NASA Wants to Fly Electric Planes in 20 Years
Concept for the electric X-plane NASA hopes to fly in several years. Image: NASA

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NASA Wants to Fly Electric Planes in 20 Years

NASA wants to make carbon-free flying the status quo within a generation.

In the future, air travel may not be accompanied by roaring jet engines, but quietly humming an electric motors. Indeed, if NASA has anything to say about it, electric airlines could be buzzing across the skies in 20 years, and hybrid planes a decade sooner.

With all the cutting-edge space tech NASA's been imagining lately, it's easy to forget the agency's aeronautics side. You know, the guys working on remotely operated solar-powered planes and electric drones that switch from chopper to flight mode in mid-air. But lest you think the aeronautics engineers at NASA are just building a bunch of giant, carbon-neutral toys, their recently released technology roadmap indicates otherwise. Eventually, the space agency would like to wean the entire commercial flight industry off petroleum.

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"The commercial supply of energy and its process stability remain a critical business concern; fuel currently represents the largest operating cost for the US airlines," NASA writes. "NASA's challenge is to enable the use of readily-available, low-carbon fuels for traditional propulsion systems and investigate alternative propulsion systems for the aircraft of the future."

Aviation is a sector that's ripe for disruption. The miracle of hurtling thousands of pounds of people, luggage and aluminum through the air is accomplished by burning tremendous amounts of fuel. According to The Economist, a single round trip flight from New York to San Fransisco produces two to three tons of carbon dioxide per person; an American who takes no flights emits roughly 19 tons of carbon in a year. Jet engines also dust the sky with an elixir of toxic compounds that contribute to asthma, lung and heart disease and cancer, which contribute to the deaths of an estimated 10,000 people every year.

But where the commercial flight industry has been slow to change, NASA seems to be positioning itself as a thought leader. Over the next decade, the space agency will focus on making conventional propulsion systems cleaner, by designing more efficient engines and cutting conventional jet fuel with vegetable oil or biomass-derived fuels. While biofuels do, in theory, emit fewer greenhouse gases than their petroleum-based counterparts, whether they could make a substantial dent in an aircraft's pollution footprint is, at this point, an open question.

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"No emissions data [for alternative fuels] exists at cruise altitude conditions, and fuel effects on plume chemistry and contrails are not known," NASA writes.

Specific short-term goals for the space agency include characterizing a range of jet biofuel emissions at cruise altitudes, and reducing hazardous NOx emissions through improved engine design. Still, this work is a baby step toward the larger goal of removing carbon-based fuels from the equation entirely and slashing airplane energy consumption many times over.

The LEAPTech ground test, a massive toy wing mounted to a truck to test electric motors for flight. Image: Joby Aviation

To that end, in 2014 NASA launched project "LEAPTech," one of the very first experiments to test electric aircraft motors (the French actually beat us to the Kitty Hawk moment last year). LEAPTech is essentially an airplane wing mounted to a truck, powered by 18 motors that run on lithium iron phosphate batteries. Data collected through this ground-based test will inform the design of the engine that'll drive a 2,000 pound electric "X-plane" NASA hopes to fly in 2017.

As Starr Ginn of NASA's Armstrong Flight Research Center told me in an email, the success of the first X-plane would pave a path toward the development of a commercially viable electric plane that runs on a 1-2 megawatt motor.

"When the Wright brothers designed their first airplane they didn't jump right to a transport vehicle, they started small and built their way up," Ginn said. "[NASA's] approach is to learn by doing, so we will first look at a variety of low-cost feasibility studies before moving on to a larger scale X-plane."

It may be a few decades yet before fully electric passenger planes are a common sight—NASA's tech roadmaps peg the 2025-2035 timeframe for the development of a 1 megawatt electric aircraft engine—but, Ginn says, NASA's Advanced Air-Vehicle Transport Technology Project is also working on hybrid gas-electric motors, and if we're lucky, those could be ready for small commercial flights by the early 2020s.

It's comforting to know that even if Congress succeeds in eviscerating NASA's Earth Science budget, the space agency's other programs will continue to fight the good fight for our planet.