NASA Wants To Get Supersonic With New Passenger Jet (networkworld.com) 144
coondoggie writes: NASA wants to put a supersonic passenger jet back in the sky that promises to a soft thump or supersonic heartbeat as the agency called it - rather than the disruptive boom currently associated with such high-speed flight. The 'low-boom' aircraft known as Quiet Supersonic Technology (QueSST) will be built by a team led by Lockheed Martin Aeronautics. It will cost $20 million to develop baseline aircraft requirements and a preliminary aircraft design.
It will be just as cost effective as the SLS (Score:2, Troll)
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Then you come along and the best you have to offer is to attempt to degrade him for his spelling of a name? You know you missed a few punctuation and other
Re:It will be just as cost effective as the SLS (Score:5, Insightful)
More pork for Lockheed Martin.
Obvious pork is most definitely obvious. After spending $20 million, NASA gets... a pile of paper. For $20 million, not one sheet of metal will be bent, not one rivet will be hammered, not one seam will be welded. And why is NASA spending this $20 million? Because it might not work. Or maybe nobody will want one.
After 70 years of this bullshit, we're suffering far more than we realize. Because of contracts like this, big business is now convinced of its own infallibility, and Republicans are convinced of the ineptitude of government. This is not the capitalism they've been selling us all these decades. This is ridiculously socialized risk. If we were pursuing actual capitalism, Lockheed would have done a market analysis, possibly discovered that there's a profitable niche going unfilled, and attempted to fill it by designing and building an aircraft. With their own goddamn money.
Instead, Lockheed did a market analysis, possibly discovered there's a profitable niche, and hedged their bets by shoving their risk up our collective asses. So now it's all upside for Lockheed. They can't lose. If it turns out that designing planes on paper is still a stupid idea (F-35, we're looking at you), and the pile of paper NASA receives can't be used to build a plane anybody wants, it's "government" that failed. "NASA Failure!" "NASA Boondoggle!" "NASA's Plane Can't Fly!" The headlines write themselves.
And so the perception that government is incompetent is reinforced, and Lockheed Martin's stock doesn't take a hit, because hey, they delivered a pile of paper. That's what the contract specified. US businesses are never wrong, US businesses never make mistakes, especially not big expensive multi-million dollar mistakes. No, only governments do that.
It's insidious. It's wrong. Every contract like it should be opposed by every American.
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So it's got nothing to do with "designing planes on paper" - that's what e
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The Navy don't want a Harrier, thats the Marine Corp - the Navy want the F-35C. The Army don't want anything, because they can't operate it.
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Perhaps you should think before jumping on posts to nitpick over trivia and getting it wrong? An addition of information is useful, irrelevant distracting noise just looks like playing some pointless mass debate game.
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Uh, the Marine Corp are *not* part of the US Navy, no sir-ee - they both fall under the Department of the Navy, but they are both entirely separate forces with their own separate commanders and their own separate budgets.
And no, the Army had utterly no say at all in the F-35 design - they provide no budgetary support to the program either.
How about you actually do some research on the topics before you try to argue your points, it stops you looking stupid.
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I should add (Score:2)
The F-35 has problems due to excessive compromise which is nowhere near the issue here with the supersonic transport design.
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Whoosh! (Score:2)
that promises to a soft thump or supersonic heartbeat as the agency called it
That one flew over our editors' heads.
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What you say?
Take off every jet!
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For great justice!
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You were too supersonic for me.
A little teaser: Sellafield is to yaelk as Windscale is to ...?
What about office door slams? (Score:2)
Maybe I blame my concern on that famous paratrooper bread-baking-warrior turned software entrepreneur Joel Spolsky who recommended putting your tech workers in a quiet setting so they can "get in the zone" to get their coding done?
How come we agonize over booms from high-flying supersonic aircraft but door slams, loud, frequent, startling door slams are part of the office environment that no one seems to think is a big deal, especially in a college-campus building?
