Yes, It is actually. I wound up pretty far down this rabbit hole while learning about re-entry dynamics. The issue with “normal” hypersonic drag is the pressur

Yes, It is actually. I wound up pretty far down this rabbit hole while learning about re-entry dynamics. The issue with “normal” hypersonic drag is the pressure shock front is “attached” to the surface of your “plane”. Which means that location is subjected to the thermal loads induced by the shockwave compression. What they discovered back in the early days of manned space flight (and icbm development) was that there is a relationship between how pointy you make something and the detachment of that shockwave. The bi-conic space capsule shape were all familiar with from the Gemini and Apollo program pushes the hypersonic shock wave completely off the surface! This means that you have way less heat to work deal with... but that shape is ideal for re-entry, when your trying to slow down. Not for when your trying to go faster. As a result there’s been heaps of aerodynamic engineering research since the 60s on how to get similar detached shock fronts while maintaining aerodynamic control over the vehicle. One significant development was the drag reducing aerospike. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drag-reducing_aerospike https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drag-reducing_aerospike and another was the creation of a lot of a lot of plasma physics funding ;-) All jokes aside, the other outcome was the realisation that by artificially inducing a plasma at a lower temperature in front of the airframe they could both aim to control the shape, composition and temperature of the plasma while also improving aerodynamic control, and minimising plasma heating and RF blocking, radar signature, all while still benefiting from the re-entry like effect of pushing the heated shock front entirely off the airframe. There’s been a fair bit of small scale wind tunnel testing over the years, some of which is available in the NASA technical reports server archives.