NASA Drops $2.3M On Supersonic Aircraft Research 85
coondoggie writes: This week the space agency said it invested $2.3 million for eight research projects that will address sonic booms and high-altitude emissions from supersonic jets. NASA's Commercial Supersonic Technology Project, which picked the new projects, focuses on developing sonic boom reduction methods and defines the necessary approaches or techniques for objectively assessing the levels of sonic boom acceptable to communities living in the vicinity of future commercial supersonic flight paths.
So sorry... (Score:2, Insightful)
There is very little (none, really) demand for supersonic passenger transport, and in any case this kind of research has been going on for 30+ years now.
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There'd be plenty of demand if these two particular problems (sonic-boom reduction and high-altitude emissions) can be overcome.
http://www.gizmag.com/supersonic-passenger-aircraft-revival/32600/
Re:So sorry... (Score:5, Insightful)
The biggest problems with supersonic flight weren't emissions or the sonic boom. It was the financial viability of it, enough people simply aren't willing to pay the extra to make this viable (at least historically).
Re:So sorry... (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, the biggest problem was indeed the sonic booms - from the airlines privatisation in the 1980s and right up until 9/11, Concorde was profitable for British Airways on the trans-atlantic routes it typically operated on, and one of the main reasons Concorde became less profitable after that was because a lot of the services clientèle were killed in the 9/11 attacks. The crash didn't help of course, but the aircraft was still profitable after that point.
The main issue was the major restrictions on the service over land - it was forbidden from flying supersonic over pretty much every land mass, meaning it had no benefits on overland routes than a more spacious aircraft (Concorde had a smaller cabin than a Boeing 737, with only a 4 across seating arrangement rather than the 737s 6 across), so the economics of those routes were murdered by the restrictions on causing sonic booms. On routes which allowed Concorde to show its legs, airlines made a profit.
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:So sorry... (Score:5, Interesting)
That depends on whose profit you are talking about - the aircraft made a profit for its operators, British Airways and Air France, but lost its manufacturers money. Two entirely different set of accounts, and its easy to turn that on its head for other aircraft as well - the Boeing 747 made Boeing a lot of money, but while it bankrupted more than a few airlines whose egos were bigger than their fiscal abilities, you wouldn't say that the Boeing 747 wasn't profitable for Boeing.
The reason it lost its manufacturers money was because of the 1970s oil crisis, it had plenty of orders before that baby hit - indeed, the oil crisis depressed the entire airline industry, and many people believe that if the Concorde production run had outlasted the effects of the oil crisis, orders would have resurfaced, but alas the order book was filled (at least in terms of long lead time parts) before the crisis passed, and thus no more orders were possible.
The Convair 880 and 990 were also profitable for its operators, but lost its manufacturer money. Same goes for the L1011. But operators loved both types and they lasted decades in operational service precisely because they were profitable to fly.
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Sunk costs fallacy? The Concorde was developed, like it or not. Those development costs are gone. So it's not relevant to your future actions unless you have a time machine to prevent the development of the Concorde in the first place.
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Actually, the biggest problem was indeed the sonic booms
That depends on their frequency. Back in the 1970's, they used to fly SR-71 training missions over my town. No big deal, but then there were not that many. It's just like distant thunder. But do that a few dozen times a day, every day ....
Today, that might not be as problematic for commercial flights. New air traffic controls and patterns no longer route everyone through the same corridors (between radio nevigation beacons). They use GPS and so flight paths can be spread out, reducing the impact on individ
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one of the main reasons Concorde became less profitable after that was because a lot of the services clientèle were killed in the 9/11 attacks.
The 3,000 people killed in 9/11 represent about 0.15% of the populations of New York and London. As comparison. 42,000 people were killed in car accidents in 2001.
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Your point is what, exactly? Those two groups of people cover entirely different demographics.
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This.
