> Overture flights will focus on 500+ primarily transoceanic routes that benefit from supersonic speeds—such as New York to London or San Francisco to Tokyo. Overture won't generate a sonic boom over land cruising at subsonic speeds. Its passengers won't even notice breaking through the "sound barrier," which will be inaudible and uneventful.
So I guess they haven't really solved physics. edit: in an economic way.
The Low-boom Flight Demonstration mission has two goals: 1) design and build a piloted, large-scale supersonic X-plane with technology that reduces the loudness of a sonic boom to that of a gentle thump; and 2) fly the X-plane over select U.S. communities to gather data on human responses to the low-boom flights and deliver that data set to U.S. and international regulators.
Using this data, new sound-based rules regarding supersonic flight over land can be written and adopted, which would open the doors to new commercial cargo and passenger markets to provide faster-than-sound air travel.
"NASA has a project to test whether the physics can be adequately finessed" would be more accurate description of what is on that page than "NASA has solved the physics".
>Graves explains that SonicBAT is an unusual test in that it uses a typical military aircraft with its loud sonic boom to help engineers better understand the sounds from future quiet supersonic aircraft
>"We're hoping we can eventually lower sonic booms to a low rumble," he said. "The goal is to eventually accommodate jets that can fly from New York to Los Angeles in two hours."
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/new-supersonic-technology-desig...
I'd hope that Boom is also working on such an approach
That's really only true west of about a North-South line through the eastern edge of the Texas panhandle. From there east, there's still some open space (not a lot once you hit the Mississippi River), but you'd have to dodge around to make path not going over population concentrations.
in concorde, the passengers didn't even notice breaking through the sound barrier either.
regarding sonic booms over land, their plan iirc is to reduce the noise level to the point where they can lobby to change legislation.