When can you and I fly faster than sound?
The first 100 people to use code CLEOABRAM with the link below will get 60% off of Incogni: http://incogni.com/cleoabram

Twenty years ago, you could fly in a plane going FASTER THAN SOUND. The famous Concorde supersonic plane could get from New York to London in 3 and a half hours! It flew at an altitude so high you could see the curve of the earth, all while popping champagne. But then… these planes stopped flying, and we never made any more like them. Now, New York to London takes 7 hours.

But why? What happened to supersonic planes? And more importantly… can we bring them BACK? If you ask NASA, the answer is yes. We got to go see the brand new experimental X-59 plane they’re building. Here’s what’s really huge if true: If NASA succeeds, it could bring back commercial supersonic flight, and allow you and I to fly faster than sound.

If you want to know more about the rise and fall of the Concorde, I highly recommend Concorde Captain Mike Bannister’s book: https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/447541/concorde-by-bannister-mike/9781405951920 

Chapters: 
00:00 What happened to supersonic planes?
01:45 How fast is supersonic?
02:21 What is NASA’s X-59 plane?
03:23 How does a supersonic plane work?
05:30 What is a sonic boom?
06:50 How loud is a sonic boom?
07:20 What happened to the Concorde?
08:58 How does the X-59 work?
10:04 How do we bring back supersonic planes?
11:12 When can I fly supersonic?
13:44 Why is supersonic flight huge if true?
15:00 Something extra :)

Additional reading and watching:
- “Concorde” by Captain Mike Bannister: https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/447541/concorde-by-bannister-mike/9781405951920 
- NASA’s X-59 Quesst Mission: https://www.nasa.gov/mission/quesst/ 
- Going Supersonic with Smarter Every Day: https://youtu.be/p1PgNbgWSyY?si=q1zJoAfKPN6xpp_r 
- This plane could cross the Atlantic in 3.5 hours. Why did it fail? By Phil Edwards at Vox: https://youtu.be/a_wuykzfFzE?si=oOijNpJB7yLKC_O4 
- The sonic boom problem, TED-Ed: https://youtu.be/JO4_VHM69oI?si=0cP3rgGroiclWkn0 
- Supersonic Planes Are Coming Back, by Wendover Productions: https://youtu.be/4p0fRlCHYyg?si=f3Q5kO3790C60VaU 
- The Insane Engineering of the Concorde, by Real Engineering: https://youtu.be/hnrpXxbVhME?si=WI06mjMU2CEMvbS5
- Exclusive look at NASA's low-boom supersonic plane, by CNET: https://youtu.be/hcHW1LZrzI0?si=nHYirVJQidoWL301 

Bio:
Cleo Abram is an Emmy-nominated independent video journalist. On her show, Huge If True, Cleo explores complex technology topics with rigor and optimism, helping her audience understand the world around them and see positive futures they can help build. Before going independent, Cleo was a video producer for Vox. She wrote and directed the Coding and Diamonds episodes of Vox’s Netflix show, Explained. She produced videos for Vox’s popular YouTube channel, was the host and senior producer of Vox’s first ever daily show, Answered, and was co-host and producer of Vox’s YouTube Originals show, Glad You Asked. 

You can find me on TikTok here for short, fun tech explainers: https://www.tiktok.com/@cleoabram 
You can find me on Instagram here for more personal stories: https://www.instagram.com/cleoabram 
You can find me on Twitter here for thoughts, threads and curated news: https://twitter.com/cleoabram 

Vox: https://www.vox.com/authors/cleo-abram
IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/name/nm10108242/ 

Gear I use: 
Camera: Sony A7SIII
Lens: Sony 16–35 mm F2.8 GM and 35mm prime
Audio: Sennheiser SK AVX
Music: Tom Fox and Musicbed

Follow along for more episodes of Huge If True: https://www.youtube.com/cleoabram?sub_confirmation=1

—
Welcome to the joke down low:

What happens to a bad airplane joke?
It doesn’t land.

Use the word “land” in a comment to tell me you’re a real one who read to the end… :)

world's first ever supersonic commercial flight, the most exciting aircraft the world had ever seen.