When Boeing pulled out of the SST race in the 70's they petitioned the US government to make sonic booms over populated areas in the US illegal for civilian aircraft (of course because the US did it, the rest of the world was forced to follow as is always the case in aviation law). This meant that the Concorde could only go supersonic over the ocean which limited it's use to transatlantic routes.
However the biggest thing that lead to the r
Re:So sorry... (Score:5, Interesting)
Not really. While this over-simplification ("It was too expensive!") might sound reasonable the true story is more complicated. Richard_at_work pointed at some of the issues. Another issue was that because of the Air France 4590 crash (which was largely due to bad luck), both British Airways and Air France got really jittery and anxious to pull the plug before another disaster happened.
Another thing that people ignore was that the Concorde was put to retirement largely because it was just a really old plane. It was designed in the 60's. It still had an _engineer_ in the cockpit - that's how old the design and avionics were. Unlike other planes designed during that period that are still flying, it never got any significant upgrades. It had a run of 27 years; more than good enough for any plane. Ultimately, it's not that Concorde failed, it's that we failed to replace it.
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And the REASON we failed to replace it was that it wasn't profitable enough... That's why it didn't get upgrades, why nobody wanted to restart the manufacturing of it after the 70's oil crisis was over, why we didn't replace it with newer and better aircraft with similar capabilities.
This thing burned way too much fuel per passenger mile, cost a lot to maintain and there wasn't enough interest for anybody to try to fund the NRE costs to replace it. Everybody knew that it would be impossible to make the th
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It's not about profitability, it's about profitably & RISK. The aircraft/airline industry has basically become locked into the 900 km/h, turbofan-powered, widebody business, because it's low-risk. It's the same reason few car companies made any hybrids or EVs until Tesla entered the market. A lot of companies now turn a profit on their hybrid/EV sales.
Am I saying that if they developed a supersonic plane they'd turn a profit? Nope. I'm saying it's very hard to predict how a supersonic transport would wo
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I disagree. I think it is pretty clear how supersonic transport would or wouldn't work in today's market. The Concorde operation is the benchmark and the experience by which an airline would judge if a supersonic service would be profitable. It was proven not to be. The reason we see all the bigger and bigger aircraft is OPERATING costs per passenger mile go down and airlines make more money. Supersonic is going the wrong way, with increases in operating costs and thinner margins.
Manufacturers know th
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There's a difference between not being profitable, and not being profitable 'enough'. The Concorde was profitable. It just ran on a thin margin (which got increasingly thinner after 9/11 and after fuel prices went up) and didn't make as much money as conventional subsonic planes.
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There's a difference between not being profitable, and not being profitable 'enough'. The Concorde was profitable. It just ran on a thin margin (which got increasingly thinner after 9/11 and after fuel prices went up) and didn't make as much money as conventional subsonic planes.
Which is exactly why we won't build another Concorde. You cannot make (enough) money flying them (or in this case, you can make more if you don't). I don't see that situation changing unless fuel costs fall though the floor, and that's about as like as a snowball not melting in ... Well you know...
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The biggest problems with supersonic flight weren't emissions or the sonic boom. It was the financial viability of it, enough people simply aren't willing to pay the extra to make this viable (at least historically).
I am willing to guess, being able to go supersonic over the continental US on a regular basis would be a big deal to the military as well. Better practice and training, as well as assisting in keeping enemies alerted. "Gee, Haji, did you hear that big boom? Think the US is back operating in the area?"
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If you have efficient and reliable aircraft style access to space, then you have a platform to test zero G propulsion systems.
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There is very little (none, really) demand for supersonic passenger transport, and in any case this kind of research has been going on for 30+ years now.