I seem to think this started in the mi
Shuttle boom not like high-altitude jets (Score:2)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
no one wealthy enough will buy a ticket (Score:1)
Does NASA have nothing better to do? (Score:2, Insightful)
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You don't think the Aeronautics Administration should work on the science of aeronautics? Interesting.
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I did some work related to the previous project. It wasn't that long ago--more like 20 years. The issue was that you could pick only two of efficient, quiet, and supersonic. I have no idea how they plan to fix that this time around.
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I don't understand why a superjet for rich people is something that should eat a single cent of NASA's budget.
In ten years, SpaceX will have accomplished everything NASA has planned for the next forty. They need a Plan B.
$20 for a buildable design is either entirely impossible or fantastically efficient.
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The only NASA plans that I know of for the next 40 years are the James Webb telescope and landing a person on an asteroid. I'm super pumped SpaceX did those!
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And aerospace has always been heavily subsidized by the government [wikipedia.org]. The physics in these high-speed / high-altitude / high-temperature environments is frequently not well understood. It makes little sense for every aerospace company out there t
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JAXA is already doing test flights of its low noise supersonic aircraft. It looks like the technology has reached the stage where a new supersonic passenger aircraft could be viable, and Japan wants to be at the forefront of that technology. The US seems to have realized the same thing and got its aeronautical R&D body, NASA, to look into it. $20m for what could be a new market, one which Airbus will be late to, seems like a good deal.
What's the market? (Score:5, Interesting)
Boeing failed with the SST, due to anticipated fuel costs not meeting market needs. Similarly with the Concorde, which couldn't operate profitably.
Sure, there are some rich folk who would pay for short flight times, but the mass market is price conscious. The problem with supersonic flight is not sonic booms, but efficiency.
Finally, why is NASA wasting taxpayer money designing passenger aircraft for the civilian market?
Re: What's the market? (Score:1)
Concorde operated profitably for quite some time. The problem was, and still is, that only a few routes make commercial sense. So the SST a low-volume product, which combined with stupid high R&D costs (government footed the bill for Concorde) makes them a very risky proposition for the aircraft companies to develop, and for airlines to buy.
Now, long haul, business heavy routes benefit the most, and if they do manage to make it quiet enough, a US transcontinental route starts to look really interesting.
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So by "operated profitably," you mean it didn't operate profitably, it just pushed development costs onto European taxpayers.
(Why is it that people think that anything paid for by government somehow comes without a cost?)
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"
So by "operated profitably," you mean it didn't operate profitably, it just pushed development costs onto European taxpayers.
Which is what NASA is doing, now.
Re: What's the market? (Score:4, Informative)
Concorde operated profitably for quite some time.
No. This is wrong. The Concorde never even came close to being profitable. It received $8000 per passenger-trip in subsidies from British and French taxpayers. But as the costs continued to climb, even that wasn't enough, and the politicians decided that there was actually a limit on how much they were willing to tax poor and middle class people in order to subsidize filthy rich Concorde passengers.
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The oldest aircraft in that list first flew in 1981, Concorde first flew in 1969... Aircraft are becoming more efficient over time, but development of supersonic passenger aircraft basically stopped in the early 70s.
Re: What's the market? (Score:5, Interesting)
I would love for you to back that up - after privatisation, British Airways increased the ticket price, still filled the aircraft (until post 9/11) and made a profit doing so.
From a WSJ article in 2003 [wsj.com]:
I have never seen any evidence of subsidisation of Concorde post-privatisation.
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No they didn't.
Both British Airways and Air France had initial orders for 6 aircraft each, and those aircraft were paid for in full by each airline. When the market collapsed, several completed Concorde airframes were dropped by their buyers, and they were sold to Air France and British Airways at cost because no one else would take them.
What the governments did do was write off the development costs, which would have been recouped from sales had they not been dropped during the oil crisis in the 1970s.
By
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What made it worse was that a lot of those routes fly over land, where people don't want to hear the sonic booms... Flights between europe and the middle east or asia, flights across the US.. You're basically left with routes from europe to east coast usa, routes from west coast usa to asia and routes to/from australia.
