The distance from front wheel to the end of the beak is impressive, its sooo engine-side heavy I guess. Curious if it requires a lot more tender landing procedure
The cockpit slightly in front of the nose wheel isn’t that unusual and the rest is just a very long nose cone added for the flow effect (that’s probably pretty empty and light).
Wikipedia:
The flush cockpit means that the long and pointed nose-cone will obstruct all forward vision. The X-59 will use an enhanced flight vision system (EVS), consisting of a forward 4K camera with a 33° by 19° angle of view, which will compensate for the lack of forward visibility.
Regular aircraft equipped for IFR can't safely land with zero forward visibility. The pilot has to be able to see the runway for the final touchdown and roll out. Only a few aircraft and airports are able to do Category IIIC precision landings.
Even if supersonic flight were 2.4x less fuel efficient than regular flights, based on Concorde vs other aircraft, if that translated into 2.4x ticket prices, a lot of people would still pay it.
$1000 vs $2400 to get to Europe in 6 hours instead of 12? A lot of people who just hate those long flights would pay for it, especially given that flights are only a portion of total vacation cost, together with hotels, etc.
Or for a flight inside the US, $1000 rather than $400, but to get from coast to coast in 3 hours rather than 6, may be very worth it for some people.
Worth mentioning that no one intends to make commercial jets go Concorde fast (mach 2) again, to my knowledge.
Boom is talking about "Boomless Cruise" being up to mach 1.3. they are trying to bounce the downward going sound waves off the atmosphere, bouncing them back up. It seems to be significantly speed dependent?
https://boomsupersonic.com/press-release/boom-supersonic-ann...
The concord was heavily subsidised. Those ticket prices didn’t cover the cost of the service.
It was also far less pleasant a ride than even most economy class tickets for long hall flights. The space was more cramped and it was much louder inside the cabin. Personally, Id rather spend more for nicer seats on a longer flight than worse seats on a shorter flight. And a lot of people with money felt the same.
Design changes might help with the passenger comfort problem but when the plane is already running at a loss, it’s a hard sell asking for more R&D costs (which would be massive) to redevelop the concord.
This is something I've really flipped on when I started taking trains more to replace domestic flights (in Europe) to improve my personal CO2 footprint.
I used to be really impatient with travel and tried my best to save travel time, and never took the train. Then I forced my self to change my ways.
Nowdays, I find thst plan the train travel days as part of the trip: Sure, it takes me a whole day to get somewhere, but I allocate that time for hacking on the laptop on a side project, reading a book, or playing a game on the Steam Deck, things I normally don't find that much time for. I find e.g. my vacation satisfaction actually has gone up.
Train travel is also easier with (my) kids than air travel despite the longer duration, because you can roam the train more, change location to the restaurant, etc.
The Concorde and what I understand to be it's lack of viability was exactly what I was thinking about - it motivated my question. What's different now?
They did fly them for 33 years. Even if it didn't work out in the end its not exactly an abject failure. I could imagine slightly better business plan, etc could make all the difference.
After all, concorde design started almost 75 years ago, surely we've learned a thing or two on how to design aircrafts with lower maintenance & operating costs in that time.
> The only reason it kept flying for 33 years is a vanity project for national airlines.
Something that loses money, but not so much money that it can't be justified as a vanity project, seems like the sort of thing that could be profitable with tweaks and improvements.
Like it didn't work, but it was close enough to working that reasonable investors could say: second time will be the charm. Especially given how much more mature aeroplane technology is now vs the 1950s.
To put it in perspective, we first broke the sound barrier in 1947. People started designing the concorde in 1954 only 7 years later. It is now three quarters of a century later. Technology has improved a lot since then.
Concorde made an operating profit. Not a huge one (how could it, with fourteen planes flying), and it didn’t recoup development costs, but it was in the green once that initial cost was paid.
It was able to coast, eventually, but that’s some very fancy accounting.
“French Transport Minister Daniel Hoeffel, saying France ''will not and cannot abandon Concorde,'' signed a new agreement with Air France this week. The French Government, which with Britain had spent more than $2 billion developing the world's first supersonic passenger aircraft, will pay 90 percent of the plane's estimated operating losses for the next three years, compared with 70 percent in the past.
