While NASA's official update centers on the X-59's envelope expansion toward Mach 1.4 at 55,000 feet, the coverage underplays the aircraft's role as a regulatory testbed that could finally overturn the 1973 FAA ban on civil supersonic overland flight. The first supersonic tests scheduled for early June rely on a chase plane with shock-sensing probes, meaning any acoustic data will be contaminated by conventional booms—an explicit limitation the agency acknowledges but does not quantify for future community surveys. Drawing on FAA sonic-boom studies from 2018 and historical Concorde operations data, the X-59's design targets a ground-level pressure signature below 75 PLdB, yet the current test block prioritizes structural and systems validation over public perception metrics. This sequencing risks repeating the 2000s-era mistake of advancing airframes before social-acceptance datasets exist at scale. Two overlooked factors stand out: integration with existing ATC routing at 43,000-plus feet and supply-chain lessons from the delayed F-35 external vision system, which shares camera architecture with the X-59's forward display. If community overflight campaigns beginning in 2027 replicate the small-sample methodology of prior NASA noise studies (n<500 participants), the resulting regulatory petition could face the same evidentiary challenges that stalled earlier supersonic proposals.