The NASA Advanced Air Vehicles Program , Commercial Supersonics Technology Project seeks to advance tools and techniques to make over - land supersonic flight feasible . In this study , preliminary computational results are presented for future tests in the NASA Ames 9 foot x 7 foot supersonic wind tunnel to be conducted in early 2016 . Shock - plume interactions and their effect on pressure signature are examined for six model geometries . Near- field pressure signatures are assessed using the CFD code USM3D to model the proposed test geometries in free - air . Additionally , results obtained using the commercial grid generation software Pointwise Reigistered Trademark are compared to results using VGRID , the NASA Langley Research Center in - house mesh generation program .