On Thursday, NASA posted an article on it’s website that outlined contracts that had been awarded, in late 2010, to three teams to study advances in aircraft design and concepts that could be flying in the skies by the year 2025.
Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and The Boeing Company were the three companies that received the awards and all three have released artist concepts of an idea and design that they might pursue.
NASA has given the contractors some guidelines for what the futuristic designs must include. Some of these include less noise, cleaner exhaust, lower fuel consumption, ability to fly at 85 percent the speed of sound, cover a range of 7,000 miles, and carry between 50,000 and 100,000 pounds or either passengers, cargo, or a combination thereof.
Lockheed Martin - Artist Concept
The concept released by Lockheed Martin is by far the one that most closely resembles our current aircraft designs. The concept appears to have a single jet engine mounted above the tail section of the plane with odd shaped wings that wrap up and back to the tail section.
Northrop Grumman - Artist Concept
The concept provided by Northrop Grumman is a very interesting design that appears to have a flight deck in the middle connecting the two large wings with dual fuselages attached to the wings outside of the dual jet engines mounted below the flight deck.
The Boeing Company - Artists Concept
Lastly, the design given to NASA by The Boeing Company most closely resembles the current B-2 Stealth Bomber with smoother curves with more of a wide flat design.
It will be interesting to see how much the previews that each of the companies have provided will change after a year of researching and testing each of their designs. For the most part the overall design of most commercial aircraft have not changed for quite a while so it is hard to imaging sitting at the gate in the airport and seeing these futuristic models sitting on the tarmac.
I guess all we can do is sit back and see what advancements are developed over the next 15 years.
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I work in the K-12 Education field as a Technical Support Specialist / Web Specialist at the St. Joseph County ISD in Southwest Michigan. I also do a lot of freelance web development in my free time which I absolutely love doing. I am also an avid gamer when it comes to the PC or the XBOX 360 and have been known to enjoy a good LAN party. 
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