Will Nasa's Quesst project be the next Concorde?

Nasa has commissioned initial designs for a supersonic passenger jet to fill the gap left by the retired Anglo-French Concorde.

The US space agency is paying US tech company Lockheed Martin Aeronautics $20m (£14.3m) over the next 17 months to come up with a preliminary concept for a "quiet supersonic transport" plane, dubbed "Quesst".

Announcing the project, Charles Bolden, the head of Nasa, said: "It's been almost 70 years since Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier in the Bell X-1 as part of our predecessor agency's high speed research.

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"Now we're continuing that supersonic X-plane legacy with this preliminary design award for a quieter supersonic jet with an aim toward passenger flight."

Nasa has specified the jet must avoid the disruptive boom associated with breaking the sound barrier. Instead, Quesst will generate a soft "heartbeat" as it goes supersonic and travels faster than the speed of sound, says The Guardian.

When Concorde arrived on the scene in the late 1960s, British newspapers fretted their readers' greenhouses would be smashed by its boom. Nasa said that determining "acceptable sound levels" for the jet will be part of the process.

Quesst is the first in a series of X-plane projects dreamt up as part of the space agency's New Aviation Horizons initiative. If the funding can be found, a scaled-down version of the plane could be built for testing as soon as 2020.