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turgid [soylentnews.org] writes:

The Guardian reports [theguardian.com] that NASA has begun another project [nasa.gov] to design a quieter (low boom) commercial supersonic transport aircraft and has awarded the contract for the preliminary design to a team lead by Lockheed Martin.

Part of the project will be to study what would be acceptable noise levels from such a vehicle, and advances in design mean that the sonic boom associated with traditional supersonic aircraft could be replaced by a less disruptive pair of soft thuds.

A quieter supersonic aircraft would have potentially much larger markets than Concorde, which was effectively limited to going supersonic only over the ocean because of the intensity of its sonic boom.

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