20 years ago, you could fly in a plane going faster than sound.

This supersonic plane, the Concorde, could get from New York to London in 3 and a half hours.

It flew at an altitude so high you could see the curve of the Earth, all while popping champagne.

Concorde will never take to the skies again.

These planes stopped flying, and we never made any more like them.

And more importantly, Can we bring them back?

We got to go see their brand new experimental supersonic plane that they're building.

If NASA succeeds, they could bring back commercial supersonic flight, allowing you and me to fly faster than sound.

A new supersonic airliner, twice as fast as current airliners.

You're going faster than the Earth rotates.

When we say supersonic, I know it's faster than sound, but exactly how fast are we talking?

For comparison, the world's fastest train can go around 286 miles per hour.

Your average Boeing 737 today will cruise at around 520 miles per hour.

And once you reach around 767 miles per hour, you're at the speed of sound, also called Mach 1.

For reference, that's roughly the same top speed as a military F-16 fighter jet today.

And now, 20 years after the Concorde's last flight, NASA is trying to build a new supersonic plane.

We're here at Skunk Works where Lockheed Martin is building a supersonic plane for NASA.

There aren't that many images of it online.

It's possible that we're 1 of the only teams to ever see it, which makes me feel awesome.

I kind of can't believe that we got this shoot, if I'm honest, because we just emailed NASA.

And we were like, hey, we know you're working on this supersonic plane, is there any chance that we can come see it?

And they said yes, but there was this very long security clearance process.

And then we got this email just a couple weeks ago, you're allowed to come visit on this day for these 2 hours.

In order to understand what NASA's building here, you need to understand how a supersonic plane actually works.

And the best way to do that is, obviously, Legos.

I'm just going to try to fit Legos into as many episodes as possible, okay?

This Lego set is of the original Concorde, and it's a plane that was just the physical embodiment of a simple fact about our species, which is that humans just love speed.

So in the 1960s, when the Concorde was originally designed, passenger planes looked pretty similar to what they look like today.

It still looks like every child's paper dart.

That's Captain Mike Bannister, the former chief Concorde pilot at British Airways.

You are flying something that's traveling at 23 miles a minute on the edge of space where the sky got darker, where you could see the curvature of the Earth.

You're traveling so quickly that you're going faster than the Earth rotates.

And when you got close to her, you could see the elegance in design.

You can see some of the features on it already.

This plane had a long narrow body to streamline air resistance.

It had these very wide, delta-shaped wings to generate lift.

It had this funny long nose called the droop snoop that drooped upon takeoff and landing so that the pilots could see.

And special, powerful engines that could handle the rapid incoming air.

And the price to go this fast wasn't cheap.

And tons of people paid lots of money to experience the thrill of riding supersonic.

But once you hit the speed of sound, Something happens.

Folks are aware that supersonic aircraft make a sonic boom, which we as human beings do hear as a double bang.

If you listen carefully, you can hear that double boom.

Alright, I need to spend some time building.

As the plane flies, it pushes air out of its path, creating pressure waves at the front and back of the plane.

When a plane flies faster than the speed of sound, the air molecules literally cannot move out of the way in time.

They form a wave off the front of the airplane and a second wave off the back.

When those pressure waves reach our ears, our brains process them as sound.

But a common misconception is that a sonic boom doesn't just boom once when the plane hits that speed.

It booms the whole time, all along the path of the plane, carpeting the ground below it.

Meaning everyone under the flight of the plane hears the sonic boom.

Weirdly though, inside the plane, you don't hear the boom at all.

There was no indication whatsoever, physically, on the airplane of going through the sound barrier.

You're traveling as fast as the pressure waves are.

We put an indicator in the cabin so the customers knew when they were going through the sound barrier, because otherwise they wouldn't have done.

But for those on the ground, the boom was loud.

For context, if this is how loud distant thunder is, and this is how loud a hand clap is, and firework, This is how loud the Concorde sonic boom was from the ground.

Because of how loud supersonic booms are, in 1973, the FAA changed their rules and banned commercial supersonic flights over the United States.

And similar rules followed around the world.

This meant that companies could mostly only offer flights over the ocean, which dramatically reduced their routes.