Even the supersonic Concorde flights from europe has to remain sub sonic until they were several miles clear of the coast which added quite a bit of time to the flights.
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Concorde couldn't operate profitably because it only had a few routes it could service due to the sonic boom restrictions. Some of the routes that it did originally serve had to be curtailed due to booms. Sonic booms most certainly IS the main problem keeping supersonic flight from gaining a foothold.
NASA's job is to research Aeronautics for all purposes, especially civilian (since the DoD has plenty of funding for defense purposes). It's what the first A in NASA stands for. It's not a waste, it's probably
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Concorde couldn't operate profitably because it only had a few routes it could service due to the sonic boom restrictions. Some of the routes that it did originally serve had to be curtailed due to booms. Sonic booms most certainly IS the main problem keeping supersonic flight from gaining a foothold.
Simple fix: Put all the people who have apoplectic fits over sonic booms but have no problems with thunder in rubber rooms. Thunder over pressure is much worse than Concorde sonic booms. I've lived in the mid west and, as a kid, under the flight paths of the SR-71 and B-70. Sonic booms have nothing on thunder.
Anyway, Boeing was behind the "ban the bang" campaign when they failed at the SST, switched to the 747 (haul lots of people slowly) and wanted to undermine the Concorde.
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$20 million for a new X-Prize would have been a much better idea. Chances of an X-Prize succeeding is about 50% where chances of a $20 million contract to Lockheed coming to anything other than asking for more money is 0%.
How many failed projects due to gross mismanagement of finances will NASA suffer before realizing that giving Lockheed money is just never a good idea.
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Concorde couldn't operate profitably because it was a fuel hog - it used a turbojet which is much less efficient than a turbofan, and it required afterburners (which are hideously inefficient) to take off and to accelerate through the transonic regime. If it couldn't make money on the heavily traveled transatlantic route, it pretty much couldn't make money anywhere,
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Turbojet is only less efficient than a turbofan when flying at low speeds. At Mach 2 there is not much difference because high bypass turbofans cannot achieve this kind of speed - in fact, the higher the bypass is, the lower is the maximum speed - and low bypass turbofans are basically leaky turbojets which use the bypass air stream more for cooling than for propulsion.
Yes, the latest Tu-144 used by NASA had turbofans borrowed from the Tu-160 bomber, and they were much more efficient than the Olympus turboj
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And the TU-160s are still flying today, conducting bombing runs in Syria...
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Probably just for pilot training - using Tu-160 for anything other than that and scaring Americans is far too expensive.
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I think NASA should do some research on supersonic flight, i.e. a technology demonstrator. And if commercial markets want to take it from there, then they can go for it. If not then document what was done. Cmon you guys, it ain't that much money, we piss magnitudes more on other guvmint programs and yet everyone is conspicuously silent about those but when NASA programs are mentioned, then comes the usual "Think of the starving children!" Besides an airplan, there are other things such as control systems, m
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If you can get past the sonic boom issue, then it's worth engine manufacturers looking into better engines for supersonic flight. Computer modelling has got a lot better since the 60s too, so a modern aircraft should be able to reduce drag significantly. Higher flight levels are also possible now, which helps thin the air.
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His article still needs to be voted up, theoretically. So either an editor did it, or enough people liked it.
So, I don't see why he can't submit his own article. Most promotion is self-promotion anyway.
Invented here (Score:3)
"... sky that promises to a soft thump ..." (Score:2, Funny)
The only thing any of us should "promise to a soft thump" are our heads hitting our desks after we all get aneurysms trying to figure out how the hell to parse these inane and poorly edited summaries.
suborbital FTW (Score:2)
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Don't know if you've ever flown an equivalent distance but five hours is a mere hop by comparison, old boy. I imagine plenty of current first-class passengers, who arrive at exactly the same time feeling almost as lousy as cattle class, would be very interested in such a short flight. Let's face it, aviation has actually stagnated to a remarkable degree for the last fifty years.
