Composites World Editor-in-Chief Scott Frances reports, “Manufacturing in general offers a multitude of trade shows — and the composites sector in particular has its fair share. For many of us, there are always those few events that we know well having attended them often.”
Full Story (Composites World – Subscription Publication)
Tag: 2025
Crew-8 Splashes Down Off the Coast of Pensacola, Florida
Spaceflight Now reports that three U.S. astronauts and a Russian cosmonaut have “returned to Earth after spending more than seven months in space.” Crew-8 includes NASA astronauts Matthew Dominick, Michael Barratt, and Jeanette Epps, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Alexander Grebenkin.
Full Story (Spaceflight Now)
Video
NASA’s SpaceX Crew-8 Re-entry and Splashdown
(NASA; YouTube)
SpaceX Falcon 9 Launches Two Private Moon Landers at Once
The New York Times reports, “A space twofer took place early Wednesday morning — two lunar missions for the price of one rocket launch. A SpaceX Falcon 9 lifted off from the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida at 1:11 a.m. Eastern time, carrying the Blue Ghost lander built by Firefly Aerospace of Austin, Texas, and the Resilience lander from Ispace of Japan.”
Full Story (The New York Times – Subscription Publication)
Video
SpaceX Falcon 9 Launches Firefly Blue Ghost & HAKUTO-R M2 “Resilience” (Launch at 00:56:42 mark)
(NASASpaceflight; YouTube)
Latest Boom Supersonic Test Paves Way for 1st Mach 1 Flight
Aerotime reports Boom Supersonic is “determining whether a 12th test flight of its XB-1 demonstrator is needed before its first attempt at breaking the speed barrier. On January 10, 2025, XB-1 reached speeds of Mach 0.95 during a 44-minute flight over the Mojave Desert with Chief Test Pilot Tristan ‘Geppetto’ Brandenburg at the controls.”
Full Story (Aerotime)
NASA Calls for Continuous American ‘Heartbeat’ in LEO
New Strategy for Sustaining U.S. Presence in Low Earth Orbit Announced
By Anne Wainscott-Sargent, AIAA Communications Team
ORLANDO, Fla. – When NASA retires the International Space Station by the end of 2031, the space agency intends for the United States to not just have capability in microgravity, but to have a continuous “heartbeat” in low Earth orbit, emphasized NASA Associate Administrator Jim Free as he unveiled NASA’s Low Earth Orbit (LEO) Microgravity Strategy during the 2025 AIAA SciTech Forum in Orlando.
The announcement follows last month’s release of NASA’s publication of its final LEO goals and objectives, which inform its long-term strategy to advance microgravity science, technology, and exploration. The framework aims to sustain human presence in orbit, drive economic growth, and strengthen international partnerships.
“A continuous heartbeat is what we have had today [with the ISS] for 24 years – a true, unbroken, continuous presence, where there’s always a person living and working in space,” said Free. “It’s written in US policy. It affects our national posture. Truthfully, if we don’t have continuous heartbeat, we risk not being the partner of choice for our international partners. We risk ceding low Earth orbit to others.”
Speaking to a global gathering of 6,000+ engineers and other technical aerospace leaders from commercial firms, government and academia, Free outlined NASA’s strategy for ensuring this continued presence, even as the agency prepares to support the transition of LEO.
Free, an Ohio native who began his NASA career in 1990 as a propulsion engineer at Goddard Space Flight Center, was inducted as a new AIAA Associate Fellow this year. He discussed the role of the ISS as a “beacon of what humanity can do when we work together.”
“For over 24 years, the ISS has allowed us to partner and continuously live and work off the planet,” said Free. “Its value goes beyond symbolism. It has been a cornerstone of our human space flight program…laying the foundation for everything we’re building toward today.”
To date, the ISS has hosted nearly 4,000 research and educational investigations from over 100 countries.
He cited examples of research on the ISS that has driven better understanding of how the human body reacts to being in space for long time periods as well as biopharma breakthroughs such as protein crystal growth that has improved the formulation of cancer drugs. One investigation with Merck has resulted in better ways to deliver cancer drugs using an injection instead of an IV.
NASA’s LEO strategy remains integral to its broader ambitions for deep space exploration. The microgravity environment in LEO offers a cost-effective, easily accessible proving ground for technologies and research necessary for human missions to explore the solar system.