Plus, these fuel-guzzling engines and rising fuel costs, combined with a deadly crash in 2000, hurt public perception of supersonic flight.

And finally, Air France chose to stop flying the Concorde, eventually forcing British Airways, the only company now paying for the upkeep of the aging planes, to stop flying them as well.

And so in early 2003, on April the 10th, British Airways very reluctantly announced that they were retiring their Concorde fleet.

And on the very last flight, we invited 100 people at British Airways' expense to join us on that last flight and getting the message across that this was something that they should really be proud to have been part of.

The Concorde was ahead of its time, but even as advanced as it was, it couldn't overcome the problem of the sonic boom.

I'm going to keep building, but let me show you something.

This shows how many data brokers I've gotten myself removed from.

Or rather, Incogni has gotten me removed from.

But what are data brokers and why do I want to get removed from them?

Well, they make money buying and selling your information.

And the reason that I care about that is that with enough data points, these data brokers can form a picture of you, a shadow profile, that they can then sell for things that you might not necessarily want, like to assess you for insurance or banking.

But incogni can force many of them to remove you.

They reach out to data brokers and they say, hey, remove this person, and then crucially they follow up to make sure that you actually got removed.

If you want to try this out, go to the link in my description, or go to incogni.com slash Cleo Abram.

The X-59 is NASA's attempt at fixing the boom problem.

It's a single-seater jet that can travel at 925 miles per hour, or 1.4 times the speed of sound.

And it's specifically engineered to prove that supersonic planes can be quiet.

That's Kathy Baum, the NASA lead on this effort.

And these are the leads from Lockheed Martin, Dave Richards, and Mike Buonanno.

Our goal is to change that regulation so that it says as long as you are below this sound level, then you can fly supersonically over land.

To achieve this goal, NASA referenced design features found on the Concorde, including those large delta wings, the very streamlined body, and that narrow nose.

There's no way you can miss our 38-foot nose.

Unlike the Concorde, this 38-foot carbon fiber nose doesn't move, which means the pilot can't see out the front during takeoff and landing.

Instead, they've built a camera at the front that sends a live video feed to the pilot.

But once in the air, this nose is key to reducing the sonic boom.

I liken it to, you know, you've done a cannonball into a swimming pool.

And what we want to do here is that splash that you make is like the sonic boom.

And we want to make that splash or that sound as small as possible.

Then NASA wants to send as much of the remaining boom as possible up, away from people.

look at the bottom of the airplane, it's very, very smooth and clean.

So that anything that would create a bump or anything like that that makes a shock that would go down, they're all on the top when they go up.

And any remaining supersonic boom that's still going down, they're gonna try to cancel it out.

When you jump into the pool doing that cannonball, the biggest splash is when all the water comes back together.

So there's a big shock on the back end of the airplane.

This feature, called the T-tail, creates its own shock that interacts with that boom, cancelling some of it out.

By the way, I still can't believe that I got to see that plane up close.

Like, normally, that is really not allowed.

How many people have been allowed to be exposed to this plane?

Well, in the state that it's in right now,

I'm gonna get fired, But yeah, you guys are the first ones to come in.

You're not actually going to get fired, right?

If NASA can help change the rule preventing supersonic overland, that can help everybody.

It can open the floodgates to more companies and more planes.

There are a bunch of private companies, including 1 called Boom, fighting to bring back these planes.

It was very clear talking to this team that there's a lot on the line with this plane.

You know, this takes a long time to develop, and there's a lot of money in the development of it.

And, you know, to see something from a concept drawn on a napkin to having the airplane here and then to fly it, it is a lot of hard work.

Really, this is our 1 opportunity to try to repeal the law.

So in order to change the rule that limits supersonic flight, they had to design the X-59 to have a sonic boom that's quiet enough to not disrupt everyday life.

The answer to that question is that no 1 exactly knows right now.

And that's the entire reason why we had to build x-59 and why NASA plans on flying it over the next several years.

NASA's anticipating that 75 perceived level decibels will be sufficiently quiet enough so that's the goal that they're aiming for right now.