Yes, that is likely due to the lack of available brain trust of the CIA SR and subsequently the OXCART program(s) and this relates exactly to why the programs were cancelled. Living down around Palmdale for the last 10 years I get the feeling as to why they mothballed the SR-71 in 1999: They didn't spend enough time on it to pick it apart, gain understandi
Re:So sorry... (Score:4, Insightful)
Not many aspects of the SR-71 would have translated into a passenger jet. The thing was huge and it was composed almost entirely of fuel tanks - and it had a passenger capacity of 2. It was obscenely expensive to operate. It needed in-air refueling. In the 80's a journalist wrote a piece about how SR-71-based tech would lead to hypersonic transport planes, and Ben Rich - the head of Lockheed Skunkworks which designed the SR and one of the designers of the SR's intakes - objected and said that such a thing would never happen in his lifetime.
Re:So sorry... (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah....but it is the coolest and fastest fucking plane ever built.
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Not exactly the fastest anymore....
The Air Force has built and flown a number of transonic (better than MAC 5) unmanned research aircraft and is apparently in the accusation phase for an operational capability for transonic aircraft. The research aircraft are faster than the SR-71 ever was.
Plus, I'd not be so sure we don't already have an SR-71 replacement which is faster, smaller, better already in operation. It took a number of decades before the public became aware of the SR-71 and it seems reasonabl
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Under OXCART, which is a program that was named conceptually after a bulldozer by the way and was shared between USAF/CIA but run within CIA SR, we had a mach 5 capable unmanned aircraft prior to the development of the SR-71 and even predated the U-2/A-12. But that was my father's side of the family, my mother's side was with the North American X-15 gig.
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Correction, the AQM-60 Kingfisher was capable of mach 4.3 and did it in 1951.
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If you can't sit in it, it doesn't count.
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The SR-71 was the fastest manned jet-powered aircraft and still holds that record. Also, I very much doubt that a secret replacement for it exists. The SR-71 was killed because spy satellites greatly decreased its relative utility, and that continues to be true. I fail to see a reason for a high-supersonic high-altitude military aircraft in 2015. Then again, the military carries out a lot of useless projects, so I wouldn't be surprised.
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It's not high altitude high speed anymore because you get shot down doing that.. It's low altitude, high speed and stealth now. You want to be FAST, LOW and invisible....
Well that or unmanned and able to stay on station for days, in which case it's just invisible you want to be..
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We do.
The spy plane died because we had better alternatives, namely satellites.
The uses we have left for spy planes are real time surveillance of local areas, so supersonic jets are seriously over designed for this. They didn't use U2 for recon in Vietnam, they used Cessna O-2's because they were cheaper, could operate from improvised airfields, could remain in the area for longe
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Not that expensive at cruise above 80k feet. I have intimate knowledge of that craft because my family was involved in that and it was my great uncle Jack that cancelled CIA SR in 1964 on account what happened to my grandfather on north shore Tahoe back then. The program had an ultimate goal of escape velocity and a goal of mach 10 for 1970. Kelly Johnson was behind the JP-7 fuel and J-58 mods. That plane was a building block to the actual JFK space program, the one we never got and yes my grandfather w
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If you read Ben Rich's memoirs he talks a lot about the interaction between the SR-71 project and the space project. After the SR-71 they obtained secret information that the USSR was ramping up its hydrogen production. At first they thought it must be for some hypersonic jet aircraft to compete with the US's SR-71. It was only after pouring hundreds of millions into developing a hydrogen-powered aircraft that they realized the USSR wasn't developing a plane - they were stocking up hydrogen for ICBMs and or
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I know, "RADAR MAN" was my kin. I don't know why the Soviets were storing hydrogen, they had the same stratosphere data we had.
Words of my great uncle Jack Branham in 1992 when I met him for the first and only time and for a meeting of the minds:
My father enters the room and states "I have told him nothing". My great uncle Jack replies, "it is okay, they have already retracted det1". My great uncle Jack directs my father out of the room and then turns to me and states, "strategic reconnaissance was my ba
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To further add to my great uncles words: "If I had a chance to do it all again, I would have walked away". He also stated that he felt it was in the wrong hands, after seeing the SR-71 in the hands of NASA for two years from '97 after my great uncle died in '96 and getting mothballed, I believe he was right. Clinton did the right thing on that, but NASA did not see it for what it was in a navigation system that only needed correct time/date that predated GPS. Not sure if they saw the relationship between
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...what?
