Maybe, but there's no way to tell from this article.

I keep seeing these reports of how NASA and DARPA are coming up with techniques to "shape" shock waves and sonic boom, and how this is going to lead to a brave new world of overland supersonic flight. But I never see any quantification of the benefit of such techniques. The other thing that I never see is a discussion of the effect on wave drag, which is the other big factor that prevents economical supersonic flight.

As I've written before, there actually may be design solutions that can significantly reduce, and even approach elimination of both sonic boom and wave drag, but NASA and DARPA continue to refuse to consider them. Perhaps when this latest attempt doesn't pan out, they'll be willing to finally do so.

[Update a few minutes later]

Here's a Usenet discussion on the topic from a few years ago among yours truly, and several others.

This prompts me to pose the question: Does the American society (and perhaps all of humanity) reap greater benefit from NASA's aeronautics research or from its astronautics research (and space operations)?

As an aerospace engineer working on helicopters but with fixed wing and spacecraft experience, I say the former. Why then do we allow spacecraft operations (e.g., Space Shuttle, ISS, and the proposed manned missions to Mars and back to the moon) to suck up such a large share of NASA's budget?

Without addressing that question (which isn't really pertinent--it's always easy to point to a government program that's more or less effective than some other), I could argue that NASA's aeronautics program has actively held back progress in commercial supersonic flight for over three decades.

Interesting quote (by Steinn Sigurdsson) from the USENET discussion:

Sometimes bypassing the normal channels backfires badly. Anyway, odds on unsolicited proposals suck, why not respond to a code R RFP? They must have some which could be stretched to be considered relevant.

If you act as if you want to play outside the normal rules it makes people suspicious that it is because you would lose playing by the rules.
It is not necessarily fair or reasonable, just institutional self-defence mechanisms. Imagine if Goldin had to look over proposals from our friendly "fractal-robot" nut - he has too much to do and too little time as is.

Unfortunately, that poster missed the point. If you lose completely when you play by the rules, then why play by the rules?