The result of that is that it would sound kind of like your neighbor closing their car door in front of their house, but most of the time you won't even hear it at all.

Every bolt, rivet, and tiny little winglet has been placed specifically to optimize aerodynamics and speed.

So you know how you walk along and you get static from the carpet?

As the airplane moves through the air, it generates static electricity on the airplane.

So we have a special paint that's like putting Teflon on your shoes, you know, so that you don't build that static charge.

But it's clear, this is not a passenger plane.

Yeah, we're not gonna build any more of these.

It's very dedicated to just this 1 demonstration to show that we can make an airplane that is capable of a low-boom supersonic flight.

So NASA's building their supersonic plane in the hopes that the breakthroughs that they make are 1 day going to be able to be translated into commercial passenger supersonic planes that can carry more people.

When are you and I going to get to fly in 1?

When is passenger supersonic flight finally coming back?

But first we'll go through the regulation process.

That'll take a number of years to test this aircraft, then go to test the communities, and then go through the regulation process.

So it looks like we're at least a decade away from seeing these planes, and claims from companies like Boom echo that.

They've set a goal of bringing their planes to market by the end of this decade.

But the industry seems so confident that this is going to happen, that 3 airlines have already placed orders for their supersonic planes.

80 years ago, we set out on a journey to go faster than sound.

We build these beautiful machines that hurtle us through the air.

Just imagine flying on a machine like this.

But the promise of supersonic flight is much more than just being extremely cool.

For all of history, being able to go farther, faster, has meant greater connection.

When our world shrinks in size, it means that we as humans get to explore more of it.

And today we have an opportunity to take another leap forward.

It'll be our second try, but the good thing about that is we can fix what we know went wrong.

Allowing supersonic flights over land is just step 1.

New supersonic planes need to be more sustainable.

They can't guzzle fuel like they used to.

They'll need to be able to hold more than just 1 passenger.

It's 20 years now since Concorde last flew and I really do believe there will be another supersonic airliner offering supersonic travel to the general public in the not too distant future.

The future is so bright and it's so achievable.

Like I know that sounds like a cliche, but you can see it.

My grandfather passed away a few years ago, and I miss him a lot.

And he actually worked for NASA in the 1960s.

And as we were going through his stuff, we found this pin of his.

I've been keeping it close to me while I was researching this episode.

And at the end of our visit to see this plane, NASA gave me this.

And so now I have my own pin and it just really means a lot to me.

So thanks for watching this episode and thank you so much to NASA.

If you like optimistic science and tech stories and you want to support us and our show, the best thing that you can do is to subscribe.


Speaker 0: On the

Speaker 1: world's first ever supersonic commercial flight, the most exciting aircraft the world had ever seen. Twice the speed of sound.

Speaker 2: This is a 1 of a kind supersonic plane. Wait, hold on. We gotta go back. 20 years ago, you could fly in a plane going faster than sound. Why can't you do that now?

This supersonic plane, the Concorde, could get from New York to London in 3 and a half hours. And it was so cool. It flew at an altitude so high you could see the curve of the Earth, all while popping champagne. But then, that all changed.

Speaker 0: The Concorde is no more.

Speaker 1: Concorde will never take to the skies again.

Speaker 2: These planes stopped flying, and we never made any more like them. Today, New York to London takes 7 hours. But why? What happened to supersonic planes? And more importantly, Can we bring them back?

If you ask NASA, the answer is yes. We got to go see their brand new experimental supersonic plane that they're building. Here's what's really huge if true. If NASA succeeds, they could bring back commercial supersonic flight, allowing you and me to fly faster than sound.

Speaker 1: Supersonic. Supersonic. Supersonic airplanes. X-59. A new supersonic airliner, twice as fast as current airliners.

Speaker 2: Twice the speed of sound.

Speaker 1: Twice the speed of sound.

Speaker 3: You're going faster than the Earth rotates.

Speaker 1: It's the only way to cross the Atlantic. So we're now going supersonic. Yep. You ready?

Speaker 2: I'm ready. Let's do this. Let's go see a supersonic plane. When we say supersonic, I know it's faster than sound, but exactly how fast are we talking? For comparison, the world's fastest train can go around 286 miles per hour.

