Imagine, high above you, the sleek silhouette of an airplane with a shape more like that of some futuristic spacecraft from a Hollywood blockbuster. You can clearly make out the long, lance-like nose, steeply swept wing and powerful engines as they blast this 21st-century private jet through the stratosphere at twice the speed of Concorde. Inside, well-heeled passengers are whisked in supreme, supersonic comfort toward their destination half a world away. Rather than a bone-rattling sonic boom, the sound you hear is a mere burble as the jet streaks overhead, vanishing beyond the horizon as quickly as it appeared.
The idea sounds like pure fantasy — and yet this is precisely the dream of a handful of bright entrepreneurs, and even many scientists and engineers at NASA and companies such as Boeing and Lockheed Martin, who say a quiet supersonic transport capable of flying from New York to Paris in less than two hours might be closer to reality than any of us could have imagined.
