Drone deliveries, high-speed aircraft and human spaceflight captivate the public
By Chi L. Mai and Amir S. Gohardani|December 2024
The Society and Aerospace Technology Outreach Committee examines the relationship between aerospace and society.
Highlights of this year’s intersections of society and aerospace technologies included advancements in drone deliveries to consumers, progress on a supersonic aircraft designed not to startle the public with sonic booms, the conclusion of a simulated crewed Mars mission, fascination with a malfunctioning spacecraft and the first private spacewalk.
In July, FAA for the first time authorized beyond-visual-line-of-sight drone flights by multiple commercial operators in the same airspace. FAA cleared Zipline and Alphabet subsidiary Wing, both of California, to deliver packages from Walmart stores in the Dallas/Fort Worth, Texas, area to nearby customers, relying on their uncrewed aircraft traffic management systems to share data and flight routes to help keep the drones safely separated. In the future, such technology could help enable routine flights where one remote pilot oversees multiple drones flying beyond the pilot’s visual line of sight.
In the supersonic flight regime, NASA and Lockheed Martin in January publicly unveiled the X-59 at Lockheed Martin Skunk Works’ facility in Palmdale, California. This experimental research aircraft is meant to demonstrate a means of reducing the sharp crack of the sonic booms produced by traveling faster than the speed of sound to a gentler “thump.” Features of the X-59 designed for quieter supersonic flight include a long, tapered nose and a top-mounted engine. In October, engine-run tests began to verify the performance of X-59’s systems under its own engine power. NASA now plans for initial flight tests to commence in early 2025, after which pilots will fly X-59 over several U.S. cities to measure the aircraft’s sonic thumps and how the public perceives them. The information could lead to the end of FAA’s ban on supersonic flight over land by civil aircraft.
Turning to simulated spaceflight on land, a four-person volunteer crew in July concluded NASA’s first year-long analog mission of a long-duration stay on Mars. Research scientist Kelly Haston, engineer Ross Brockwell, physician Nathan Jones and microbiologist Anca Selariu lived in a 3D-printed Martian habitat at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. They conducted spacewalks, operated robots, maintained their habitat, exercised, grew crops, gave haircuts and contended with communication delays of up to 44 minutes when contacting mission controllers, friends and family. As NASA prepares to return astronauts to the moon and later send humans to Mars, such analog missions can help the agency refine its plans and determine how the conditions of living in another world affect human health and performance.
As part of NASA’s Commercial Crew program, a Boeing Starliner capsule in June carried astronauts Barry “Butch” Wilmore and Suni Williams to the International Space Station for the design’s first flight with crew. While en route to ISS, several thrusters malfunctioned. After testing and reviews, NASA decided in August that Wilmore and Williams will remain on orbit until February, when they are to return in a SpaceX Crew Dragon. The unoccupied Starliner capsule undocked from ISS in September and landed in White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico.
In a leap forward for commercial spaceflight, two members of the four-person Polaris Dawn crew in September performed the first private spacewalk. At an altitude of about 700 kilometers, the hatch on a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule was opened, exposing Jared Isaacman, Scott Poteet, Sarah Gillis and Anna Menon to the vacuum of space. Isaacman, the billionaire founder of Shift4 who founded the flight, and Gillis, a SpaceX engineer, took turns partially exiting the capsule. During their nearly five days in low-Earth orbit, the crew reached a maximum altitude of 1,400 kilometers, the farthest that humans have traveled from Earth since the Apollo 17 lunar landing in 1972.