The fastest car goes around 330. Your average Boeing 737 today will cruise at around 520 miles per hour. And once you reach around 767 miles per hour, you're at the speed of sound, also called Mach 1. The Concorde? It went 1,350 miles per hour.

For reference, that's roughly the same top speed as a military F-16 fighter jet today. And now, 20 years after the Concorde's last flight, NASA is trying to build a new supersonic plane. And we're on our way to go see it.

Speaker 1: We've entered the land of the planes.

Speaker 2: And the weird, short palm trees. Let's do it! We're here at Skunk Works where Lockheed Martin is building a supersonic plane for NASA. This plane is really cool. There aren't that many images of it online.

It's possible that we're 1 of the only teams to ever see it, which makes me feel awesome. I kind of can't believe that we got this shoot, if I'm honest, because we just emailed NASA. And we were like, hey, we know you're working on this supersonic plane, is there any chance that we can come see it? And they said yes, but there was this very long security clearance process. And then we got this email just a couple weeks ago, you're allowed to come visit on this day for these 2 hours.

So here we are. Is that the plane?

Speaker 0: So this is it.

Speaker 1: This is

Speaker 0: the X-59.

Speaker 2: This plane is beautiful. And weird looking. In order to understand what NASA's building here, you need to understand how a supersonic plane actually works. And the best way to do that is, obviously, Legos. I'm just going to try to fit Legos into as many episodes as possible, okay?

This Lego set is of the original Concorde, and it's a plane that was just the physical embodiment of a simple fact about our species, which is that humans just love speed. Humans just love speed. Oh my god, there are more in here. Look how thick the instruction book is. 545 pages long.

What have I gotten myself into? So in the 1960s, when the Concorde was originally designed, passenger planes looked pretty similar to what they look like today. But the Concorde looked like this.

Speaker 3: The shape still looks futuristic. It still looks like every child's paper dart.

Speaker 2: That's Captain Mike Bannister, the former chief Concorde pilot at British Airways.

Speaker 3: I flew her for a total of 22 years. Flying Concorde was an absolute joy. You are flying something that's traveling at 23 miles a minute on the edge of space where the sky got darker, where you could see the curvature of the Earth. You're traveling so quickly that you're going faster than the Earth rotates. And when you got close to her, you could see the elegance in design.

Speaker 2: Now I gotta actually build this thing. Look! It's coming together. You can see some of the features on it already. This plane had a long narrow body to streamline air resistance.

It had these very wide, delta-shaped wings to generate lift. It had this funny long nose called the droop snoop that drooped upon takeoff and landing so that the pilots could see. Gah! See that? And special, powerful engines that could handle the rapid incoming air.

Even special paint that discharged heat. And the price to go this fast wasn't cheap. And tons of people paid lots of money to experience the thrill of riding supersonic. But once you hit the speed of sound, Something happens. Let me play that again.

Speaker 3: Folks are aware that supersonic aircraft make a sonic boom, which we as human beings do hear as a double bang.

Speaker 2: If you listen carefully, you can hear that double boom. Alright, I need to spend some time building. As the plane flies, it pushes air out of its path, creating pressure waves at the front and back of the plane. When a plane flies faster than the speed of sound, the air molecules literally cannot move out of the way in time.

Speaker 3: And so they get compressed together. They form a wave off the front of the airplane and a second wave off the back.

Speaker 2: When those pressure waves reach our ears, our brains process them as sound. A massive boom. But a common misconception is that a sonic boom doesn't just boom once when the plane hits that speed. It booms the whole time, all along the path of the plane, carpeting the ground below it. Meaning everyone under the flight of the plane hears the sonic boom.

Weirdly though, inside the plane, you don't hear the boom at all.

Speaker 3: There was no indication whatsoever, physically, on the airplane of going through the sound barrier. You're traveling as fast as the pressure waves are. We put an indicator in the cabin so the customers knew when they were going through the sound barrier, because otherwise they wouldn't have done.

Speaker 2: But for those on the ground, the boom was loud. For context, if this is how loud distant thunder is, and this is how loud a hand clap is, and firework, This is how loud the Concorde sonic boom was from the ground. Just below a balloon pop. Because of how loud supersonic booms are, in 1973, the FAA changed their rules and banned commercial supersonic flights over the United States. And similar rules followed around the world.