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You read correctly, 'RADAR MAN' was my kin. What you read took place before the SR-71 was moved over to USAF who ultimately had to purchase the image sensors after the program that developed it had to be cancelled. The SR-71 was also a building block for the actual Kennedy space program, and providing recon data was the only ethical way that kids could be involved in defending the nation though they were not to know the details until OXCART produced aircraft access to space providing a platform for testin
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not sure why you got modded down. You are correct. The concorde was a complete failure financially, they only kept it flying so long as a showcase for the airlines and the lack of demand (read as demand when priced to make it financially viable) was completely non existent. I doubt consumer appetite to pay many times the cost to save a few hours has increased in the past 30 years.
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Would have been different if supersonic/hypersonic were adopted mainstream as commercial flights could have broken through the 50k foot flight ceiling and this would have prompted aircraft style access to space. A lot changed in 1963-4, and that left us behind like ~50 years in aerospace/aviation. The Concorde would have been way better price wise to run if it could have broken through the 50k foot flight ceiling and that would have greatly changed ticket cost, but it was actually cancelled over a blown t
Re:So sorry... (Score:5, Insightful)
$2.3 million across 8 projects? That's less than $300,000 / project. Jack-squat to do much besides running a bunch of simulations on computers. Maybe one or two test flights.
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1. With the Internet and modern conferencing and collaboration systems, why bother going in person?
Because High end hotels and food, getting out of the office, and enjoyment.
You don't think that these folks who travel all the time do it because they don't like it do you?
Traveling for work (Score:4, Insightful)
You don't think that these folks who travel all the time do it because they don't like it do you?
You've never traveled a lot for work I take it? I have and it's isn't a grand adventure. "High end hotels and food"? Not working for most companies. Certainly none I've ever worked for unless you consider dinner at Applebee's and a Holiday Inn to be high end. Most people who travel a lot for work do it because it pays well, not because it's particularly fun. Once in a while it has its moments but mostly it's just boring, expensive and tiring. There is a reason most consultants that travel a lot tend to be young. Hard to have a family and be on the road constantly.
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You don't think that these folks who travel all the time do it because they don't like it do you?
You've never traveled a lot for work I take it? I have and it's isn't a grand adventure.
Only all the time in 30 some years. Spent a good bit of time in a lot of places, some wonderful some not so much. But I enjooyed the traveling, as it got me out of the office. Even raised a family.
Sucks to have a job travelling if you hate travel - which is why I'm saying that a lot of people who travel a lot actually enjoy it. I wouldn't presume that my (and their) opinions are the only one ot have. You shouldn't either.
Huh? (Score:2)
The single most dreaded thing about travel is the uncomfortable time it takes wasted in a cramped tube full of people. There are a number of questions of profitability and what naught in this thread to support the idea of "no demand" but those arguments have nothing to do with demand. They are simply reflections on one specifi
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So there is no demand for getting from point A to point B faster?
Oh there is demand for that... The problem is that this increased demand does not equate to willingness to pay increased ticket prices at a large enough differential to make the increased costs of getting from A to B faster profitable, over the slower and CHEAPER options already available. If you don't have enough demand for your more expensive option to fill the aircraft seats, you must fly partially full or lower your ticket prices. There is a minimum cost for flying the route and when you cannot collect
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So in a multi billion dollar industry maybe it deserves some investment looking at the problem. Hence this story...
So you get the price down so it costs 2.5 times as much per hour to operate the airframe and it would then be a MAJOR competitor. At 1/2 the flight time 2.5X hourly cost would mean increas
Better, faster, cheaper. Pick two. (Score:2)
So there is no demand for getting from point A to point B faster?
You are asking the wrong question. The right question is how much are you willing to pay to get from A to B faster? Of course people would like to reduce travel time but that doesn't mean there is an economically viable way of doing so.
