Boom Supersonic loses the sonic boom: The XB-1's quiet Mach 1 flight
By Joe Salas
February 11, 2025
https://newatlas.com/aircraft/boom-supe ... onic-boom/
If you've been keeping tabs on aviation news as of late, you saw that Boom Supersonic just recently broke the sound barrier with its XB-1 demonstrator aircraft. Oddly enough, no one on the ground heard a thing during its "boomless" cruise.
Supersonic flight has been all the rage since the mid-1970s when the Concorde was whisking commercial passengers across the pond at breakneck speeds upwards of Mach 2 (right around 1,354 mph or 2,180 km/h).
The trouble is, supersonic flight means sonic booms. And while they might sound pretty cool when you hear them at an airshow when your favorite USAF or Navy fighter plane does a flyby, the fact is that broken windows, scared pets and livestock, and other annoying or property-damaging things are less cool. The FAA put a screeching halt to civilian supersonic flight over land in 1973 before civilian supersonic flight even became a thing, limiting jets to subsonic speeds.
Image of prototype XB-1 caught breaking the sound barrier
By David Szondy
March 03, 2025
NASA has released a new image providing photographic evidence of Boom Supersonic's XB-1 prototype aircraft breaking the sound barrier. Captured on the second supersonic flight, it used a special imaging technique to record the historic event.
A frustrating aspect of many technological achievements is that you often have to take someone else's word that it happened at all. Did Sir Edmund Hillary and Tensing Norgay reach the summit of Mount Everest in 1953? They said they did. Did Jacques Piccard really visit the bottom of the Mariana trench in 1960? So we were told. Did Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin set foot on the Moon in 1969? Oh, don't open that can of worms.
That's not to say none of these happened. Scepticism is all well and good, but it can go a bit too far. Pretty soon, you end up with the old joke that in order to fake the Moon landing you still had to build and launch the giant rocket, so the only money the alleged fraud saved was the catering bill.
Quarterhorse Mark 1 takes to the air in race for commercial hypersonic
By David Szondy
May 31, 2025
Hermeus seems dead keen on fast-tracking its way to hypersonic passenger flight. Its uncrewed subsonic Quarterhorse Mark 1 prototype has completed its maiden flight in the skies over Edwards Air Force Base in California on May 21, 2025.
Hypersonic flight looks to be the flavor du jour of the aerospace world these days, which isn't surprising. Not only is it poised to revolutionize warfare, it also has the potential to alter civilian cargo and passenger travel in ways far beyond what Concorde and its kin promised but never delivered in the 1960s.
The tricky bit is how to, pardon the pun, get it all off the ground. Since its founding in 2018, Hermeus has been pursuing a novel development strategy. Instead of the conventional approach of working directly on a final aircraft preceded by, perhaps, a flying prototype or two that approximate the performance of the ultimate aircraft, the company has been working on highly specialized prototypes designed to specifically test various systems without any pretense of being anything like a hypersonic plane.
Supersonic flight is returning to the US after a half-century ban
By Abhimanyu Ghoshal
June 09, 2025
More than 20 years after the last commercial Concorde flight, US President Donald Trump signed an executive order last week to repeal the ban on supersonic flight over land across the country.
That ban was implemented more than 50 years ago in 1973, over public complaints about the incredibly loud noise made by these planes, which broke the sound barrier while flying at speeds of over 1,500 mph. The sonic boom created by a supersonic aircraft could be as loud as 110 dB on the ground, similar to a car horn blaring at close range.
Lifting the ban could significantly speed up air travel. For reference, British Airways' Concorde holds the record for the fastest transatlantic passenger aircraft crossing, going from London to New York in under 3 hours – a trip that usually takes 8-9 hours.
What has zero moving parts, yet can blast an aerial vehicle to velocities beyond Mach 5? The answer is the recently flight-tested Atmospheric Test of Launched Airbreathing System (ATLAS) powered by a new solid-fueled ramjet built by GE Aerospace.
Hypersonic missiles capable of flying well in excess of five times the speed of sound promise to revolutionize warfare and aviation in general in a manner not seen since the sound barrier was broken in 1947. Not only could it turn flights from London to Sydney into an afternoon jaunt instead of a 22-plus-hour ordeal, it could also make current air defenses obsolete as vehicles blast by before defenders would even detect them.
The tricky bit is how to get the vehicle into the hypersonic range where it can cruise under its own power or fly as a Mach 5+ glider. For the ATLAS program, GE Aerospace has come up with the latest in Solid-Fuel Ramjet (SFRJ) technology that seems to operate almost by magic.
Kratos To Use Hermeus’ Supersonic and Hypersonic Aircraft For MACH-TB
October 29, 2025 by Brian Wang
Kratos Defense will utilize the Hermeus high-speed Quarterhorse aircraft as part of its support work for the U.S. Navy and Missile Defense Agency’s Multi-Service Advanced Capabilities Hypersonic Testbed (MACH-TB) program. The rapid expansion of the Kratos Defense hypersonic test team follows the award of a $1.45 billion contract in January 2025 to support the MACH-TB program—a five-year initiative.
It may seem like a horse-drawn Zeppelin, but Astro Mechanica seems to be all-in on its revolutionary hybrid-electric supersonic jet engine as it partnered with UK-based engineering firm Helix to add high-energy density radial-flux motors to the tech.
In the 1940s, Commander Lee Lewis, Commander G. Halvorson, S. F. Singer, and Dr. James A. Van Allen came up with one of the strangest mixtures of technologies ever – the rockoon, which was a combination of a rocket and a balloon. At first glance, it seemed about as silly as things could get, with a small rocket being hoisted high into the air by a balloon to ignite at high altitude.
It seems not only daft but overcomplicated, yet it addressed a very real problem, which was how to get a rocket to fly through the dense lower layers of the atmosphere without wasting a lot of fuel. It also meant that sounding rockets could be safely launched from ships far out at sea where the spent vehicles could crash into the water nowhere near inhabited areas.
The idea of a hybrid-electric engine for supersonic aircraft may elicit a similar initial response, but there is some very firm engineering logic behind it.
