NASA Will Be Building a Quiet, Supersonic Aircraft: the X-59

NASA’s X-Plane Program has been around for 70 years. Over the course of those decades, the agency has developed a series of airplanes and rockets to test out various technologies and design advances. Now NASA has cleared the newest one, the X-59, for final assembly.

The X-59 is a supersonic aircraft design. Its full name is the X-59 Quiet SuperSonic Technology (QueSST) aircraft. Rather than pushing for greater speeds or higher altitudes like some previous X-Plane’s, the X-59 is designed to break the sound barrier without the sonic boom. The X-59 will produce no more than a loud thump, if anything at all, when it passes the sound barrier.

Preliminary design for the X-59 began in February 2016. NASA wanted to develop a supersonic aircraft that eliminated the sonic boom. Supersonic aircraft have been around for a while, and have served as commercial airline aircraft. The Concorde was in service until 2003, but the tell-tale sonic boom that the Concorde created is problematic: the Concorde was only allowed on ocean-crossing flights as the noise was too much for populated areas.

But the speed of supersonic aircraft is hard to resist. Designers believed that the shape of an aircraft could be modified to eliminate the sonic boom, and bring supersonic aircraft back into service. One early test aircraft, the Northrop F5-E, had a specially-shaped nose that designers hoped would reduce or eliminate the sonic boom.

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https://www.universetoday.com/144403/nasa-will-be-building-a-quiet-supersonic-aircraft-the-x-59/