By Chloe Turgis

NASA has revealed what the future of air travel could look like.

The US space agency has released pictures of three different designs of aircrafts that could potentially be seen flying in 2025. These concepts for the next generation of planes have been developed by three teams who were offered contracts by NASA late last year.

The teams - Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and The Boeing Company – have been asked to further investigate their designs and test them during the course of 2011.

Commenting on the three projects and what sort of plane it was hoping to launch in the future, NASA said on its website: "Each design looks very different, but all final designs have to meet NASA's goals for less noise, cleaner exhaust and lower fuel consumption. Each aircraft has to be able to do all of those things at the same time, which requires a complex dance of trade-offs between all of the new advanced technologies that will be on these vehicles."

NASA added: "Each design has to fly up to 85 percent of the speed of sound; cover a range of approximately 7,000 miles; and carry between 50,000 and 100,000 pounds of payload, either passengers or cargo."

Here is a first look at what planes of the future could look like:


Image credit: NASA/Lockheed Martin


Image credit: NASA/Northrop Grumman


Image credit: NASA/The Boeing Company

How much computing power did NASA have when they put a man on the moon? I've heard that there is more computing power in the average $600 laptop than all of NASA had when they put a man on the moon.