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I can’t help but marvel at the stagnation that has existed in the aviation industry over past half century

Some things are limited by physics. We can control the aircraft design, make them cheaper, more efficient, etc, etc. But we can hardly control the atmosphere around the plane that it must fly through. We might as well try to control the weather as try to harness shock waves in the atmosphere. God gave us a universe to explore (within its rule set). It will come as a disappointment to some that humans cant overcome everything. Some limits we will have to live with.

In the meantime I have to attend to some important business in 1955...

God gave us a universe to explore (within its rule set). It will come as a disappointment to some that humans cant overcome everything. Some limits we will have to live with.

I tend to blame government (over)regulation more than God. Many, many physics 'barriers' that were declared insurmountable have been broken by human ingenuity and trial and error. But when the FAA and similar governmental agencies around the world have blanket bans on non-military supersonic flight, it discourages aerospace from even attempting to innovate in that area. It's a situation where your ability to test new technologies is artificially limited by the government, and even if you succeeded there's a strong possibility that you'd be legally barred from commercializing your innovation.

They claimed that man could not fly faster than the speed of sound. A wall existed that would kill any pilot that dared to go there. Then Chuck Yeager showed that their thinking was in fact an illusion, an adjustment of perspective would reveal a practical approach to achieve supersonic.

For now supersonic flight produces sonic booms and requires so much power that fuel consumption is horrendous. Only the military can afford to fly supersonic, and then only sprints between mid-air refueling points. Many claim the shock wave will always accompany aircraft travel faster than the speed of sound in an undisturbed atmosphere; but, who says we can’t tinker with the very air itself?

Richard Lugg has a vision of producing a turbine-electric hybrid propulsion system which has an ability to generate tens of millions of watts of electric power. With that power available, there are various ways to modify the properties of the atmosphere directly ahead of an aircraft, which then allows manipulating the atmosphere to disperse any shock front and concurrently reduce drag. Fuel aboard would then suffice for long journeys at multi-mach speed.

https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/systems/aircraft/hypermach.htm

https://patents.justia.com/inventor/richard-h-lugg