This meant that companies could mostly only offer flights over the ocean, which dramatically reduced their routes. Plus, these fuel-guzzling engines and rising fuel costs, combined with a deadly crash in 2000, hurt public perception of supersonic flight. And finally, Air France chose to stop flying the Concorde, eventually forcing British Airways, the only company now paying for the upkeep of the aging planes, to stop flying them as well.

Speaker 3: And so in early 2003, on April the 10th, British Airways very reluctantly announced that they were retiring their Concorde fleet. And on the very last flight, we invited 100 people at British Airways' expense to join us on that last flight and getting the message across that this was something that they should really be proud to have been part of.

Speaker 2: The Concorde was ahead of its time, but even as advanced as it was, it couldn't overcome the problem of the sonic boom. But what if we could fix that? That is what NASA is trying to do. I'm going to keep building, but let me show you something. Okay, this is my privacy dashboard.

This shows how many data brokers I've gotten myself removed from. Or rather, Incogni has gotten me removed from. I didn't do anything except sign up. But what are data brokers and why do I want to get removed from them? Well, they make money buying and selling your information.

And the reason that I care about that is that with enough data points, these data brokers can form a picture of you, a shadow profile, that they can then sell for things that you might not necessarily want, like to assess you for insurance or banking. But incogni can force many of them to remove you. They reach out to data brokers and they say, hey, remove this person, and then crucially they follow up to make sure that you actually got removed. If you want to try this out, go to the link in my description, or go to incogni.com slash Cleo Abram. Now, back to the story.

The X-59 is NASA's attempt at fixing the boom problem. It's a single-seater jet that can travel at 925 miles per hour, or 1.4 times the speed of sound. And it's specifically engineered to prove that supersonic planes can be quiet. That's Kathy Baum, the NASA lead on this effort. And these are the leads from Lockheed Martin, Dave Richards, and Mike Buonanno.

Speaker 4: Our goal is to change that regulation so that it says as long as you are below this sound level, then you can fly supersonically over land.

Speaker 2: To achieve this goal, NASA referenced design features found on the Concorde, including those large delta wings, the very streamlined body, and that narrow nose. But the nose on the X-59 is much longer.

Speaker 4: There's no way you can miss our 38-foot nose.

Speaker 2: Unlike the Concorde, this 38-foot carbon fiber nose doesn't move, which means the pilot can't see out the front during takeoff and landing. Instead, they've built a camera at the front that sends a live video feed to the pilot. But once in the air, this nose is key to reducing the sonic boom.

Speaker 0: I liken it to, you know, you've done a cannonball into a swimming pool. And what we want to do here is that splash that you make is like the sonic boom. And we want to make that splash or that sound as small as possible.

Speaker 2: Then NASA wants to send as much of the remaining boom as possible up, away from people.

Speaker 1: If you

Speaker 0: look at the bottom of the airplane, it's very, very smooth and clean. So that anything that would create a bump or anything like that that makes a shock that would go down, they're all on the top when they go up.

Speaker 2: And any remaining supersonic boom that's still going down, they're gonna try to cancel it out.

Speaker 0: When you jump into the pool doing that cannonball, the biggest splash is when all the water comes back together. So there's a big shock on the back end of the airplane.

Speaker 2: This feature, called the T-tail, creates its own shock that interacts with that boom, cancelling some of it out. By the way, I still can't believe that I got to see that plane up close. Like, normally, that is really not allowed. How many people have been allowed to be exposed to this plane?

Speaker 0: Well, in the state that it's in right now,

Speaker 1: you're actually

Speaker 0: the first. I'm gonna get fired, But yeah, you guys are the first ones to come in.

Speaker 2: You're not actually going to get fired, right?

Speaker 0: No, but I already got yelled at.

Speaker 2: So there's no way I can sit? Nope. That seems fair. I'm glad

Speaker 1: I pushed

Speaker 2: it enough. If NASA can help change the rule preventing supersonic overland, that can help everybody. It can open the floodgates to more companies and more planes. There are a bunch of private companies, including 1 called Boom, fighting to bring back these planes. And the pressure is on.