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Don't know if you've ever flown an equivalent distance but five hours is a mere hop by comparison, old boy. I imagine plenty of current first-class passengers, who arrive at exactly the same time feeling almost as lousy as cattle class, would be very interested in such a short flight. Let's face it, aviation has actually stagnated to a remarkable degree for the last fifty years.
And why should you know? Yes, I have in fact flown NY to Tokyo on two separate occasions. And NY to India several times. And NY to Jo'berg. Also coast-to-coast on a regular basis, which is six hours all by itself on a non-stop flight.
Mach three was hypothetical. The Concorde only flew at Mach two. So NY to Tokyo is really more like a ten hour flight. I'm even one of the fortunate ones who can sleep through a lot of the flight, but there's only so much one can sleep; at some point drugs – the ones I
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Well jeeze, you don't have to go all *cough* ballistic!
Of course you're right though. NASA is aeronautics and space after all. There's no reason not to combine the two for this. The flight takes less time than waiting for your bags and clearing customs, anywhere in the world. And the kids would find take off really exciting. One thing that's absolutely required is big windows
Missed opportunity (Score:2)
With the tendency for government drones to think up "cute" acronyms I think they missed a great opportunity in naming this one. In only a few seconds I came up with a better name, the Silent Over-Flight Testing Jet...
the SOFT Jet.
Not a good idea? Reply with one better, this could be fun.
How many passengers? (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't want to try to oversimplify aeronautical engineering - and I am certainly not an aeronautical engineer myself - but in the current economy it certainly seems that something this expensive will only be viable if it can take a larger number of passengers than the Concorde could.
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You're wrong about the 737 - the 737-100, which was the 737 variant around when Concorde was designed, could seat 85-124 depending on configuration. Concorde was 92-128. The 747 was only unveiled the same year Concorde was, so again the Concorde design was contemporary with the 707 rather than the 747. The 707 had a slightly higher seating capacity, but it wasn't vastly more. In the 60s, it probably was anyone's guess how things would go - they'd only just left the prope
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Micro SST is better answer (Score:2, Interesting)
1-3 person pilotless, lying in 'coffin' wearing VR headset to eliminate claustrophobia. Use just 25-50g/s fuel (1-2MW heat) vs 7kg/s of concorde (300MW). Small power use=tiny boom noise.
-Small ramjets just as efficient as big ramjets (unlike gas turbines), Small turboramjets have good efficiency as most of compression not done by turbomachinery. Use small gas turbine or more efficient IC engine to fly to altitude and dive to accelerate through sound barrier and ignite turbo-ramjet.
-Enables supersonic fli
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Uh, comic books aren't actually engineering textbooks...
Won't happen (Score:2, Interesting)
Lockheed can't do anything for under a billion dollars. The breakdown is $50 million to
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Re:This will only help the wealthy... (Score:5, Funny)
Concord is a variety of grape. Indeed, there can be some expensive wines out there. This story is about fast planes, however. Maybe you mean the Concorde?
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It was very briefly Concord because of a hissy-fit that Harold Macmillan threw.
Then Tony Benn (Minister for Technology) put the e back on the end at it's launch.
It is, and always has been, officially, Concorde.
Re: This will only help the wealthy... (Score:4, Interesting)
It seems slashdotter's aren't the only ones who disagreed about the "E"
Quoted from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org].
Naming:
Reflecting the treaty between the British and French governments that led to Concorde's construction, the name Concorde is from the French word concorde (IPA: [kkd]), which has an English equivalent, concord. Both words mean agreement, harmony or union. The name was officially changed to Concord by Harold Macmillan in response to a perceived slight by Charles de Gaulle. At the French roll-out in Toulouse in late 1967,[26] the British Government Minister for Technology, Tony Benn, announced that he would change the spelling back to Concorde.[27] This created a nationalist uproar that died down when Benn stated that the suffixed 'e' represented "Excellence, England, Europe and Entente (Cordiale)." In his memoirs, he recounts a tale of a letter from an irate Scotsman claiming: "[Y]ou talk about 'E' for England, but part of it is made in Scotland." Given Scotland's contribution of providing the nose cone for the aircraft, Benn replied, "[I]t was also 'E' for 'Écosse' (the French name for Scotland) — and I might have added 'e' for extravagance and 'e' for escalation as well!"[28]
Concorde also acquired an unusual nomenclature for an aircraft. In common usage in the United Kingdom, the type is known as Concorde without an article, rather than the Concorde or a Concorde.[29][30]
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Very well then. Konchord it is.
