Fra Zerohedge:
China, the rising power of the world, has transformed its country into a superpower that will likely dominate the US by the 2030s. To do this, they need to advance their aerospace industry, along with supersonic civil jetliners that could take a traditional flight of ten hours down to five.
A new report from China Central Television (CCTV), reported in English via the Global Times, says China is expected to develop an environmentally friendly supersonic civil aircraft with prototypes expected for flight tests in 2035.
China Association for Science and Technology announced on Sunday at its annual meeting held in Harbin, Northeast China’s Heilongjiang Province, that it has started designing a green supersonic civil jetliner.
The CCTV report said supersonic air travel would take a traditional ten-hour flight down to five, would revolutionize travel between continents.
“Green supersonic civil aircraft is currently a hot research topic internationally, as well as the direction of future aerospace development,” Xu Yue, a senior engineer at the Chinese Aeronautical Establishment under the state-owned Aviation Industry of China, told CCTV.
We have extensively covered the developments of supersonic and even hypersonic technologies that are expected to revolutionize aerospace in the next decade.
Countries including the US, Japan, and some European countries have already published designs for supersonic planes, CCTV said.
In November 2018, Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works started to build the X-59 Quiet Supersonic Technology (QueSST) plane, which could take to the skies in the next several years.
The QueSST is for NASA’s Low-Boom Flight Demonstration program will be flown above several US cities to measure the public’s reaction of a low-boom sound from supersonic flight.
We even reported that an Atlanta-based startup is working on the development of hypersonic jetliners.
China has already made breakthroughs in technologies for supersonic and hypersonic flight.
“We hope that, through our own technological development and continued scientific investment, we can launch our own supersonic civil aircraft prototype in around 2035,” Xu said.
A race between China and the US has developed, in who can build, test, and launch a supersonic jetliner first. For the US, this will be about defending its aerospace empire. And for China, well, it’s about becoming the world’s next greatest superpower through technological advances, starting in aerospace, then in all other industries to displace the American empire.