It was very clear talking to this team that there's a lot on the line with this plane.

Speaker 0: You know, this takes a long time to develop, and there's a lot of money in the development of it. And, you know, to see something from a concept drawn on a napkin to having the airplane here and then to fly it, it is a lot of hard work. Really, this is our 1 opportunity to try to repeal the law. This is our 1 chance to get it right.

Speaker 2: So in order to change the rule that limits supersonic flight, they had to design the X-59 to have a sonic boom that's quiet enough to not disrupt everyday life. But how quiet is that exactly?

Speaker 1: The answer to that question is that no 1 exactly knows right now. And that's the entire reason why we had to build x-59 and why NASA plans on flying it over the next several years.

Speaker 2: NASA's anticipating that 75 perceived level decibels will be sufficiently quiet enough so that's the goal that they're aiming for right now.

Speaker 1: The result of that is that it would sound kind of like your neighbor closing their car door in front of their house, but most of the time you won't even hear it at all.

Speaker 2: This plane is just amazing. Every bolt, rivet, and tiny little winglet has been placed specifically to optimize aerodynamics and speed. All the way down to the paint.

Speaker 0: It has a very special anti-static paint. So you know how you walk along and you get static from the carpet? Well, the carpet is like the air. As the airplane moves through the air, it generates static electricity on the airplane. So we have a special paint that's like putting Teflon on your shoes, you know, so that you don't build that static charge.

Speaker 2: But it's clear, this is not a passenger plane.

Speaker 0: Yeah, we're not gonna build any more of these. This is a one-off airplane. It's very dedicated to just this 1 demonstration to show that we can make an airplane that is capable of a low-boom supersonic flight.

Speaker 2: So NASA's building their supersonic plane in the hopes that the breakthroughs that they make are 1 day going to be able to be translated into commercial passenger supersonic planes that can carry more people. But when? When are you and I going to get to fly in 1? When is passenger supersonic flight finally coming back?

Speaker 4: Not soon enough in my book. But first we'll go through the regulation process. That'll take a number of years to test this aircraft, then go to test the communities, and then go through the regulation process.

Speaker 2: So it looks like we're at least a decade away from seeing these planes, and claims from companies like Boom echo that. They've set a goal of bringing their planes to market by the end of this decade. But the industry seems so confident that this is going to happen, that 3 airlines have already placed orders for their supersonic planes. 80 years ago, we set out on a journey to go faster than sound. Because as humans, we love going fast.

We work so hard at it. We build these beautiful machines that hurtle us through the air. Just imagine flying on a machine like this. It's just so cool. But the promise of supersonic flight is much more than just being extremely cool.

For all of history, being able to go farther, faster, has meant greater connection. When our world shrinks in size, it means that we as humans get to explore more of it. And today we have an opportunity to take another leap forward. It'll be our second try, but the good thing about that is we can fix what we know went wrong. Allowing supersonic flights over land is just step 1.

New supersonic planes need to be more sustainable. They can't guzzle fuel like they used to. They'll need to be cheaper. They'll need to be able to hold more than just 1 passenger. But we can do this.

Speaker 3: It's 20 years now since Concorde last flew and I really do believe there will be another supersonic airliner offering supersonic travel to the general public in the not too distant future.

Speaker 4: The future is so bright and it's so achievable. Like I know that sounds like a cliche, but you can see it.

Speaker 2: That's really exciting. It really is. Huge if true. Huge if true. Huge and true.

OK, I want to show you 1 more thing. My grandfather passed away a few years ago, and I miss him a lot. And he actually worked for NASA in the 1960s. And as we were going through his stuff, we found this pin of his. I've been keeping it close to me while I was researching this episode.

And at the end of our visit to see this plane, NASA gave me this. And so now I have my own pin and it just really means a lot to me. So thanks for watching this episode and thank you so much to NASA. If you like optimistic science and tech stories and you want to support us and our show, the best thing that you can do is to subscribe. See you for the next 1.

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NASA Is Bringing Supersonic Planes BACK