NASA’s supersonic jet completes its first flight in California

Nearly a decade after NASA partnered with Lockheed Martin to build the X-59, the supersonic jet has completed its first flight in California, according to a press release spotted by Gizmodo. The X-59 Quiet SuperSonic Technology (Quesst) aircraft is designed to reach supersonic speeds without the “sonic boom,” and now with this latest test flight complete, NASA and Lockheed plan to conduct future tests to measure the X-59’s “sound signature and conduct community acceptance testing.”

The flight on Tuesday was between US Air Force Plant 42 in Palmdale, California and NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center in Edwards, California. “The X-59 performed exactly as planned,” Lockheed Martin says, “verifying initial flying qualities and air data performance on the way to a safe landing at its new home.”

The ultimate goal for the X-59 project is to open up the possibility for commercial supersonic flights in the future. Traveling at supersonic speeds, faster than Mach 1 or around 768 miles per hour, could dramatically shorten trips transporting people and cargo. And if the Quesst design NASA and Lockheed Martin have come up with works, which includes tweaks like placing the jet engine on top of the plane and using an extremely pointy nose, it should also be much quieter. “People below would hear sonic ‘thumps’ rather than booms, if they hear anything at all,” NASA explained in a 2023 blog post.

A ban on supersonic flights over the United States went into effect on April 27, 1973, in response to concerns of property damage and noise pollution. The ban stayed in place for decades until President Donald Trump ordered the Federal Aviation Administration to remove the ban in June 2025 as part of an executive order. Now there’s a new urgency to NASA and Lockheed Martin’s work with the X-59, and an opportunity to apply what they learn to “inform the establishment of new data-driven acceptable noise thresholds related to supersonic commercial flight over land.”