For a man writing in the 1800s, he was often astonishingly close.
An experimental aircraft just achieved a “major milestone” that NASA officials say brings the future of quiet supersonic flight closer to being a reality.
The test flights involved the American space agency’s secretive X-59 aircraft, which reportedly reached speeds of 1.4 Mach—roughly 924 miles per hour—during a flight last Friday.
Reaching an altitude of 55,000 feet, the experimental aircraft’s speed and height during last week’s test flight met the conditions the agency says are required for future flights aiming to achieve supersonic flight without the noisy booms it usually generates.
In a statement, NASA said the aircraft’s tests are far from complete, although Friday’s test marks a significant milestone toward reaching its current mission goals.
“The X-59 still has months of performance testing ahead, but after those are complete, NASA’s Quesst mission will fly the aircraft over several U.S. communities to collect data on public perception of the quiet sonic thump it will make at supersonic speeds,” NASA’s statement on Friday read. “Those community overflights will include flights at Mach 1.4 and 55,000 feet.”
Last week’s test occurred within days of an earlier takeoff that sent the X-59 on its first successful supersonic flight, where the plane reached a top speed of Mach 1.1.
The earlier test also marked a leap forward for the Quesst mission, which is in the process of completing several crucial steps that are expanding the X-59’s capabilities.
Deployed for test flights at various speeds and at different altitudes, flight engineers are currently gauging the aircraft’s flight envelope by having it perform in a range of different flight conditions.
During its current test flights, NASA said the supersonic aircraft was accompanied by a NASA F-15 research aircraft, which still produces a sonic boom when it flies, unlike the X-59. NASA engineers plan to mount a shock-sensing probe on the accompanying aircraft during future flights, which the agency says will collect vital information about the shock waves the experimental aircraft produces.
The resulting experiments will help engineers measure the exact capabilities of the new aircraft and its supersonic performance.
Although designed to function as a “quiet” supersonic aircraft, the X-59 still produces audible signatures, which NASA likens more to being a soft “thump” than a sonic boom.
During its final testing phases, the X-59’s supersonic acoustic signature will also be measured.
If all goes according to plan, the supersonic aircraft will complete its full round of testing in the months ahead, marking a successful series of demonstrations that it meets all the requirements for quiet flight under a range of different altitudes and other flight conditions.
Ultimately, the technologies being innovated by this experimental plane will help to enable the first supersonic flight over land in decades, paving the way toward a new future of commercial flight faster than the speed of sound.
Additional details about NASA’s Quesst program can be found on its official site.
Micah Hanks is the Editor-in-Chief and Co-Founder of The Debrief. A longtime reporter on science, defense, and technology with a focus on space and astronomy, he can be reached at micah@thedebrief.org. Follow him on X @MicahHanks, and at micahhanks.com.
Future interstellar travelers who hope to reach distant star systems will likely need better propulsion technologies than the chemical rockets humans currently rely on for our exploration of space.
Among the range of proposed alternatives, one potential candidate involves what are called solar light sails, a theoretical propulsion system that relies on pressure generated from solar radiation against a large surface to move a spacecraft.
Such concepts have been proposed since the 1980s, some of which combine the idea of using sunlight as a power source with the implementation of lasers, which could propel such futuristic starships to speeds our best current technologies cannot attain.
However, not all spacecraft propulsion experts are necessarily sold on the idea of solar light sails just yet. According to new findings detailed in a paper by researchers Jiaze Li and Chao Shen of the Harbin Institute of Technology in China, this novel form of propulsion may have a few hurdles to cross before it can attain the near-light-speeds many experts had hoped for.
According to Shen and Li’s recent research, a key problem arises once a solar light sail spacecraft begins nearing the speed of light: drag forces resulting from the very source of energy used to propel the devices could place significant limitations on their maximum attainable speeds.
A combination of different forces can be expected to occur as sunlight strikes a light sail, the authors say, which includes incident light, specular reflection, and diffuse scattering.
Incident light describes the physical momentum generated by light energy in the form of photons as they strike the sail, whereas specular reflection describes the momentum produced as photons reflect off the sail. Finally, diffuse scattering is a separate form of momentum generated by photons, which, rather than bouncing away upon impact, is actually absorbed by the sail, the energy from which is thereafter released in random directions.
Based on these primary forces, the authors identify that once a light sail begins reaching relativistic speeds, it also becomes subjected to intense Doppler effect—the phenomenon that occurs as changes in the frequency of waves result as their source and an object or observer’s distance changes in relation to it.
In the case of solar light sails, the more the frequency of light waves striking the sail decreases, the less the amount of thrust generated by the three forces the paper identifies. In simpler terms, the faster a solar light sail spacecraft attempts to travel, the harder it becomes for it to accelerate.
At approximately 75% of the speed of light, the researchers say that an additional hindrance emerges, as what physicists call relativistic light aberration takes over. This phenomenon, first described by Einstein more than a century ago, involves relativistic corrections of light sources for observers who move at velocities approaching light speed.
In the case of our prospective future solar light sailors, this would mean that the weakest of the three forces impacting the sail (diffuse scattering) would begin to impose an active drag once the sail reaches approximately three-quarters of light speed. While the overall force of lasers helping to propel the light sail would remain positive at this stage in the system’s acceleration, the authors note an inevitable decline in efficiency.
The authors do concede that while their paper examines the radiative dynamics of solar light sail propulsion, it does not account for other factors that may include drag resulting from encounters with materials like gases, dust, or other physical sources (i.e., non-radiative sources), which could also impact overall speeds.
Additional factors worthy of consideration, but which the authors do not directly address in their paper, include the melting point of any materials used for solar light sail propulsion, which could be heated to extreme temperatures due to combined exposure to solar radiation, laser energy, and friction from movement.
Fundamentally, the team reports that their paper “provides a rigorous and in-depth theoretical foundation for lightsail dynamics,” which illustrates that while this future propulsion concept has its merits, we may still be far from seeing its realization for practical space travel.
By outlining the factors that contribute to constraints on light sail propulsion, Li and Shen aim to improve our overall understanding of this prospective future technology, thereby helping engineers to realize its potential for use in space exploration at some point in the future.
The team’s paper, “Relativistic Lightsail Propulsion Dynamics,” appeared on the preprint arXiv.org server.
Micah Hanks is the Editor-in-Chief and Co-Founder of The Debrief. A longtime reporter on science, defense, and technology with a focus on space and astronomy, he can be reached at micah@thedebrief.org. Follow him on X @MicahHanks, and at micahhanks.com.
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