NASA’s X-59 completes first no-boom supersonic flight, more than a year after a private company did it
NASA yesterday made a big deal about the first successful supersonic test flight of its X-59 test plane, built by Lockheed Martin for $247.5 million to demonstrate quiet no-boom supersonic flight.
And as usual, our uneducated propaganda press played along, touting the wonders of this new NASA achievement. A few examples:
- Scientific American: NASA’s X-59 plane goes supersonic for the first time
- Aerospace America: NASA’s X-59 breaks sound barrier in first supersonic flight
- Fox News: NASA’s ‘quiet’ supersonic jet completes first flight in potential breakthrough for commercial air travel
- Space.com: Going supersonic! NASA’s X-59 jet breaks sound barrier for the 1st time
Poppycock. Not one of these news articles made mention of the fact that the private commercial company Boom Supersonic accomplished the same feat eighteen months earlier, its XB-1 supersonic airplane breaking the sound barrier with no boom three separate times. And it did so using private funds for significantly less and getting the job done faster and in a manner that it can quickly convert into its planned commercial supersonic planes.
The X-59 is a typical NASA test project, designed to test a technology in a manner that is generally too specific and expensive for commercial use. Without doubt the engineering and the data from these flights will be helpful to companies like Boom, but to use it will require major changes and revisions to bring the cost down. It is for this reason Boom did its own engineering and test.
That I appear to be the only news outlet aware of this important background information — that puts a significantly different light on this government project — illustrates the bankruptcy of our modern media. They don’t know anything, and can only rewrite press releases.
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From the media, then, Deafening Silence on the COMPLETE sonic boom story.
In many ways, X has become a better news medium than the traditional media. They’ve become so used to being propaganda mouthpieces that real reporting is rare.
I like Boom. They and Hermeus (and a few other companies, such as Astro Mechanica) are trying to push the state of the art forward in aviation again, after a long stagnation and minor improvements in design or fuel efficiency and the like. I hope they all succeed; supersonic/hypersonic planes that are appropriately priced and more convenient are probably one of the few paths to dethroning the Boeing/Airbus duopoly.
And why is this this being researched? By NASA especially. Could it be a way to funnel money to their favorite company?