Our Future Planes? NASA Reveals The Airplanes Of 2025 (PICTURES)

Get ready for the next generation of passenger airplanes.

NASA has taken the wraps off three concept designs for quiet, energy efficient aircraft that could potentially be ready to fly as soon as 2025. The designs come from Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and The Boeing Company. In the final months of 2010, each of these companies won a contract from NASA to research and test their concepts during 2011.

According to NASA,

[E]ach design has to fly up to 85 percent of the speed of sound; cover a range of approximately 7,000 miles; and carry between 50,000 and 100,000 pounds of payload, either passengers or cargo. For the rest of this year, each team will be exploring, testing, simulating, keeping and discarding innovations and technologies to make their design a winner.

Apparently, NASA is aiming to develop a line of super-planes that larger, faster, quieter, and that burn fuel slower and cleaner than their present counterparts.

How likely is it that we'll see these designs in the sky? Fast Company offers some insight: "Given how long it usually takes to craft an aircraft from scratch, and bearing in mind how many technical hitches the revolutionary Boeing 787 Dreamliner has suffered, these are the sorts of aircraft that these three firms are probably beginning to design for real right about now."

Check out the three concept planes (below), then have a look at our slideshow of more incredible planes from the future.

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Northrop Grumman Concept

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Comments

[OldHick]

06:14 PM on 01/20/2011

the Boeing concept plane is exactly the same as the Northrup flying wing with jet engines. No wonder they can lay people off. They are going Chinese.

[Benjamin Rosenfeld]

09:47 AM on 01/19/2011

Concept #2 reminds me of the passenger space craft in The 5th Element.

[WthyrBendragon]

07:52 AM on 01/19/2011

That single engine idea reminds me of an old Tom Lehrer song...

We will all go to together when we go
In a great conflagration, don't you know?...

Unfortunately, all of these designs have been around in various forms since Eisenhower was POTUS.

Twin hull - been there in WWII
Flying wing - done that too, in WWII.
Single engine in the tail - WWI! and such a fail.

[JuanCarlosysofia]

01:00 PM on 01/18/2011

that's the classic BURT RUTTAN design.Has Northrup no shame to field these images?

[grandcarrera]

11:03 PM on 01/18/2011

Northrop owns Scaled Composites (Burt Rutan's compay).

[grandcarrera]

11:54 PM on 01/18/2011

Northrop owns Scaled Composites (Burt Rutan's company). Wikipedia is your friend: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scaled_Composites

[twigtrigtrack]

12:56 PM on 01/18/2011

Pretty wild concepts...

[Prateek Panchal]

02:46 AM on 01/18/2011

Beautiful pictures!!!...

Thanks for sharing. Hopefully it will be a very useful technology.

http://www.northamericavoyage.com/crown-paradise-club-cancun-a-true-jewel.html

[mashtoe]

12:40 AM on 01/18/2011

Please end NASA. The only purpose of NASA is to force taxpayers to fund basic research which is then offshored to China by Boeing and other multinational corporations.

There is no such thing as an American corporation then there should also be no US funded research.

[jsarets]

02:05 AM on 01/18/2011

I'd sooner suggest prohibiting multinational corporations than ending publicly-funded research. 

During the Cold War, the Soviet Union undertook a phenomenal series of robotic missions to Venus called the Venera probes. They were the first terrestrial spacecraft to successfully land on another planet, and they returned magnificent imagery from the Venusian surface. The U.S. government acquired the data but refused to share it with the scientific community because they did not want to publicize the successes of the Soviet space program.

We have to realize that, to a certain extent, this kind of knowledge belongs to the world no matter which nation was responsible for it. Outer space is the legacy of all mankind. We can't let that get lost in the nationalist rhetoric that tends to characterize space programs. We may have different ideologies and cultures, but we're all humans and Earthlings. 

Furthermore, if the plan for the future of the American economy is to market proprietary information, then we will be sorely disappointed. Intellectual property is not practical or enforceable. Those who produce goods and services from ideas will make fools of those who are content to merely produce ideas. If America cannot capitalize on technology, then we rightly deserve to be beaten by the Chinese, and there's nothing that the lawyers and politicians can really do about that.

[jsarets]

11:38 PM on 01/17/2011

For those of you questioning the future of NASA spaceflight -- yes, there are reasons to be frustrated with the progress of NASA's in-house human spaceflight program, but there are also definite reasons to be hopeful, and one of them is the remarkable rise of SpaceX.

