Concerning supersonic generally, Sabine Hossenfelder explained what this means - assuming chemical fuel.
Sabine like United Airlines cares about Sustainability - which she'll tell you. Sabine is furthermore the sort of Twitterite who posts pronouns on her profile. She/Her has taken the corporate ticket, in short. But here she/her is talking serious physics.
I am not a serious physicist. I am a very silly physicist. To that end I want a persistently-flying Mach 8 Pluto ramjet using vaporised Curium-247 for energy. (I tried melting the fuel. It didn't work.) Notion here was and is that if my ramjet is hot enough I can boost it above the SLAM altitudes. Ultimately this isn't for Earth but for Venus.
Hossenfelder deals with the chassis of the rest of the craft. I hadn't looked at this. There's a thing called Stagnation Temperature which is the temperature of the bow-shock in front of the craft. 3000 K at Mach 8. Owch!
She does point out that where the atmosphere gets more rarified, it doesn't heat up the outside as much, even if (on paper) the temperature is high. So I'm thinking that a scramjet with superPluto energies, flying higher, might not burn out the outside.
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