On the latter issue, the answer is yes, in theory. “Sonic boom is only very loosely related to weight and size, when you have a shaped aircraft,” says Michael Buonanno, the project’s chief engineer at Lockheed’s Skunk Works advanced research center in California.
NASA began working new designs more than a decade, using the power of supercomputers to model the fluid dynamics in ways earlier engineers never could, Harrington said, followed by wind tunnel tests. “And now we’re at the stage where we can actually build an X-plane,” he said.