Under the new pact, the French taxpayer will contribute $66 million this year to the cost of Air France's champagne-and-caviar service linking Paris with New York, Washington, Caracas and Rio de Janeiro. In 1982, when losses are expected to decline slightly, the subsidy will be about $64 million, and in 1983, $59 million.”
In my opinion, there are worse ways for governments to subsidize aerospace and materials research and development, improve the connectivity between nations, generate national prestige, give people optimism for the future, and so on. 2 billion doesn't sound like a lot. It's a drop in the bucket compared to US military expenditures.
If California High Speed Rail loses a little bit of money, I won't be too upset by it. Unfortunately the up front costs are much higher, but at the same time, massive, massive infrastructure development is happening in California all along the length of the state, and the government is acquiring the rights to develop public transportation both now and into the future on that land. Again, there are worse ways to spend the money in my opinion.
I remember seeing something from Boom (now renamed?) which was an YN company years ago. I recall them developing some technology to solve the noise problem - somehow bouncing the sound off the atmosphere or similar IIRC? I do think its viability has increased over the years, just everyone has this default "it wont work" mindset because of the failure that was Concorde.
If the overland regulation changed, there would very likely be Supersonic business jets after a decade or too.
Boom the only company trying to seriously do it, and they are facing a major uphill battle and will need many billions more.
And this NASA project doesn't really solve the problem, because its primary way to avoid the noise, is to reduce what would be cabin space for the already limited space. So that makes commercial viability even worse.
14 CFR 91.817 was changed in the US, sort of, by executive order (depending on if this is legal) and by a proposed bill Supersonic Aviation Modernization Act (SAMA) H.R.3410
Reminder that NASA's X-59 (which tests redirecting shockwave mostly upwards) is different from Boom Airspace's XB-1 (which tests flying slower than speed of sound down on the surface)
This is not the only hurdle. You can have an airport right next to a major city, with hundreds of arrivals and departures each day.
The same cannot be said for a Starship spaceport. Due to very loud launch, sonic booms on landing [0], and the danger of dropping a Starship onto populated areas, it would likely need to be offshore. That requires a boat, so now boarding a Starship involves thinking about sea states, taking a ferry ride on each side, and more.
Starship is super cool, but point to point Starship is a bit of a fantasy when you start to get to the nitty gritty.
110dB 20km from the origin? That is a serious WTF right there if that number is accurate. If my quick estimate is correct that would mean that the sonic boom is deadly to anything within a few 100m around the booster. Even 110dB is skirting the border to permanent hearing damage from a single exposure.
And that suborbital spaceflight is effectively off the table for anyone with a heart condition. There's a reason why you see all those warnings on rollercoasters even when the dangerous part lasts <1s. Now let's subject someone to minutes of it.
That's akin to saying that it seems fundamentally impossible to make landing rockets safe which, in fact, is exactly what Boeing/Lockheed were saying when SpaceX was first revolutionizing that space as well.
I’m not aware of any rocket landing safe enough for human use. NASA nixed the idea of propulsive landing for Dragon 2 for this reason. It’s extremely difficult to make safe, since just about any reasonable engine configuration means guaranteed death if a single engine fails at a critical moment. Compare with modern airliners where an engine can fail at any point in flight and the plane can land safely.
> NASA nixed the idea of propulsive landing for Dragon 2 for this reason.
That is completely false. First of all, NASA didn't nix it, they just didn't make it a priority as it had little value from their perspective.
The reason it was not done is that para-shouts have to be in the design anyway for abort situations, so that was fixed.
So for SpaceX, the question was to likely delay the program, and take on a whole lot of extra engineering work that they were not actually getting paid for, remember fixed price contract.
They were only going to work on it if they really thought they needed it for something like Red Dragon. And then they could still add it later.
And one of the primary reason SpaceX thought that its to hard, is that they landing feet would have to have gone threw the heat shield. That would have made the whole heat-shield design massively more complex.
He said it was the difficulty in proving the safety. There's an informative article here. [1]
NASA likes parachutes because they've always used parachutes. SpaceX likes retropulsive landings because Mars is their goal, and Mars' atmosphere isn't dense enough for parachutes. It's also safer for the crew in nominal operation and enables a much higher degree of rapid reuse, relative to NASA's traditional operation of taking a salt water bath in the ocean.
