Year 2025 Future Plane Design Concepts - NASA

NASA – On-Peak with 2025 Plane Designs

3 Top JET makers reveal Design Concepts they are x-ploring for the Future

NASA has offered a first peek at possible airplanes of the future that are currently being explored by titans of the aviation industry. 

In late 2010, NASA awarded contracts to three teams — from Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and The Boeing Co. — to produce advanced-concept designs for aircraft that could take to the skies in 2025.

**NASA / Northrop Grumman

A design team led by:

Northrop Grumman

came up with this concept for a

twin-fuselage airplane

that could enter service in 2025.

The initial design concepts look very different from each other.

Northrop Grumman envisions a plane with two fuselages sharing a middle wing under which dual jet engines are slung.

Boeing, meanwhile, is working with a "flying wing" concept that resembles a stealth bomber in that it has an arrowhead- or wedge-shaped profile in place of an obvious, tubular fuselage.

Lockheed Martin's initial design looks the most like a commercial plane of today, but the two lateral wings wrap around to the rear of the plane and connect over top of where a tail fin would be, and the engines appear here as well.

**NASA / Boeing

An artist's conception shows a

"flying wing" concept for an aircraft that could enter service in 2025, as designed by a Boeing-led team.

All final designs will have to meet NASA's requirements for less noise, cleaner exhaust and lower fuel consumption. That will involve a complex dance of tradeoffs between all of the advanced technologies available for these aircraft.

The proposed airplanes also will have to operate safely in a more modernized air traffic management system.

In addition, each plane will have to be able to fly up to 85 percent of the speed of sound; cover a range of about 7,000 miles; and carry between 50,000 and 100,000 pounds of either passengers or cargo.

**NASA / Lockheed Martin

This concept for a 2025 airplane,

designed by a team led by Lockheed Martin,features "wrap-around" wings that join up with the tail.

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.

Source : http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/41160471/ns/technology_and_science-tech_and_gadgets/