NASA Quietly Builds Silent Supersonic Plane For First Flight In 2023

wccftech.com:

This is not investment advice. The author has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. Wccftech.com has a disclosure and ethics policy.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is quietly building its quiet supersonic airplane. NASA's X-59 is a supersonic aircraft designed to test technologies that could hopefully make commercial supersonic travel tolerable by reducing the sound produced by air compression (a boom) when an aircraft crosses the sound barrier. The X-57 team joined the aircraft tail section to its body late last month at Lockheed Martin's facilities in Palmdale, California, and NASA is aiming for a test flight later this year.

All the hype surrounding NASA these days is about the agency's Artemis program, which will soon place astronauts on the Moon. The agency flew its Artemis 1 mission to a lunar orbit late last year and announced the crew for the first crewed lunar mission since the Apollo era earlier this month.

However, quietly in the background, NASA and its primary contractor for the X-59 project, Lockheed Martin, are building the X-59 aircraft. Lockheed was awarded the design contract for the plane in 2016, and after a series of small-scale wind tunnel tests, a full award ensued two years later in 2018. The first series of tests validated the design's flight stability and angle of attack to ensure that a pilot could control it in case of an anomaly.

This control is crucial for the X-59 as it is a rare aircraft designed without a front window. The plane's design requires a long nose to ensure that the air flowing above and below it does not make a loud sonic boom, which makes putting a window in front of the cockpit useless as it would be too far behind the tip of the nose and