Nasa (silently) Soars to New Speeds

By Malakhi Beyah, 2025

Published 1/31/2024

NASA’s X-59 Quesst Jet is set to shatter the science community’s perception of supersonic air travel. Photo courtesy of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

Until the mid-1900s, traveling faster than the speed of sound was something that could only be done on the pages of a science-fiction novel. Planes had only been introduced to the world a few decades before, and the fastest commercial flights reached top speeds that would be considerably slower than modern airplanes. At the time, people had little reason to believe that their technology would bring them to impressive speeds anytime soon. That doubt was wiped from everyone’s minds on October 14, 1947, when Air Force craft Glamorous Glennis successfully traveled Mach 1.06 (1.06 times the speed of sound), or about 700 miles per hour, flying faster than the speed of sound and officially overcoming the so-called “sound barrier”. However, most people never saw the immediate benefit of this breakthrough; commercial flights’ speeds were kept much lower than Mach 1, while faster aircrafts were reserved for military operations and government research.

The reason you cannot expect your average American Airlines flight to travel faster than Mach 0.85 (around 575 miles per hour) has to do with what happens when something breaks the sound barrier. When regular planes glide through the sky, air simply flows around the plane. When a plane begins to travel faster than the speed of sound, though, the air molecules in front of the plane are hit with a much larger force and do not have enough time to flow around it. The pressure on the air around the plane results in a shockwave that causes a thunder-like “sonic boom.” This “boom” feels like an earthquake to those on the ground below the plane, with the shockwave shaking and damaging buildings. This problem is already bad enough with small supersonic military jets; creating larger supersonic passenger planes would only make “sonic booms” much more disruptive. In fact, one of the first (and only) supersonic commercial airplanes, the Concorde, had to be retired in 2003 because of how problematic its “sonic booms” were for cities it passed over.

NASA has set out to minimize the “sonic boom” caused by supersonic travel. With its Quesst mission in collaboration with Lockheed Martin, NASA has designed the X-59 aircraft to hopefully lower the volume of a “sonic boom” from thunder to a closing car door. The space agency hopes to accomplish this through the X-59’s long and narrow frame with a pointed nose; this should limit the amount of pressure on the air in front of the plane and, as a result, decrease the intensity of the shockwaves produced. The plane is expected to reach a top speed of Mach 1.4 (about 925 miles per hour). During the X-59’s scheduled flight later this year, NASA will have surveyors on the ground along the plane’s path to record how loud the “sonic booms'' are. If the disruption is noticeably less than that caused by standard supersonic planes, NASA plans to convince air traffic regulators to “[write] new sound-based rules to lift the ban on faster-than-sound flight over land.” NASA’s ultimate goal is to prove that the future could see commercial flights regularly flying at supersonic speeds, rather than keeping that achievement limited to military jets. As it stands, NASA’s new supersonic plane may soon make long plane rides a thing of the past.