So they could go through the [very reasonable] extensive costs and testing involved in proving the safety of the retropulsive landings, or just go old school, strap a few parachutes on and work on getting crew to the ISS (which was the goal at the time). They chose the latter and with the plan of getting back to retropulsive landings later, which they also did. Parachutes remain the main landing mechanism for the Crew Dragon, but it now also has retropulsive landing capabilities to be used in case of a chute failure.
You're right; I meant to refute the following point:
NASA nixed the idea of propulsive landing for Dragon 2 for this reason (safety)
It wasn't because of safety, but because it would have needed tests, development and certification (for a new type of landing) while already having an established method (splashing into the sea).
The distance from front wheel to the end of the beak is impressive, its sooo engine-side heavy I guess. Curious if it requires a lot more tender landing procedure
The cockpit slightly in front of the nose wheel isn’t that unusual and the rest is just a very long nose cone added for the flow effect (that’s probably pretty empty and light).
I wonder how they manage the stability with that much aerodynamic surface out front.
It looks like the pilot barely sees out the window? Does it rely on cameras or does it föy by itself?
It relies on cameras.
Wikipedia: The flush cockpit means that the long and pointed nose-cone will obstruct all forward vision. The X-59 will use an enhanced flight vision system (EVS), consisting of a forward 4K camera with a 33° by 19° angle of view, which will compensate for the lack of forward visibility.
Thats pretty cool, Concorde had to drop the nose so the pilots could see out when landing, no longer an issue.
What happens if the camera stops working?
Same thing that happens when flying through storms or clouds - fly by instrument.
Regular aircraft equipped for IFR can't safely land with zero forward visibility. The pilot has to be able to see the runway for the final touchdown and roll out. Only a few aircraft and airports are able to do Category IIIC precision landings.
https://skybrary.aero/articles/instrument-landing-system-ils
I am sorry for a stupid comment, but when I hear this I always picture sad pilot reaching for a guitar, playing a ballad and hoping for the best.
Are there many pilots who are even rated for 6-strings?
I know commercial airliners are required to carry an emergency ukulele, but that's only 4 strings.
RUD.
Is any super sonic flight truly commercially viable/sustainable or is this just a skunkworks front?
Even if supersonic flight were 2.4x less fuel efficient than regular flights, based on Concorde vs other aircraft, if that translated into 2.4x ticket prices, a lot of people would still pay it.
$1000 vs $2400 to get to Europe in 6 hours instead of 12? A lot of people who just hate those long flights would pay for it, especially given that flights are only a portion of total vacation cost, together with hotels, etc.
Or for a flight inside the US, $1000 rather than $400, but to get from coast to coast in 3 hours rather than 6, may be very worth it for some people.
https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/107206/how-clos...
Worth mentioning that no one intends to make commercial jets go Concorde fast (mach 2) again, to my knowledge.
Boom is talking about "Boomless Cruise" being up to mach 1.3. they are trying to bounce the downward going sound waves off the atmosphere, bouncing them back up. It seems to be significantly speed dependent? https://boomsupersonic.com/press-release/boom-supersonic-ann...
The concord was heavily subsidised. Those ticket prices didn’t cover the cost of the service.
It was also far less pleasant a ride than even most economy class tickets for long hall flights. The space was more cramped and it was much louder inside the cabin. Personally, Id rather spend more for nicer seats on a longer flight than worse seats on a shorter flight. And a lot of people with money felt the same.
Design changes might help with the passenger comfort problem but when the plane is already running at a loss, it’s a hard sell asking for more R&D costs (which would be massive) to redevelop the concord.
This is something I've really flipped on when I started taking trains more to replace domestic flights (in Europe) to improve my personal CO2 footprint.
I used to be really impatient with travel and tried my best to save travel time, and never took the train. Then I forced my self to change my ways.
Nowdays, I find thst plan the train travel days as part of the trip: Sure, it takes me a whole day to get somewhere, but I allocate that time for hacking on the laptop on a side project, reading a book, or playing a game on the Steam Deck, things I normally don't find that much time for. I find e.g. my vacation satisfaction actually has gone up.
Train travel is also easier with (my) kids than air travel despite the longer duration, because you can roam the train more, change location to the restaurant, etc.