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I'm not a Republican and I flew on the Concorde.
I remember most of the passengers being Hollywood types, and Rod Stewart flying to New York for his weekly haircut (no shit).
Re:This will only help the wealthy... (Score:5, Insightful)
Refrigeration is only for the wealthy. Automobiles are only for the wealthy. Indoor plumbing is only for the wealthy. Computers are only for the wealthy. Going to college is only for the wealthy. Electric cars are only for the wealthy.
Ethanol subsidies are just corporate welfare. Windmill subsidies are just corporate welfare. Solar panel subsidies are just corporate welfare. Electric car subsidies are just corporate welfare. Government backed student loans are just corporate welfare. CFL subsidies are just corporate welfare.
Isn't it funny on how the definition of "wealthy" and "corporate welfare" changes depending on the who, when, and where? There's plenty of evidence that what is now a luxury that only the 1% could afford will eventually become affordable for the other 99%.
Oh, and let's pick on just the Republicans because the Democrats NEVER give free stuff to corporations.
If there is something to complain about with government spending then I can give much better examples than funding NASA to research high speed flight. Researching high speed flight is EXACTLY the kind of thing that NASA was created to do.
Go soak your head.
Re:This will only help the wealthy... (Score:5, Insightful)
I would agree with most of what you say until you get to "Researching high speed flight is EXACTLY the kind of thing that NASA was created to do." Technically, NASA was created because of Sputnik and had nothing to do with anything but the space race.
But ignoring that point. Isn't the US about free market capitalism. Doesn't that mean that those that risk capital benefit from the success of taking that risk? Government funding of the project removes the risk, but Lockheed still gets the reward. Now government funding makes sense when there is low return so nobody takes the risk such as certain medical research, infrastructure projects, etc. But that is not the case with this. Government funding of this is like government funding of an oil pipeline. Surely the private sector can do this on their own.
If one truly values capitalism as an economic system, then how can this be seen as anything other than corporatism, which is basically corporate welfare.
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Aeronautics
aeronautics
ernôdiks/
noun
noun: aeronautics
the science or practice of travel through the air. Especially at High Speed.
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Somebody should tell NASA. From their very own vision statement they say:
What Does NASA Do?
NASA's vision: We reach for new heights and reveal the unknown for the benefit of humankind.
To do that, thousands of people have been working around the world -- and off of it -- for more than 50 years, trying to answer some basic questions. What's out there in space? How do we get there? What will we find? What can we learn there, or learn just by trying to get there, that will make life better here on Earth?
It would seem that funding commercial airline products does not fit with that.
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The US is not about free market capitalism. We give lip service to it, the talking heads point out the other party ruining it, but in reality most if not all industries have gamed the system. It is now about socializing the costs as much as possible and privatizing the profits. This is near end game capitalism and its ugly as fuck.
I agree totally. The US left capitalism back in the 1980s and shifted to corporatism, which is the politically correct term for fascism. Nobody wants to admit that the US has become fascist because of the ties to Nazi Germany. But it is/was a most efficient mechanism to have a robust economy. Of course, only those at the top benefited and the common workers (middle class) became more like serfs.
To bad Lincoln was wrong at Gettysburg when he stated "... a government of the people, by the people and for the
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NASA was created from NACA as a direct response to Sputnit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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It turns out proof by juxtaposition is not valid.
Also the "Republican" guy is a nutcase.
