NASA revealed it’s working on a Concord-like research jet that can zip over the Atlantic at speeds over 3,000 miles per hour, meaning passengers could get from New York to London in just 90 minutes.
NASA’s proposed passenger jet prototype is designed to travel at incredible speeds between Mach 2 and Mach 4, or from 1,535 to 3,045 mph — more than twice as fast as a typical large airliner, which travels under Mach 1 at roughly 600 mph, about 80% of the speed of sound.
“Flying from New York City to London up to four times faster than what’s currently possible may sound like a far-off dream, but NASA is exploring whether the commercial market could support travel at such speeds,” the space agency said in a press release issued earlier this week.
NASA already concluded that a supersonic passenger plane could “theoretically” travel up to Mach 4, and found that “potential passenger markets exist in about 50 established routes that connect cities.”
The next phase “includes issuing two 12-month contracts to companies to develop concept designs and technology roadmaps,” NASA said, which will “outline risks and challenges, and identify needed technologies to make Mach 2-plus travel a reality.”
The project — part of NASA’s Advanced Air Vehicles Program (AAVP) — will draw on NASA’s X-59 quiet supersonic technology (QueSST) test aircraft, which was developed as part of its Quesst mission that kicked off in 2016 and plans to wrap up in 2027.
Phase three of Quesst will see X-59 dashing across US airspace.
NASA has yet to select which parts of the country the craft will fly over, though the company plans to “gather data from the public to learn what people think of the X-59’s sound” from test flights set to take place from 2024 through 2026.
The vessel “has the potential to transform air travel as we currently know it,” said Peter Coen, NASA’s mission integration manager for Quesst, opening the doors to high-speed commercial air travel by finding ways for planes to muffle their own sonic booms.
Currently, the US prohibits over-land supersonic flights, citing noise pollution. However, reducing that thunderous sound could see passengers getting from New York to LA in under one hour — and across the pond in less time than it takes to watch most movies on NASA’s Mach 4-speed jet.
The X-59 craft, meanwhile, halves the flight time between New York and London from an average of eight hours to under four hours.
The jet is NASA’s first large experimental plane in three decades and reduces its sonic boom with a unique design where the cockpit is not located in a front-facing window.
Instead, a 4K monitor displaying images captured on two cameras situated on the outside of the craft will serve as the central window, and the canopy overhead will be one giant curved window to allow the pilot to see the horizon, NASA said.
Both the X-59 and NASA’s even-faster upcoming jet build upon the French- and British-made Concorde — so far, the world’s fastest passenger jet in history that enjoyed a maximum cruising speed of Mach 2.04, or 1,354 mph, more than double the speed of sound.
Fourteen Concorde jets were constructed in the late 1960s for commercial use for flights accommodating up to 128 passengers, though the model was retired in late 2003 following an engine failure and crash that killed 113 people.
At that point, however, Concordes were already being criticized for their noisiness and extremely high operation costs.
A sonic boom, a noise similar to thunder that people hear when airplanes pass overhead, happens when an object moves faster than sound and generates about 110 decibels of sound energy.
It happens when an aircraft traveling through the atmosphere disrupts sound waves, creating the bangs of a sonic boom — similar to how a ship moving through water causes waves.
For reference, Concorde generated 100 decibels of sound energy, and NASA’s X-59 has a sonic boom of only 60 dBA.
It’s unclear how many decibels of sound the Mach 4-speed jet will produce.
Representatives for NASA did not immediately respond to The Post’s request for comment.