In America's recent Florida primary, one candidate was lambasted by another for discussing plans to build a base on the moon—to an audience coming from a state with a nearly 10% unemployment rate, back here on Earth. The moon is not really what's on people's minds these days. Which raises the question, how relevant is NASA?

The space agency is in fact working on something more of us can relate to, and that's commercial aircraft. The NASA Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate's Environmentally Responsible Aviation Project has tasked three companies with designing concepts for greener planes:

Teams from The Boeing Company in Huntington Beach, Calif., Lockheed Martin in Palmdale, Calif., and Northrop Grumman in El Segundo, Calif., have spent the last year studying how to meet NASA goals to develop technology that would allow future aircraft to burn 50 percent less fuel than aircraft that entered service in 1998 (the baseline for the study), with 50 percent fewer harmful emissions; and to shrink the size of geographic areas affected by objectionable airport noise by 83 percent.

"The real challenge is we want to accomplish all these things simultaneously," said ERA project manager Fay Collier. "It's never been done before. We looked at some very difficult metrics and tried to push all those metrics down at the same time."

While the delta-shaped "flying wing" configurations of Boeing and Northrop Grumman look similar to concepts we've seen before, Lockheed Martin's "box wing" design, below, is the one that really caught our eye.

In a design situation that George Lucas would find familiar, the company reportedly envisioned the box wing three decades ago, but had to wait for technology (in this case, lightweight composites) to catch up to the concept.

Frustratingly, while all three concepts are touted for their greenness, descriptions of how the particular designs actually achieve superior targets is pretty vague. But the findings, whatever the details, are expected to determine where NASA will invest research money in the coming years.

Aircraft geeks can read more here.