As part of its LEO sustainment strategy, NASA will award contracts through the agency’s in-space production applications to support commercial development of new and promising technologies for in space manufacturing of advanced materials and products for use on Earth, as well as semiconductor materials and optical fiber production. According to Free, a key need from industry partners is better environmental control and life support systems on spacecraft or habitats.
“With most of the journey to Moon and Mars occurring in microgravity, the objectives give the opportunity to continue vital human research, test future exploration systems, and retain the critical skills needed to operate in the microgravity environment,” stated NASA publicly in late December.
NASA needs the United States to continually operate in LEO as it launches long-duration trips as a warm-up to Mars, and to ensure there are affordable and frequent commercial transport options to support the traffic to and from low Earth orbit. The agency plans to issue a second RFP this June for its Commercial Low Earth Orbit Development Program, designed to support the development of commercially owned and operated LEO destinations from which NASA, along with other customers, can purchase services and stimulate the growth of commercial activities in LEO.
“Our primary need is to mitigate risk for future trips to Mars with long duration flights in LEO of six months to a year. With the time we have left on ISS, we won’t have a statistically significant population of six-to-12-month missions to properly understand the risks of going to and returning from Mars,” he told AIAA SciTech Forum attendees.
The final framework includes 13 goals and 44 objectives across seven key areas: commercial low Earth orbit infrastructure, operations, science, research and technology development for exploration, international cooperation, workforce development and STEM engagement, and, public engagement.
Free said a key component of developing the strategy was weighing input from industry partners, whose feedback has served as “a cornerstone of the strategy.” NASA received 1,800 pieces of input during two workshops hosted in the UK and in Washington, D.C. last year.
“The comments we got were incredibly helpful,” said Free, who indicated the feedback validated the strategy. One piece of input from European space partners was the desire for faster scientific return, and as a result, “we added a new goal and objective around rapid LEO science to help us increase the pace of research.”
The input also led to a new objective for public engagement focused on collaborating NASA’s communication efforts to reach new audiences.
The new LEO strategy supports the United States’ national posture, or global standing as a leader in space.
During the Q&A, Free touched on a variety of topics, including NASA’s commitment to going to the moon, the agency’s digital engineering approach, the most exciting impact of AI on NASA’s work, and advice to AIAA’s technical committees and the new generation of aerospace workers.
He said AIAA remains an invaluable partner to NASA and its technical committee a valuable source of free-flowing discussions and ideas. He urged AIAA members to give feedback on the second draft RFP when it comes out.
“We need the feedback so the Commercial LEO Destinations program can be better,” he said.
Free also reiterated how important it is for the United States to continue to lead in space.
“If you try and think about a world where we do not lead in space – I have not experienced that in my lifetime, and I don’t want to,” he concluded.
Following the presentation, Karen Barker, an AIAA member since 1993, called NASA’s strategy for a sustained presence in LEO “very encouraging.”
“He explained why LEO is so important for us – a pillar on which to build to go other places. It’s extremely important that we keep our heartbeat in LEO,” she said, adding that she was pleased how open NASA is to getting feedback from industry, both on the LEO strategy and the upcoming RFP.
“It’s so important for us as a community to do that,” said Barker, CEO of Alabama-based BRAHE Corporation, a consulting firm that serves defense and aerospace clients.
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Read NASA’s vision for the next generation of human presence in low Earth orbit and how the agency envisions achieving this future.
Tackling the Big Questions
‘We must continue to do the really hard things,’ said JPL’s Director in the 2025 AIAA SciTech Forum’s opening plenary session
By Anne Wainscott-Sargent, AIAA Communications Team
ORLANDO, Fla.– The 10th and only female director of NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) opened the 2025 AIAA SciTech Forum Monday, highlighting the hard questions that JPL answers in its unique role as a federally funded R&D center operated by CalTech for NASA.
Laurie Leshin, who has been at the helm of JPL since 2022, shared how JPL’s work focuses on answering three fundamental questions: “What is our destiny on Earth?”, “Are we alone?”, and “How do we lead the future?”
She implored the audience to continue striving for knowledge. “If I have one message for you in this time of change in our country, it is we must continue to do the really hard things,” she said. “Our job as a nation in order to lead is not to do what’s easy…or what you can predict exactly how it’s going to go…Our job is to do the things that are ridiculously hard.”
