NASA is getting ready to trying to bring back supersonic travel back to commercial aviation, with the help of Lockheed Martin to get there.
On Tuesday NASA awarded Lockheed Martin a $247.5 million contract to build the Low-Boom Flight Demonstrator, a one-off X-plane with a design intended to eliminate, or at least minimize, the sonic boom characteristic of aircraft breaking the sound barrier.
This plane will be expected to fly at altitudes of around 55,000 feet, and will reach speeds of around 940 miles per hour! NASA says the sound it will produce should be at 75 perceived-level decibels, or about as loud as a car door closing. However planes like this have already flown. British Airways and Air France made regular flights across the Atlantic to the US until they retired their needle-nosed Concorde airplane, which flew at about Mach 2 (twice the speed of sound), in 2003. 
NASA expects to begin flying the demonstrator aircraft over unspecified US cities beginning in mid-2022.
So what does this have to do with engineering? This has to do with engineering because of the fact that an innovation of planes, something that is very important to many people, is happening.
https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-begins-work-to-build-a-quieter-supersonic-passenger-jet
Original link
https://www.cnet.com/news/nasa-orders-a-supersonic-x-plane-easy-on-the-boom/
