Supersonic cruise aircraft represent one of the most significant opportunities for mobility improvement in NextGen. The long-term goal of the Supersonics Project is to enable supersonic cruise by eliminating current efficiency, environmental, and performance barriers. The Project seeks to develop multidisciplinary, physics-based predictive design, analysis, and optimization capabilities for supersonic vehicles. The project will validate these new capabilities at the foundational, discipline, and systems levels.

Research Overview
The Supersonics Project is a broad-based effort designed to develop knowledge, capabilities, and technologies in support of all vehicles that fly in the supersonic speed regime.
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Efficiency
To become economically viable, supersonic cruise civil aircraft need to achieve unprecedented levels of cruise efficiency without excessive penalties to performance in other speed regimes. This efficiency must be derived not only from improvements in aerodynamic and propulsion, but structure and materials as well.
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Environmental Concerns
Sonic booms that accompany travel at speeds above the speed of sound are a major environmental challenge to civil supersonic transportation. Nearly equally challenging are noise in the vicinity of airports, and emissions at high-altitudes, where the exhaust from supersonic engines can have a negative impact on the atmosphere.
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Performance
Due to their unique structural configuration, nonlinear aerodynamics, and rigid bodies, supersonic cruise aircraft present highly complex Aero/Propulso/Servo/Elastic (APSE) flight dynamic phenomena.
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Entry, Descent, and Landing
NASA’s space exploration missions require supersonic vehicle operations in the atmospheres of other planets and moons, presenting a different set of flight challenges than those of Earth.
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Multidisciplinary design, analysis, and optimization
Understanding and exploiting the interactions of all supersonic technology challenges is key to the creation of practical designs. A flexible integration framework must be developed in which variable fidelity analysis tools can be used.
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