The Concorde and what I understand to be it's lack of viability was exactly what I was thinking about - it motivated my question. What's different now?
They did fly them for 33 years. Even if it didn't work out in the end its not exactly an abject failure. I could imagine slightly better business plan, etc could make all the difference.
After all, concorde design started almost 75 years ago, surely we've learned a thing or two on how to design aircrafts with lower maintenance & operating costs in that time.
It lost money consistently all the time.
The only reason it kept flying for 33 years is a vanity project for national airlines.
Which it was excellent at. Actually viable business? Not so much.
> It lost money consistently all the time.
> The only reason it kept flying for 33 years is a vanity project for national airlines.
Something that loses money, but not so much money that it can't be justified as a vanity project, seems like the sort of thing that could be profitable with tweaks and improvements.
Like it didn't work, but it was close enough to working that reasonable investors could say: second time will be the charm. Especially given how much more mature aeroplane technology is now vs the 1950s.
To put it in perspective, we first broke the sound barrier in 1947. People started designing the concorde in 1954 only 7 years later. It is now three quarters of a century later. Technology has improved a lot since then.
Concorde made an operating profit. Not a huge one (how could it, with fourteen planes flying), and it didn’t recoup development costs, but it was in the green once that initial cost was paid.
Concorde never paid those initial costs, and had massive subsidies [https://www.nytimes.com/1981/01/09/business/france-extending...].
It was able to coast, eventually, but that’s some very fancy accounting.
“French Transport Minister Daniel Hoeffel, saying France ''will not and cannot abandon Concorde,'' signed a new agreement with Air France this week. The French Government, which with Britain had spent more than $2 billion developing the world's first supersonic passenger aircraft, will pay 90 percent of the plane's estimated operating losses for the next three years, compared with 70 percent in the past.
Under the new pact, the French taxpayer will contribute $66 million this year to the cost of Air France's champagne-and-caviar service linking Paris with New York, Washington, Caracas and Rio de Janeiro. In 1982, when losses are expected to decline slightly, the subsidy will be about $64 million, and in 1983, $59 million.”
In my opinion, there are worse ways for governments to subsidize aerospace and materials research and development, improve the connectivity between nations, generate national prestige, give people optimism for the future, and so on. 2 billion doesn't sound like a lot. It's a drop in the bucket compared to US military expenditures.
If California High Speed Rail loses a little bit of money, I won't be too upset by it. Unfortunately the up front costs are much higher, but at the same time, massive, massive infrastructure development is happening in California all along the length of the state, and the government is acquiring the rights to develop public transportation both now and into the future on that land. Again, there are worse ways to spend the money in my opinion.
I am not sure if there are much worse ways, as this here means normal people subsidizing rich peoples luxory fast flights.
Bad for climate. Bad for the people below enjoying the noise. Bad for all the other things you could do with 2 billion. (A lot)
Only good for people who want jetting quickly around the World.
And it is good for material research, but that's the same argument for military development.
Bear in mind those are 1981 dollars.
Revenue exceeding ongoing costs after writing off development costs is not very fancy accounting.
It wasn’t just dev costs.
I remember seeing something from Boom (now renamed?) which was an YN company years ago. I recall them developing some technology to solve the noise problem - somehow bouncing the sound off the atmosphere or similar IIRC? I do think its viability has increased over the years, just everyone has this default "it wont work" mindset because of the failure that was Concorde.
the biggest difference is that composites and better computers probably make designing and manufacturing a good design a lot more feasible
IIRC the big issue was cooling the air into the engines. I think that is still a big issue.
X-59 appears to be the only known active research demonstrator as XB-1 was retired.
Boom claims to have completed their Overture facilities and plans to unveil a completed aircraft this year.[0]
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boom_Overture
It will be sustainable by influencers alone
Probably some combination of both.
If the overland regulation changed, there would very likely be Supersonic business jets after a decade or too.
Boom the only company trying to seriously do it, and they are facing a major uphill battle and will need many billions more.
And this NASA project doesn't really solve the problem, because its primary way to avoid the noise, is to reduce what would be cabin space for the already limited space. So that makes commercial viability even worse.
14 CFR 91.817 was changed in the US, sort of, by executive order (depending on if this is legal) and by a proposed bill Supersonic Aviation Modernization Act (SAMA) H.R.3410
https://boomsupersonic.com/flyby/breaking-the-sound-barrier-...
