NASA Wants to Build a Super Quiet Supersonic Jet

A NASA rendering shows an early vision of what the quiet supersonic X-plane might look like.

(Image credit: NASA)

A very quiet plane could be coming very fast.

The recent 2019 NASA budget request was, as Live Science sister site Space.com reported, light on science and funding for the International Space Station but heavy on commercialization and space exploration. In this proposed budget, President Donald Trump's administration also announced its intention to fully fund a new experimental supersonic airplane.

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The plane, called the Low-Boom Flight Demonstrator, would make its first flight in 2021 if the budget line is approved and the craft's development goes according to plan. It's meant as a test bed for technologies that could one day show up on commercial planes, the budget states. It would allow for faster-than-sound travel without the glass-shattering booms that characterize supersonic fighter jets and that enraged Queens, New York, residents during the era of the supersonic New York-to-Europe Concorde jet.

Here's the problem the quiet supersonic craft could solve: When a plane moves slower than sound, the jet's sound waves arrive on the ground in pretty similar shape to how they left the engine (with perhaps a little distortion and pitch-shifting thanks to things like the Doppler effect.) But — as Pennsylvania State University's NoiseQuest lab explained on its website — when planes move faster than sound, they outrun their own engine noise, with the vibrations spreading out behind them through the air in a kind of invisible wake. [Supersonic! The 10 Fastest Military Airplanes]

People don't generally like normal airport noise, as the NoiseQuest lab notes, and people definitely don't like when that sound arrives in a series of shocking crashes. That's led to the 1973 Federal Aviation Administration regulation §91.817, which prohibits civilians from engaging in supersonic flight over land in the United States. No supersonic civilian jets have operated since the Concorde was retired in 2003, NASA wrote in a statement accompanying the budget. (The Concorde only flew at subsonic speeds overland in US territory.)

"Like the railroads that brought American explorers, entrepreneurs and settlers to tame the Wild West, these groundbreaking new technologies will open untold opportunities to extend the range of American action and values into the new worlds of outer space," the vice president said. "And by fostering much stronger partnerships between the federal government and the realm of industry, and bringing the full force of our national interest to bear, American leadership in space will be assured."

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Rafi joined Live Science in 2017. He has a bachelor's degree in journalism from Northwestern University’s Medill School of journalism. You can find his past science reporting at Inverse, Business Insider and Popular Science, and his past photojournalism on the Flash90 wire service and in the pages of The Courier Post of southern New Jersey.