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So that would mean that with an investment in research maybe you could make it viable. In fact you would actually have to expect that it would become more cost effective with the normal manufacturing economies of scale and the vast improvement in materials science. That just leaves the question of getting past environmental hurdles. That will require
more research!
2.3M? gosh! (Score:5, Insightful)
2.3M isn't much for even one supersonic research project. 2.3M for 8 is 300K. That's less than the cost of 2-engineer years at most companies. If they need an actual lab forget it.
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These are small projects each focused on one specific detail, mostly modelling ways to predict and reduce sonic booms.
Also, the total amount is $5.7 million; I think the $2.3 million might be the first year.
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Less than the cost for a single senior engineer or scientist, especially an aerospace engineer. They may only make $100-150k, but the contracts (even with non-profit's like Lincoln Labs) contain a profit margin, overhead costs, employee fringe benefits (401k/health insurance/etc.), Facilities Capital Cost of Money (FCCM), etc.
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That seem most unimpressive. (Score:5, Insightful)
commercial supersonic (Score:2)
(I read that so it must be true)
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Boeing pushed the Sonic Cruiser concept, which was a half way house in that it flew at just under the speed of sound (mach 0.98) rather than well over the speed of sound (mach 2, which is about where Concorde sat during cruise) - not enough timesaving benefit there to actually justify the additional costs in running such an aircraft, so it was easier to justify cost savings in having a more efficient aircraft to replace current aircraft on a similar basis. And thus the Boeing 787 was born.
Neither major man
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Yes but it is a real bitch to fly over 20 hrs to get anywhere. I'd like to do it in 7 hrs if I can, but I don't think I could afford the 10k price tag.
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I don't think I could afford the 10k
This is why the market looks better for business jet size supersonic planes. There is a small market for people that will pay 10 or 20k to get there fast. This includes the ability to operate from private airfields and depart on your passengers' schedules.
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Since no one batted an eyelid to 'enhanced security measures' at airports meaning you needed to get to the airport an hour earlier than you used to, I guess the industry thought there was little point in trying to save the customer any time, and rather to focus on saving them some money instead. Probably a short-sighted view from us customers, particularly those that travel for work.
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free markets ? and angry citizens (Score:2)
Concorde had its issues which only appeared much later due to the small number of aircraft.
But it was amazing to look at.
Its market limitation by congress of the day as it competed with Boeing's products seems to be troublesome.So is supersonic now ok ? or will the villagers be burning witches again?
Sounds like "supporting university research" (Score:1)
2,3 million on 8 projects is not much. This sounds like grants for single- or two-person post-grad university research. It is not much - but awesome for those who get it.
Don't forget the Supersonic Business Jet market (Score:1)
It seems everybody is talking abount the Concorde and commercial supersonic and comments such as "Neither major manufacturer (Boeing and Airbus) pitched a new supersonic aircraft in any seriousness.". It doesn't take much to go on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerion_AS2
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Aerion is classed as a joke in the industry, and have been pushing their supersonic business jet concept for a number of years without actually getting anywhere. Their "collaboration with Airbus" is limited to use of Airbuses technical facilities, Airbus isnt actually involved in the design, manufacture or promotion of the concept.
Pause for a moment and consider why Aerion thinks they can produce a profitable supersonic business jet when companies with decades of experience building successful business jet
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Pause for a moment and consider why Aerion thinks they can produce a profitable supersonic business jet when companies with decades of experience building successful business jets have already largely dismissed the idea in the same timeframe?
Pause for a moment, and consider why SpaceX thinks they can produce a profitable, resuable rocket when companies with decades of expeirence producing successful rockets have already largely dismissed the idea in the same timeframe?
I know pretty much nothing about Aerion, so their claims may just be hot aer, but 'companies with decades of experience' are usually the last places you want to go for technological innovation.
Poor headline. (Score:2)