Seventeen years after the Olympus 593 turbojets were shut down for the last time on the final operational Concorde, supersonic engine developer Rolls-Royce is staking claims to power a resurgent generation of 21st-century, highspeed successors. Banking on 27 years of commercial supersonic experience-and a raft of high-speed propulsion technology developed and tested over the past four decades-Rolls has signed study agreements with Boom Supersonic on the Colorado-based company's proposed Mach 2.2 Overture airliner design and with Virgin Galactic for the space company's Mach 3 transport concept. While both partnership agreements are described as preliminary, they mark the start of a potential new competitive phase in the emerging civil high-speed transport market. Although the supersonic sector struggled to gain traction over most of the past decade, it has gained significant ground in the last three years. Stimulated in part by the U.S. government-backed NASA X-59 low-sonic-boom research project, the commercial supersonics arena has been reinvigorated by several well-funded industry programs aimed at developing sustainable, low-noise designs powered by carbon-neutral synthetic fuels.
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