In July, Lockheed Martin completed the build of NASA’s X-59 test aircraft, which is designed to turn sonic booms into mere thumps, in the hope of making overland supersonic flight a possibility. Ground tests and a first test flight are planned for later in the year. NASA aims to have enough data to hand over to US regulators in 2027.
I like the technological idea, but not the idea of catering to the super rich by giving them convenience at the cost of increasing their carbon footprint by another order or magnitude. This is tax money funding toys for the parasitic criminal billionaires.
Technology filters down. Once upon a time only the rich could afford corrective lenses, but that wasn’t a waste of resources. How many of non-wealthy people will read this comment and wear glasses or contacts? I do. BEVs were limited to the wealthy at first too, and now are solidly affordable to much of the middle class: dependent more on their access to charging and their driving requirements than on their budget. The first residential fridges cost more than a brand new Model T when they came out: the inflation adjusted 1922 price was ~$13,000 today. Was inventing fridges worthless?
It’s NASA developing new technologies. New stuff starts off more expensive, which means it will start off limited to the wealthy. If you don’t want any new tech to come out that starts with rich people being the primary users, then you should go find your local luddite club to join.
There will never be a fuel efficient way to travel at supersonic speeds using combustion technology. This is planet destroying tech. It won’t matter in 100 years when everyone is dead. This has no trickle down benefits, nor is it cutting edge. This targets an established market by trying to make it half tolerable for parasitic billionaires to further destroy the world. Supersonic commercial flight was done already. This is 1960’s technology with some CAD tools added. Trickle down, it did not. It did however prove exactly the market it is designed to enable. This is a toy for criminals that shouldn’t exist; the careless egomaniac destroyers of the World. This is only for the people that are constantly flying and have carbon footprints the size of small countries. It is criminal that this is developed at all right now. It is kind of interesting from an engineering perspective, but we are currently in the biggest deviation in earth’s climate since it has been tracked. We stepped over a cliff and have no clue when we’ll hit the bottom. The last thing we need is some stupid asshole that chose to make this problem enabled to make it worse.
Aviation is one of the smallest contributions to greenhouse gas emissions as-is: in 2016 it was 1.9% of global emissions.
The danger the rich pose to the planet isn’t being first in line for the second generation of supersonic transoceanic flights.
The danger the rich pose to the planet is them keeping coal and natural gas plants open longer because they personally profit from it. It’s them keeping their taxes low, reducing our ability to fund renewable energy. It’s them fighting tooth and nail against any new energy efficiency regulation (remember the incandescent lightbulb ban fight?) because it “hurts profits.” It’s them fighting against public transportation.
This? This isn’t even in the top 50 of their ills against the climate. The hate for the rich is well placed. Applying that hate to basic science is dangerously misplaced. The rich love when people push-back on funding science efforts.
There are already ways of making jet fuel from captured carbon, as the chemistry continues to evolve we absolutely will see carbon neutral flights becoming more common.
I know doom feels good and I’m very susceptible to it myself but the reality is we’re probably going to make it through this, it kinda sucks really because it means we do need to plan for the future after all.
I see where you’re coming from. Battery electric vehicles I think are a good example of trickle-down. It seems the R&D for electric cars affordable to wealthy people leads to new infra and tech for a changing power grid, buses, trains and bicycles.
But two examples you raised:
- corrective lenses
- refrigeration
have clear quality-of-life and health benefits. Supersonic passenger flights feel more like a luxury and convenience compared to food preservation.
Hopefully in the development of reduced flight times between other sides of the world we perform research with impact beyond flight. Things like improved materials, fuel, aerodynamics that could be used for trains and trucks. I’m not an engineer but I hope it works like that!
Faster transportation is quality of life too. Just like cars were, or railroads before them. Yeah, this one is currently worthless for anyone that isn’t rich. But if it proves successful it will become useful for more of us. Like you say, there’s also just the material and other sciences being done to make it possible that will filter out elsewhere. So much of early space exploration was Cold War dick waving, and now think about how much we rely on satellites. I couldn’t navigate anywhere without GPS, personally…
People here take their hate of the rich (which is well placed) and aim it at all the wrong things. Don’t like the rich? Tax 'em more. That’s what I want. Higher income taxes and even a wealth tax on the top. And way more meaningful inheritance taxes. Instead they’re bitching about investments in science.
This is wrong. NASA from the beginning was co-opted by the MIC owned by the original billionaires with a tissue thin veil about civilization advancement. Any discussion about super-sonic flight has already dismissed environmental impact and economic accessibility even if it’s ostensibly NASA doing it.
IF there was a supersonic capable flight technology that somehow wasn’t reliant on fossil fuels or other externalities and was cheap enough that a minimum wage worker could use them as often as they use the Subway in the top 10 largest cities in the world, then I’d be 100% behind it. But that isn’t the case, that is not the intended case, and that will never be the case.
First point there is carbon neutral jet fuel because NASA have been working of jet fuel chemistry for decades.
Secondly flying isn’t commuting, people don’t need to go to new cities twice a day but being cheap enough to allow people on minimum wage to have a holiday a few times a year would be a great benefit to all.
This is tax money funding toys for the parasitic criminal billionaires.
