NASA prepares historic first supersonic flight for revolutionary X-59 aircraft

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has announced that its new supersonic jet dubbed “Son of Concorde” or X-59 capable of traveling faster than the speed of sound is ready for its first supersonic flight.

The American space agency’s plane is scheduled for a series of test flights in early June. It aims to achieve a speed of 630 miles per hour at an altitude of 43000 feet.

X-59 has already gone through months of test flights since its launch in October last year.

Here are salient features of NASA’s experimental jet:

• It can travel at speeds up to Mach 1.6 or 1218 miles per hour
• The aircraft is designed to reduce the traditional sonic boom to a quieter "thump" through NASA's Quiet SuperSonic Technology (Quesst) program
• Every feature of the plane including its thin, tapered nose is radically designed to diffuse and muffle the sonic boom

Following the current series of tests, NASA has planned “mission condition flights” in which the space agency aims to fly the jet at Mach 1.4 (925 miles per hour) at an even higher 50,000 feet altitude.

In the final phase of testing the space exploration company aims to test the Lockheed Martin developed to its absolute limits, aiming to hit the top speed of 1.6 Mach while flying at 60,000 feet above ground.

The Agency described the ultimate goal behind X-59 supersonic jet on its website: “The ultimate goal of the NASA X-59 Quesst is to make commercial supersonic air travel over land possible by reducing deafening sonic booms to a quiet, barely audible thump."