This ambitious but delicate project focuses on highly advanced techniques that have so far remained for the most part in the fundamental research laboratory onto problems of great industrial importance. One expects significant advances to be made both in the area of chemical vapour deposition and in the field of high velocity flight through the atmosphere. Fallout might also be expected in the pumping technology as well. The hope is to find materials and to define their surface properties such that a low pressure boundary layer would slip on them, thereby procuring less drag in the relative motion and reducing energy loss.

A very systematic approach is being used, in which practical demonstrations are being conducted in the laboratory, together with full computer simulations using complementary numerical approaches. Practical research in a Mach 10, low pressure hypersonic facility of ONERA, where many models of re-entry vehicles have been tested in the past, is but one of the important facets of this project. Although this is a high-risk research, preliminary encouraging results on boundary layer slip have already been obtained there. Noteworthy is the complementarity of this research with other work at the Institute of Thermophysics, where the same parameters are to be measured in an entirely different configuration.

The practical work in wind tunnels is complemented with molecular beam scattering experiments and with a meticulous characterisation of surface properties using a scanning tunnelling microscope and other advanced techniques, developed in different teams in INTAS and in NIS countries. This part of the program is absolutely necessary in order to establish the design rules that must be used in the future to construct a working system that takes advantage of the boundary layer slip. But it is not possible to solve the problem posed for all varieties of surfaces and gas flow conditions. That is why the new method of accommodation coefficient determination, based on a combination of advanced experiments with computational modelling to be developed present particular fundamental importance
Both progress in the gas-surface science and in the design of low pressure devices or re-entry vehicles are expected