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There's plenty of evidence that what is now a luxury that only the 1% could afford will eventually become affordable for the other 99%.
The SST makes sense only over global distances. New York to Beijing. San Francisco to Tokyo. The question is whether the market for a 6 to 8 hr. SST flight is strong enough to bear the premium above the mass market or business class fare for the 16 hr. airbus.
Re:This will only help the wealthy... (Score:4, Insightful)
While I agree that there is a lower limit on the distance such an aircraft would make sense I do not agree that it must be so large. A flight from MSP to ORD is 1:20 according to Google Maps, that's not where a supersonic transport would be used.
What might get people to buy tickets is a SFO to NYC flight that takes 2 or 3 hours instead of 5 to 7. But it is more than just the time in the air that determines travel time. What really kills short hop flights and supersonic transport is the wait times at airports. TSA checkpoints, the rarity of flight choices, and how sensitive flight times are to weather and other circumstances makes travel by air lengthy, inconvenient, and therefore expensive.
I think we will see cheap and speedy air travel only when the federal government realizes that their are greater threats to our lives than religious nutjobs with suicidal tendencies. I should be able to drive to the airport and buy a ticket to Chicago on the spot for the next flight that leaves. I should not have to reserve a seat in advance, show a government issued ID, or take off my shoes. I can understand a need for some security, we don't want people bringing gas cans and live chickens on the plane. I'm not sure we should even need metal detectors since I see no need to take people's pocketknives and knitting needles. Pat downs and full body scanners don't make sense on matters of security regardless. Anyway, perhaps that is a rant for another time.
If I can get on a plane with such little hassle then I'd quite likely fly more often. If more people fly then the tickets will get cheaper, if tickets get cheaper then more people will fly. If tickets get cheaper then there is more "room" (economically speaking) for things like supersonic passenger aircraft.
Faster airplanes would be nice and I do believe that there is a market for them but the most effective way, IMHO, to shorten travel times by air is to improve the mechanics of the modern airport, not that of the modern airplane. If we can get that fixed then we might see supersonic flights make sense for not just transatlantic and transcontinental distances but also for interstate travel.
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Of course my examples are corporate welfare, but people tend to view them as otherwise because it fits their view of what governments should do. My examples of corporate welfare are tolerated or encouraged because they meet some "greater good" for the nation. I can make the case that funding supersonic flight research also has a "greater good".
If supersonic flight research fails to meet the greater good requirement then I can argue that my examples from my previous post do as well. If someone wants to ki
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A supersonic aircraft is (by definition) faster than sound.
Then surely listening can only tell you that a supersonic aircraft has already passed you and can not give any information about an approaching aircraft.
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The aircraft is moving faster than sound, not faster than light. Put up a perimeter of listening posts around where you'd expect the aircraft to attack and if/when a sonic boom is heard then counter measures can be planned.
For example, if you are defending your coasts from approaching supersonic aircraft then you can place your first layer of sonic boom detecting buoys at about 1500km out from the coast. A plane approaching at Mach 1 will still give you one hour of warning. Place some other buoys at inte
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If communication with the buoys is lost due to jamming of the signal, or destruction of the buoy, then that alone is indicative of a potential attack.
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Concorde was also the first generation supersonic airliner... There were already plans for a model B Concorde which had improved range and reduced fuel consumption. If more of them had been sold to other airlines then there would have been continued development and improvements, just like there have been with sub sonic aircraft.
Concorde is basically 1960s technology and was never developed any further before being retired in 2003, look how far other fields have come in that time? If Concorde had continued d
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In the sense that a limo driver that takes in more than he spends on gas makes a profit, assuming someone gave him the car.
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This is just more disgusting Republican corporate welfare.
From a Democrat administration? Seriously, this is not partisan politics, this is NASA trying to get money for the Aeronautics portion of their name.
PS: If it is American, it is an SST, not some French word. We were smart enough to kill the boondoggle before building a prototype the last time, and you can expect this will die in the womb, too.
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white supreme ass =/= white supremacist.