NASA spends $87 million to make Electric Plane, scraps program, declares great success

Repeat after me, comrade: "Your government is competent.  NASA is competent.  Thus all the decisions they make are good."  Got it?

NASA is one of the two gummint agencies that's been changing historic measured temperatures for the last 20 years or so, lowering older measured temps and raising recent ones to make it appear that "global warming" is real.  I've covered that extensively before.

So having done that, now NASA bleats that the warming they've greatly exaggerated is caused by rising CO2, which they claim is caused by burning carbon-based fuels.  One of the results is that NASA has been pushing electric airplanes.

Young Democrats:  "Yay!!!  Dis faaabulous!  Cuz if we don' do dat, all duh puppies an' kitties on Earth gonna be roasted!  Duh sea lebble gon' rise an' flood New Yawk City!"

So by stoking this fear NASA got congress to authorize it to spend a few tens of millions of tax dollars on...an electric plane!  It was called the X-57 Flying Unicorn, and the purpose was to show that electric passenger planes were totally feasible!  And in that case whatever it cost was a total bargain, eh?

Hahahahahaha!  Just kidding!  Dey spent $87 million to design and build a cute test plane--but are now scrapping the project without a single flight.  And yet they're crowing that the project was a faaabulous success!

Oh, and I was also kidding about the name:  "Flying Unicorn" is a spoof on Leftist morons who claim we don't need carbon fuels for jets, since we can power 'em with non-CO2-emitting unicorn farts.

Oh wait...NASA didn't actually design and build a new plane at all!  All they did was take a tiny, almost useless plane and put electric motors on it.  The existing aircraft could only carry four people at 135 mph.  But hey, we wouldn't want to spend money on a BIG plane and scrap it, right? 

So if they didn't actually design and build the airplane, what did they spend $87 million ON?

Federal salaries, baby.  Folks, if NASA set out to design a parking meter, or a cell phone, they'd spend $50 million and the thing probably wouldn't work.  It's par for the course.

The Flying Unicorn project started in 2016.  When it began, NASA said it would cost $40 million to get to the first flight, slated for May 2018--so two years. So how'd that work out?

Well, six years after starting (so end of 2022) the program had spent over $87 million, and plane still hadn't flown.  NASA said it would cost "at least" another $64 million to get to the first flight, now pushed back to 2027.  So a program they said would take two years in 2016 would end up taking 11 years and cost over three times the initial estimate.

For young Americans: This is absolutely normal for all government programs: they take 3 or 4 times longer than initially forecast and cost 3-4 times more.

NASA has now scrapped the whole program, claiming they found "unforeseen, insurmountable safety concerns."

Ah. “Unforeseen safety concerns,” y'say.  The average voter hears that and shrugs: "Sure, that happens.  We sure wouldn't want to continue if there were "safety concerns," eh?

But a tiny handful of Americans have engineering degrees.  And even smaller group of engineers are also pilots--some with LOTS of experience.  So we asked, What, specifically, are those "unforeseen safety concerns" that couldn't have been foreseen way back in 2016 when this project started?

(See, we've learned that you have to add that word "specifically" cuz if you don't, the NAS-holes will reply with a bunch of horseshit, cuz they're used to dealing with reporters who don't know jack-shit about engineering.  In fact NASA people think they're the only folks on the planet who know fuck-all about engineering, so they're used to just giving gobblespeak answers to stupid reporters.)

Nevertheless, even with "specifically," NASA spouted some tap-dancing bureau-babble.  Gobblespeak.  Baffle-gab.  But the betting is that the real reason is that as everyone in the biz knew before 2016, lithium-ion batteries occasionally catch fire, and those fires are very hard to extinguish.  

If a lithium battery fire happened in-flight, you'd likely have just minutes to get on the ground before structural failure.  Short answer is, that's essentially impossible.

Question is, did most experts know about the fire risk of lithium batteries before 2016?

So NASA blew through $87 million of taxpayer money.  But was it wasted?  Brad Flick is the director of NASA's Armstrong Flight Research Center, so he's a "high official," so has a whole phalanx of PR writers.  Let's watch them earn their pay here:

Although the X-57 program failed to achieve a flight test, the project succeeded at its primary goal, which was to share what it learned with regulators and the aviation industry to help develop certification standards for electric aircraft. In fact, the X-57 team has published dozens of technical papers over the years detailing every aspect of its design and testing processes.
    NASA’s goal is to drive innovation through groundbreaking research and technology development. The X-57 project team has done just that by providing foundational information to industry.... through lessons learned, and we’re seeing the benefits borne out by American commercial aviation companies that are aiming to change the way we fly,” Flick said. “I’m incredibly proud of their tenacity and ingenuity as they led the way in advancing electrified propulsion. The future of electrified propulsion is possible because of their contributions.

Let me translate. For $87 million NASA has learned that airplanes powered by lithium batteries aren't safe for flight.  Wow, who coulda predicted that, eh?  And all it took was six years and $87 million dollars!  Fabulous!

Source. 

https://www.ainonline.com/aviation-news/advanced-air-mobility/2023-06-29/nasa-wraps-x-57-program-without-flight