Reminder that NASA's X-59 (which tests redirecting shockwave mostly upwards) is different from Boom Airspace's XB-1 (which tests flying slower than speed of sound down on the surface)
They should use a Starship rather. Much quicker. The only hurdle would be the price.
> The only hurdle would be the price.
This is not the only hurdle. You can have an airport right next to a major city, with hundreds of arrivals and departures each day.
The same cannot be said for a Starship spaceport. Due to very loud launch, sonic booms on landing [0], and the danger of dropping a Starship onto populated areas, it would likely need to be offshore. That requires a boat, so now boarding a Starship involves thinking about sea states, taking a ferry ride on each side, and more.
Starship is super cool, but point to point Starship is a bit of a fantasy when you start to get to the nitty gritty.
[0] https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2024/11/starships-sound-stud... (TL;DR: Super Heavy's sonic booms are 110 dB when standing 20 km from the booster.)
110dB 20km from the origin? That is a serious WTF right there if that number is accurate. If my quick estimate is correct that would mean that the sonic boom is deadly to anything within a few 100m around the booster. Even 110dB is skirting the border to permanent hearing damage from a single exposure.
The launch (engines etc) are MUCH louder still.
>The only hurdle would be the price.
And that suborbital spaceflight is effectively off the table for anyone with a heart condition. There's a reason why you see all those warnings on rollercoasters even when the dangerous part lasts <1s. Now let's subject someone to minutes of it.
And the dying in a fireball. Starship’s design seems fundamentally impossible to make safe.
That's akin to saying that it seems fundamentally impossible to make landing rockets safe which, in fact, is exactly what Boeing/Lockheed were saying when SpaceX was first revolutionizing that space as well.
I’m not aware of any rocket landing safe enough for human use. NASA nixed the idea of propulsive landing for Dragon 2 for this reason. It’s extremely difficult to make safe, since just about any reasonable engine configuration means guaranteed death if a single engine fails at a critical moment. Compare with modern airliners where an engine can fail at any point in flight and the plane can land safely.
So yes, I agree, it is akin to saying that.
> NASA nixed the idea of propulsive landing for Dragon 2 for this reason.
That is completely false. First of all, NASA didn't nix it, they just didn't make it a priority as it had little value from their perspective.
The reason it was not done is that para-shouts have to be in the design anyway for abort situations, so that was fixed.
So for SpaceX, the question was to likely delay the program, and take on a whole lot of extra engineering work that they were not actually getting paid for, remember fixed price contract.
They were only going to work on it if they really thought they needed it for something like Red Dragon. And then they could still add it later.
And one of the primary reason SpaceX thought that its to hard, is that they landing feet would have to have gone threw the heat shield. That would have made the whole heat-shield design massively more complex.
Some dude who runs SpaceX seems to think the reason was safety. https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1104509345922838528
He said it was the difficulty in proving the safety. There's an informative article here. [1]
NASA likes parachutes because they've always used parachutes. SpaceX likes retropulsive landings because Mars is their goal, and Mars' atmosphere isn't dense enough for parachutes. It's also safer for the crew in nominal operation and enables a much higher degree of rapid reuse, relative to NASA's traditional operation of taking a salt water bath in the ocean.
So they could go through the [very reasonable] extensive costs and testing involved in proving the safety of the retropulsive landings, or just go old school, strap a few parachutes on and work on getting crew to the ISS (which was the goal at the time). They chose the latter and with the plan of getting back to retropulsive landings later, which they also did. Parachutes remain the main landing mechanism for the Crew Dragon, but it now also has retropulsive landing capabilities to be used in case of a chute failure.
[1] - https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2024/10/dragon-propulsive-la...
This literally doesn't disagree with what I said. I have no idea why you think it does.
Soyuz uses propulsive landing
And that's why astronauts preferred the Shuttle
what, the puff of impulse at the end of the parachute descent? I thinks it's a bit disingenuous to call that propulsive landing without context
You're right; I meant to refute the following point: NASA nixed the idea of propulsive landing for Dragon 2 for this reason (safety)
It wasn't because of safety, but because it would have needed tests, development and certification (for a new type of landing) while already having an established method (splashing into the sea).