NASA and the DLR, German Aerospace Center, are working together to create SOFIA - a Boeing 747SP aircraft modified by L3 Communications to accommodate a 2.5 meter reflecting telescope. SOFIA will be the largest airborne observatory in the world, and will make observations that are impossible for even the largest and highest of ground-based telescopes. The observatory is being developed and operated for NASA by a team of industry experts led by the Universities Space Research Association. SOFIA will be based at NASA's Ames Research Center at Moffett Federal Airfield near Mountain View, California, and is expected to begin flying in the year 2004.

SOFIA is expected to fly into the stratosphere, open the telescope cavity door, and point its telescope at the heavens three or four nights a week for at least twenty years. SOFIA will be used to study many different kinds of astronomical objects and phenomena, but some of the most interesting are:

• Star birth and death
• Formation of new solar systems
• Identification of complex molecules in space
• Planets, comets and asteroids in our solar system
• Nebulae and dust in galaxies (or, Ecosystems of galaxies)
• Black holes at the center of galaxies