NASA recently awarded Lockheed Martin with an extensive contract to develop new supersonic planes. The only catch is that the plane must avoid making the sonic booms associated with breaking the sound barrier. 

Craft like the Concorde made headlines over a decade ago, but nothing has yet to really take its place in more updated supersonic jets. For the first time, NASA's aeronautics is building a piloted X-plane designed from scratch in conjunction with Lockheed Martin. 

“It is super exciting to be back designing and flying X-planes at this scale,” said Jaiwon Shin, NASA’s associate administrator for aeronautics. “Our long tradition of solving the technical barriers of supersonic flight to benefit everyone continues.”

The $247.5 million contract even put a due date on the X-plane being delivered to the Armstrong Flight Research Center in California. Everything should be done by 2021. 

"We look forward to applying the extensive work completed under QueSST to the design, build and flight test of the X-plane, providing NASA with a demonstrator to make supersonic commercial travel possible for passengers around the globe," program manager Peter Iosifidis said in a statement.

There have been a number of recent studies that detail various techniques to better understand supersonic shockwave behavior. They vary from a deeper understanding of sonic booms to wing layout. There's even been a 150-year-old photographic technique helping researchers and engineers better understand how supersonic shockwaves function, NASA noted.