Understanding Earth
Leshin pointed out that while JPL is most known for its work in space exploration, it also brings decades of history contributing to understanding Earth using cutting-edge space-based radars capable of measuring pollution, ocean rise, and urban heat, among other items critical to understanding climate change and predicting natural disasters. One important focus is identifying super emitters of methane, an odorless gas invisible to the naked eye that is responsible for 30–40% of global warming (due to its structure, methane traps more heat in the atmosphere per molecule than carbon dioxide, making it 80 times more harmful than CO2 for 20 years after its release). Runaway methane leaks in pipelines cost oil and gas companies $1 billion a year, she noted. Methane is now visible from orbit thanks to the EMIT tool attached to the International Space Station.
JPL also is finding and mapping heat islands in big cities such as Los Angeles and Houston, where concrete jungles are adding to the heat issue. Insights from the Ecosystem Spaceborne Thermal Radiometer Experiment on Space Station, or ECOSTRESS mission, is helping cities find hot spots. It has led one neighborhood in Los Angeles to use a reflective coating on streets to lower one street’s temperatures by up to 4 degrees Fahrenheit, leading to a noticeably cooler environment for residents.
Leshin said JPL researchers are working with global partners to map Earth’s water to better understand how rivers and lakes respond to flooding. In a first-ever collaboration with the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), JPL will launch the NISAR Earth-observation radar this spring that will help view changes to the Earth’s surface so people can prepare for volcanoes, earthquakes, and landslides. According to Leshin, it will provide “unprecedented eyes on Earth.”
Finding Proof of Life Beyond Earth
In exploring the question of “Are we alone?” Leshin observed, “In some ways I like to say we are in a space race with ourselves in trying to answer this question.”
There’s a race to find evidence of life beyond Earth, and the big questions is where will the evidence come from — Mars, the moons of Jupiter or Saturn, or an exoplanet?
JPL is tackling this quest across all those avenues and has made significant inroads over the last few decades studying the surface of Mars. Missions have gone from larger ground-based rovers to a new way of exploring the Red Planet from the air.
“Today we are there with Perseverance,” said Leshin, noting that the rover recently collected “incredible samples” from a rock that points to ancient life on Mars. The rover’s instruments detected organic compounds within the rock, which are essential to all known life. These rocks and other samples are housed in tubes inside Perseverance, but how and when they will find their way back to Earth for study is a big question. “Landing on Mars is really stupid hard,” she added.
Rethinking Mars’ Sample Return
JPL has spent significant time rethinking how it does Mars sample return. NASA is discussing the path forward with media on Tuesday, 7 January. A 2023 assessment indicated that returning Mars samples would take until 2040 at a price tag of $11 billion. JPL’s concept would cut the cost in half and the timeline to a decade. Leshin said the approach will include heavy industry collaboration to get these rocks back. NASA’s proposal will use the stacking technology that has successfully landed the last two rovers on Mars to get a big lander with a rocket on board down to the surface of Mars, load it with the sample tubes and returning it to Earth safely. She also indicated that she’s very open to leveraging SpaceX’s Starship vehicle to get the lander to the Red Planet, which wouldn’t occur for another decade at the earliest, she stated, adding that partners such as the European Space Agency will play a key role in getting the samples home.
Another exciting avenue for investigating evidence of life beyond Earth is through ocean worlds. Two months ago, JPL launched the Europa Clipper probe to Europa, a moon of Jupiter. “It’s doing great. It’s flying beautifully,” said Leshin, noting that it will fly by Mars on 1 March, and will come back to Earth before it heads to Jupiter, where it is expected to arrive in 2030.
“We think there are two Earth oceans worth of liquid water on Europa,” she added, explaining that the ingredients for life will likely be present beneath those oceans.
“One of the challenges with deep space exploration is you have to be patient,” said Leshin, who described the Europa effort as “a generational quest.” She noted the wait is worth it because “the science will be incredible.”
JPL also sees promise in exoplanets – deploying transit spectroscopy as one of the lab’s tools to discover distant planets that are so far away that they can only be detected through the brightness of an individual star. To date, NASA has found over 5,500 exoplanets.
The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, scheduled to launch in October 2026, will provide an even wider of view of these planets and other galaxies.
