Love the concept, will watch with interest to see how this develops. Great to see the weird and occasionally wacky ideas can still get funding.

I do not see a reason that this could not work but the design can not be modified to add or remove a few rows of seats without redesigning the whole airplane. Boeing saved a lot of money by using the same nose, cockpit, and fuselage components in the 727 and 737 that they designed for the 707.
I prefer a tube with a delta wing and a tail like a Mig 21. However if retractable canards like the Tu-144Ds can provide enough elevator control to allow the full use of high-lift devices on the main wings I would gladly forgo the horizontal tail wing assuming it is demonstrated that the plane can land safely without deploying the canards.

A $100,000 grant?? It looks like NASA is feeling the economic crisis too :)

I think it is a neat idea, although true the funding seems low, but times are what they are. I dont understand why it seems they just tacked the engines on top, and not incorporated them into the plane design. They could have developed a flattened dome incorporated in the structure which could rotate to provide thrust in whatever direction they wanted.

I saw this wing configuration 30 years ago. The rotating engines look novel. Hope it flies.

That thing is going to have some serious stability problems. But at least now I know how low the bar is to get research grant money from Nasa, maybe I should submit a few of my own designs?

Like the rotational idea, but how exactly do the engines spin? In the two smaller renderings, they look to be on the port side of the fuselage, but in the larger one (over the water and island) they seem to be more centered.

Congrats to the University of Miami for managing to coax money out of NASA for an academic exercise. No wonder our aero research effort is is trouble.
You can look at the supersonic capabilities all you want. The transition from subsonic to supersonic and back again is dubious and should be looked at first.
How'd you like to be flying this thing during the transition--hang onto your drinks etc!! Do you pivot the seats or is everyone flying sideways? How do you land the thing if there's a systems failure, etc, etc, etc.

It looks like some of the Gamilas ships from Space Battleship Yamato. That's the original anime series from 1974, not the 2010 movie.

You can see an animation of the SBIDIR-FW on the U of Miami website. And, if you want to hear more details, then watch 40 minutes of video presentations by Dr Gecheng Zha.
http://www6.miami.edu/acfdlab/projects/sbidir.html