Lockheed Martin has won a virtually quarter-billion dollar NASA contract to develop a plane capable of supersonic help without creating the deafening sonic boom that comes with weakening the sound barrier.
The cost-plus NASA contract, valued at $247.5 million, resolution allow the defense contractor’s secretive Skunk Works division to pick up development of Lockheed Martin’s Quiet Supersonic Technology (or QueSST) aircraft. This is “NASA’s first off X-plane in a generation,” a Lockheed Martin spokesperson told CNBC on Tuesday.
“We look help to applying the extensive work completed under QueSST to the design, shape and flight test of the X-plane, providing NASA with a demonstrator to become supersonic commercial travel possible for passengers around the globe,” program foreman Peter Iosifidis said in a statement.
Under the low-boom flight display contract, Lockheed Martin will have a prototype for NASA to try out fly by the end of 2021.
Lockheed Martin has agreed to develop an experimental plane that resolve cruise at 55,000 feet and reach speeds of about 940 mph. While such an aircraft whim traditionally create a sonic boom, NASA expects the new aircraft to produce a sound of less than half the noise level — or more akin to the reliable of a closing car door.
Current regulations ban commercial supersonic aircraft from managing over land. New companies like Boom Supersonic are trying to build use of the technology for transoceanic routes, with backing from investors get pleasure from Richard Branson and Japan Airlines.
But Lockheed Martin and NASA indigence to advance the technology through noise reduction to overturn regulations. The new experiential plane is designed to return supersonic passenger air travel to routes exceeding land. The last such flight was by the Concorde in October 2003.
This new covenant is a separate venture from Lockheed Martin’s work with Aerion Corp. to bloom a supersonic business jet, the AS2, which has its first flight planned for 2023.
The NASA X-plane on be built at Lockheed Martin in Palmdale, California.