What an idiotic and short-sighted take. Research on supersonic aerodynamics is useful for far more than just toys for billionaires. Military applications, rocketry and astrophysics, for example. And even regular commercial aviation, because supersonic shockwaves are a major source of drag even at the speeds airliners fly at. Airlines would kill to have a fleet of planes that burn a few percent less fuel.
E: Also, much of the noise an airliner makes during takeoff comes from the sonic booms created by the engine fan blades going supersonic.
Ffs it’s nasa not blue origin. Do we really have to fight anti nasa shills now ffs, it really is like Nixon all over again after Trump ffs.
Ah yes, the old fallacy of the “I see no value in my life for this development therefore it is only catering to the elite” trope.
Kind of like computers or global communications, electricity…
Thankfully people like you are not smart enough to work in research and development. Otherwise we would all still be rubbing two sticks together to make fire.
america will do anything but invest in public transport huh
How about bitch about the actual wasteful military spending instead of scientific research into physics and understanding the dynamics of sonic booms. Nasa has like .1% of the military budget ffs.
US defense budget was 752.9B for 2022, whereas NASA’s was 24.8B
So NASA’s funding amounts to 3.29% of the Defense budget (about 1/30)
https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/atoms/files/fy2022_budget_summary.pdf
I agree with you, but it’s nice to nail down the numbers
There are technologies already starting to roll out which will make flying the least ecologically damaging means of public transport for long and medium length journeys, I wrote a comment about it already but they’re building a faculty that turns captured carbon into jet fuel it’s really clever stuff.
Or it’s own people. Which is stupid, because the brain drain will catch up technology wise.
We can tell it’s already effecting you by trying to suggest nasa is a waste, when we spend 100 times it’s budget on wasted military contracts or the fact we do have a tax bracket that allows someone to even become a billionaire instead of taking back excessive wealth stolen from workers in predatory labor markets. There are other areas we should be getting this money for the public and it sure as hell shouldn’t be from aeronautic or space research ffs.
We need bullet trains, not more passenger jets.
Actually just regular passenger trains that have priority over freight trains would be a great step forward
You don’t want that unless you want the cost of virtually everything to increase.
Don’t fuck with the infrastructure that keeps every corner of a country running on a day to day basis.
The freight railroads aren’t good at what they do. It would be much easier to run passenger services (and improve their own operations) if they ran trains that actually fit within their own passing loops, but they desperately want to reduce the number of people they have to pay to run their trains. Both would also benefit from better maintained infrastructure with upgrades such as electrification and more double tracking, but the railroads don’t want to spend any more money than absolutely necessary to keep their (mostly) running.
I wonder if research into sonic boom physics could translate over to high speed aerodynamics generally, to include the useful models for high speed trains.
Lack of high speed rail isn’t caused by lack of knowledge about how to do it. High speed rail exists in some places, just not the US.
Because the USA is 2892 miles wide. Even a 285 mph bullet train, which is the fastest train in the world, would take 10 hours to cross the United States, and that’s at absolute max speed, with no stops, which isn’t how trains operate. Realistically it would take a few days to cross the United States, as opposed to 5 hours in an airplane, or a couple of hours in a hypersonic jet. Trains are great, especially for more relaxed travel, or moving lots of goods, but they’re not a final solution for countries this size.
Interesting thought; I’d hope so. Maybe some material physics/chemistry research that makes some stuff cheaper for trains (I’m not an engineer so totally out of my depth here).
Efficient High-speed rails are already possible and have been since the 70s, it’s not a lack of science that stops them from being a thing, it’s a lack of desire from government officials being paid by private interests to do things less efficiently because people are getting paid.
Price per km of track goes up exponentialy the faster you want to go, which means they will either have expensive tickets or will be unprofitable.
Still, someone has to finance it. In the worst case you have a high speed rail network with high operationg costs that nobody uses, but taxpayers still need to maintain.
Instead of more luxury boondoggles for the rich, funded with tax money from people who will never afford it, how about we focus on decarbonizing air travel for the commoners? Fuck supersonic flight, use public money to develop a hydrogen powered regular speed transoceanic airliner so that regular people can have a sustainable long haul air travel option instead of making the carbon footprint of the rich even higher.
Flying used to be a “luxury boondoggle for the rich” same with a lot of things that we view as common today.
They can do both.
Specialization of Labor is what society is built upon, and it actually allows society to work on multiple problems all at once.
“Engineer” is not a magical term. The people working on improving aerodynamics can’t just stop doing that and switch gears to focus on chemistry, materials, process improvements, or software.
Complaining that these engineers aren’t fixing the pollution from air travel is like complaining that they aren’t delivering the mail, preventing shoplifting, or solving the Hollywood strikes.
A quarter billion dollars to build just a prototype and retread the Concorde fiasco with all its attendant environmental destruction. What does this have to do with exploring space, which is what I thought was NASA’s mission?
National Aeronautics and Space Administration
Atmospheric based praise pursuits have always been within their purview. Space just gets all the press.
Fair point. It’s still striking to me how much public money is being thrown at a project that will benefit just a handful of private citizens.
Climate science doesnt have much to do with spaceflight either. Are you complaining about that too?
I am. We have enough problems here, and there is an enormous amount of climate damage for every rocket sent to space.
