Skip to main content

NASA unveils weird airplane concepts for 2025

NASA must have realized that it’s been a while since we had some new pictures of crazy futuristic flying vehicles to look at. The National Aeronautic and Space Administration has released three pictures of concept aircraft that could theoretically hit the skies in 2025. The concepts come from Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and The Boeing Company, which were awarded contracts to study and design the future aircraft.

NASA intends for all three of these designs to produce less noise, cleaner exhaust, and consume lower amounts of fuel than modern aircraft. They also have to fly at least 85 percent of the speed of sound, have a range of 7,000 miles, and carry between 50,000 and 100,000 lbs of cargo. Below are the initial designs by each company.

Northrop Grumman

nasa-2025-aircraft-concept-norhtrop-grumman
Image used with permission by copyright holder

The Boeing Company

nasa-2025-aircraft-concept-the-boeing-company
Image used with permission by copyright holder

Lockheed Martin

Image used with permission by copyright holder

All three designs look pretty neat, but NASA hasn’t released any unique information about any of the designs, so we are left to speculate about almost everything, including the odd paint job on the Lockheed Martin design. My personal favorite is the design by The Boeing Company because it looks like it has three almost entirely unnecessary propellers on it.

NASA tends to release batches of pretty pictures and concept designs every so often. Check out this one-man stealth plane or these 10 space projects. And don’t forget: NASA just discovered “alien life” in California as well.

Jeffrey Van Camp
Former Digital Trends Contributor
As DT's Deputy Editor, Jeff helps oversee editorial operations at Digital Trends. Previously, he ran the site's…
This AI cloned my voice using just three minutes of audio
acapela group voice cloning ad

There's a scene in Mission Impossible 3 that you might recall. In it, our hero Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) tackles the movie's villain, holds him at gunpoint, and forces him to read a bizarre series of sentences aloud.

"The pleasure of Busby's company is what I most enjoy," he reluctantly reads. "He put a tack on Miss Yancy's chair, and she called him a horrible boy. At the end of the month, he was flinging two kittens across the width of the room ..."

Read more
Digital Trends’ Top Tech of CES 2023 Awards
Best of CES 2023 Awards Our Top Tech from the Show Feature

Let there be no doubt: CES isn’t just alive in 2023; it’s thriving. Take one glance at the taxi gridlock outside the Las Vegas Convention Center and it’s evident that two quiet COVID years didn’t kill the world’s desire for an overcrowded in-person tech extravaganza -- they just built up a ravenous demand.

From VR to AI, eVTOLs and QD-OLED, the acronyms were flying and fresh technologies populated every corner of the show floor, and even the parking lot. So naturally, we poked, prodded, and tried on everything we could. They weren’t all revolutionary. But they didn’t have to be. We’ve watched enough waves of “game-changing” technologies that never quite arrive to know that sometimes it’s the little tweaks that really count.

Read more
Digital Trends’ Tech For Change CES 2023 Awards
Digital Trends CES 2023 Tech For Change Award Winners Feature

CES is more than just a neon-drenched show-and-tell session for the world’s biggest tech manufacturers. More and more, it’s also a place where companies showcase innovations that could truly make the world a better place — and at CES 2023, this type of tech was on full display. We saw everything from accessibility-minded PS5 controllers to pedal-powered smart desks. But of all the amazing innovations on display this year, these three impressed us the most:

Samsung's Relumino Mode
Across the globe, roughly 300 million people suffer from moderate to severe vision loss, and generally speaking, most TVs don’t take that into account. So in an effort to make television more accessible and enjoyable for those millions of people suffering from impaired vision, Samsung is adding a new picture mode to many of its new TVs.
[CES 2023] Relumino Mode: Innovation for every need | Samsung
Relumino Mode, as it’s called, works by adding a bunch of different visual filters to the picture simultaneously. Outlines of people and objects on screen are highlighted, the contrast and brightness of the overall picture are cranked up, and extra sharpness is applied to everything. The resulting video would likely look strange to people with normal vision, but for folks with low vision, it should look clearer and closer to "normal" than it otherwise would.
Excitingly, since Relumino Mode is ultimately just a clever software trick, this technology could theoretically be pushed out via a software update and installed on millions of existing Samsung TVs -- not just new and recently purchased ones.

Read more