Nasa will attempt to break the sound barrier for the first time without making a loud sonic boom, the US space agency has announced.
Seventy-five years after the first ever supersonic flight, Nasa’s Quesst mission aims to eliminate the thunder crack sound made when passing the speed of sound, with the hope that the achievement will usher in “a new era” of high-speed commercial air travel.
“That first supersonic flight was such a tremendous achievement, and now you look at how far we’ve come since then,” said Catherine Bahm, an aeronautical engineer at Nasa’s Armstrong Flight Research Center in California. “What we’re doing now is the culmination of so much of their work.”
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The sonic boom has stifled the development of supersonic travel, with the US and other countries banning it over land due to the disturbance the sound made on the ground.
Read more: yahoo
