Quiet Supersonic Platform
This modified F-5E breaks the sound barrier quietly.
Northrop Grumman Corporation’s (NYSE:NOC) Integrated Systems sector, in cooperation with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and NASA, has made aviation history by demonstrating a method to reduce the bone-jarring impact of sonic booms, a technology that could usher in a new era of supersonic flight.
Photos accompanying this release are available at: http://media.primezone.com/noc/
In flights conducted Aug. 27 on the same supersonic test range where Chuck Yeager first broke the sound barrier nearly 56 years ago, the government/industry team showed that modifying an aircraft’s shape can reduce the intensity of its sonic boom. This theory had never been demonstrated in actual flight.
The technology, being developed as part of DARPA’s Quiet Supersonic Platform (QSP) program, could eventually lead to unrestricted supersonic flight over land.
Excellent. The quicker the flight the better! In my opinion they are years behind on this. They are also years behind on civilian space travel. I should be able to take my kid on a recreational trip to the moon by now. I blame the lame baby boomer generation…their parents made it to the moon…they’ve been in orbit in the stupid space shuttle for 25 years.
I’ll probably do a post on why I think NASA should be abolished sometime soon.
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Jeremy
Just finished reading your post about the QSP program. I agree with 95% of it. However, it wasn’t the “baby boomer” generation that let you down. It was the generation before the baby boomers. They decided that education wasn’t important enough and the baby boomer generation became the generation that took the easy way out. NASA’s better, faster, cheaper solution was really lazier, lamer and lost. They lost the Apollo plans, tossed out the X20 program (which would have given us a better system than the shuttle before most of us baby boomers left grammer school. If you want a tragedy look at how Macnamara really killed most of the hypersonic programs in the early 60s. NASA failed but mainly because the generation before fired everyone who knew what they were doing in 1970. No one from my generation wanted to work for an organization that spent more generating reasons for its existance than actual spacecraft and then got the federal government to prevent most space exploration unless it was federal based. What a waste of the last thirty years. I hope the generation of kids we are educating now get their heads into this problem.
Comment by Mike Cataldo — January 12, 2004 @ 7:29 pm
Mike,
Thank you for your thoughtful comment. You clearly know what you are talking about. I’ll defer to you on whose fault it is that we are so far behind where we should be on these technologies. Thank you for setting me straight.
I agree with you. I hope the upcoming generations are able to get involved in this. I also agree with you that as long as research on these technologies is controlled and dominated by the federal bureaucracy we will continue to get nowhere fast.
Thanks for reading the site and thanks again for an insightful comment.
Comment by Jeremy — January 13, 2004 @ 12:16 pm