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fragmedelast Wednesday at 10:12 AM2 repliesview on HN

NASA seems to think it's possible though. https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20160007348/downloads/20...


Replies

filleduchaoslast Wednesday at 5:46 PM

See the pesky thing is that if you actually read the paper you've been linking as opposed to just running with "NASA said it's possible", you'll notice that like I alluded to, at Mach 1.3 (theoretically!) "boomless flight" is much slower than Concorde's Mach 2+ cruise that the company certainly wants you to think of when you do your back-of-the-napkin supersonic flight time savings maths. And that's on top of requiring optimal atmospheric conditions, so not even a guarantee to begin with.

The laws of physics funnily enough are not something you can "move fast and break" or PR-speak your way around.

labcomputerlast Wednesday at 5:16 PM

Yea, but only for speeds up to Mach 1.3… theoretically. Not Mach 2.0 flights. And they only demonstrated the effect up to Mach 1.1.

Saving only one hour on a transcontinental (US) flight doesn’t seem all that impressive.