SpaceX has released a new video recapping the spectacularly successful maiden flight of the Dragon spacecraft and including new animations of the launch abort system and precision soft landing system in development for the next generation of Dragon spacecraft, which will carry passengers:

http://www.spacex.com/multimedia/videos.php?id=58

Unlike previous launch abort systems (LAS), Dragon will use rocket engines built into the spacecraft and the existing propellant tanks that would otherwise be used for on-orbit propulsion. This means the LAS will be completely reusable and available all the way from liftoff to orbit.

The same engines used for the LAS will also be used to decelerate and guide the spacecraft to a soft landing (like the Apollo lunar module) on normal missions. For aborted ascents or aborted landings, Dragon will also carry a parachute system for splashdown landings.

The Dragon spacecraft launched on the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket will cost approximately half as much per seat as the Russian Soyuz, and it will be manufactured in America. SpaceX is by far the most vertically-integrated spaceflight company in the world, producing over 80% of their hardware from raw materials at their factory in Hawthorne, CA.

[GerryS]

10:41 PM on 01/17/2011

somebody,

miderate me,

I am getting used to it----------------

[Daniel Bopeley]

09:41 PM on 01/17/2011

new designs?...hardly the future is indebted to horten bros, jack northrup, kelly johnson and of course rutan btw the lockheed martin design I think actually might have two engines. look closer

[Edward Standley]

07:04 PM on 01/17/2011

Really like the swoopy planes, but where are our equally swoopy trains. Seems a lot more efficient to just power something forward than to have to power it forward while hangin' it in the air.

[AnonymousHuckster]

06:00 PM on 01/17/2011

These are ridiculous, impractical, and will never see the light of day. The "Lockheed Martin concept" is idiotic as it only has one engine. A major element of flight safety and reliability is the idea of redundancy. What happens if that one engine fails? I guess the plane goes down. The "Boeing Concept" is hardly a new design and it's lack of windows ensures it will never be a passenger vehicle.

[KennebunkportIndependent]

03:06 PM on 01/17/2011

So let me get this right - if these planes come into service in 2025, then we might see them hit American Airlines fleet about.....2075??

[JuanCarlosysofia]

01:03 PM on 01/18/2011

there will be no flying in 2075 for the masses..i think in 5 years the peasants will not be allowed near an airport.

[john frodo]

02:40 PM on 01/17/2011

Look at those 3 concepts, Northrup Grumman went all out.

[JuanCarlosysofia]

01:04 PM on 01/18/2011

this has been done before to the core.

[Chipher]

02:25 PM on 01/17/2011

Am I the only one who finds it ALARMINGLY SOCIALIST for US taxpayer life savings to be used to underwrite DEFENSE CONTRACTOR research and development in COMMERCIAL AEROSPACE? Boeing is already receiving MASSIVE tax breaks and SWEET-HEART contracts, like the now defunct Border Fence program Boeing failed to deliver on, BUT GOT PAID BILLIONS ANYWAY! They can't even deploy a functional Patriot Missile (ERA < 50%) after TENS OF BILLIONS of our life savings have been squandered. We are STILL PAYING FOR STAR WARS PROGRAMS more than TWENTY FIVE YEARS that will NEVER DEPLOY! They are SCIENCE FICTION! When did FUNDING SCIENCE FICTION BECOME NATIONAL PRIORITY? Should we beatify Carl Sagan? "Billions and Billions™". America is dead-busted flat broke, with 46,000,000 jobless, homeless or part-time 99'rs, and an INVISIBLE TRILLION DOLLAR WEHRMACT and GESTAPO disappearing OVER 2/3RDS OF ALL DISCRETIONARY SPENDING!! Congress just STOLE $95 BILLION from ObamaCare and GRIFTED IT to 'Defense' (sic) as a +14% COLA RAISE for 2011, then right away STOLE $8 BILLION from US Education and GRIFTED IT to 'Homeland Defense' (sic) as a +14% COLA RAISE for 2011 TSA pat-downs. What will Congress STEAL FROM to GRIFT TO NA$A next!? Will we have to give up FOOD?!

[Hvartski]

08:34 PM on 01/17/2011

Where have you been? Our government has, from party to party, and president to president, engaged in a militaristic form of Keynesian economics for 60 years. We sustain our economy by defense spending. Now we spend more than the rest of the world combined and 10 times as much as 2nd place China. (One style suggestion: go easy on the capital letters. It doesn't add anything to the force of your statements and it brands you.)

[GerryS]

10:43 PM on 01/17/2011

fanned and faved, Chipher-----

while I was not a fan of your screaming, still, F&F-------------------------