JPL also is investing in autonomous capabilities and the next generation of robotics. One such innovation is EELS (Exobiology Extant Life Surveyor), a 14-foot snake-like robot. JPL is already testing a prototype, which is winding down frozen crevasses on Earth. “It’s got to be smart enough to make its own decisions,” she noted, adding that the JPL team had to innovate around the form factor as well as the avionics and how it works and “thinks.”
Leading the Future
In closing, Leshin said the work of JPL is focused on driving humanity forward through the forefront of technology. “We’re incredibly proud of the work we do. And we can answer the biggest, hardest questions if we dare mighty things together.”
Reaction to Leshin’s lecture was well received by attendees.
“It was a nice flyover of the work they do at JPL,” said Egbert Hood, an aerospace engineer at Lockheed Martin Aeronautics in Fort Worth, Texas. “It was interesting to hear of all the missions they have ongoing – and some for them had nothing to do with landing on a moon or planet, it was just exploration of space. It was good to get a new awareness of JPL.”
Amanda Simpson, CEO, Third Segment, expressed excitement for Leshin’s message. “We have to do the hard things! It brought to mind President Kennedy’s moon speech. Space is hard. If we only concentrate on doing the easy things then we’re not actually making any progress. The way we treat going off our planet tells us so much about ourselves. And to do that, we must do the things that are hard. To do that together and to challenge ourselves – those are the keys that are going to make the difference for the future. Inspiring the future is so critical for keeping this industry, this ecosystem in aerospace, moving forward to entice and inspire the future generations.”
CJ Negrete, an undergraduate student at Cal Poly Pomona in Los Angeles, previously interned at JPL, where she worked to increase the technology readiness level of oscillating heat pipe (OHP) technology, commonly used in high-heat density electronics and exoplanet detection. She credited Leshin’s presence as a plenary speaker as one reason she decided to attend the forum, saying that having a woman at the helm of JPL “is brand new and unheard of.”
“Dr. Leshin is leading the pack of what women are more than capable of doing in the industry and we have to come and support her,” she said.
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Hypersonics Chief Details Journey of Building the World’s Most Speed-Defying Aircraft
2025 Durand Lecturer Delves into the History and Future Prospects of Supersonic Systems
By Anne Wainscott-Sargent, AIAA Communications Team
ORLANDO, Fla.– Kevin Bowcutt has spent over four decades advancing the field of hypersonic flight, notable for achieving speeds greater than five times the speed of sound, or faster than Mach 5.
As this year’s recipient of the AIAA Durand Lectureship for Public Service, Bowcutt, who serves as principal senior technical fellow and chief scientist of Hypersonics at The Boeing Company, shared how far hypersonic flight capabilities have come from its origins after World War II at the 2025 AIAA SciTech Forum in Orlando.
The age of hypersonics began almost 76 years ago. In 1949, the U.S. Army took a captured German V2 rocket and added a WAC Corporal second stage to the top before launching it into the atmosphere from White Sands Proving Grounds. The experimental rocket achieved Mach 7 or 8, depending on the atmospheric temperature at the point of entry, noted Bowcutt.
Over the next 50 years, hypersonics was relegated to the domain of rocket-propelled systems, with both NASA’s Apollo space capsule and later the Space Shuttle achieving hypersonic speeds, with the capsule reaching Mach 37, or almost 25,000 miles per hour, on its return from the moon.
Bowcutt interspersed personal anecdotes of his own journey in the field while highlighting the development challenges of hypersonic systems. He emerged on the scene in 1984 as a doctoral student at the University of Maryland. Under the tutelage of John Anderson Jr., a leading authority on hypersonics and the former professor emeritus in the university’s Department of Aerospace Engineering, Bowcutt began his first foray into advancing the field of hypersonics. His task: to take rudimentary forms of parametric geometry generation, computational fluid dynamics, and mathematical optimization to find complex curved aircraft shapes that rode on their own shock waves and performed better than the state of the art.
“It worked. I found shapes that performed quite a bit better,” he shared.
In February 1986, following the Challenger disaster, President Reagan announced the X-30 National Aero-Space Plane program. Bowcutt spent seven years on the effort, helping design a horizontal takeoff and landing aircraft that could fly all the way into orbit.
“It was exciting. The thought of doing this as a 25-year-old at the time was just thrilling,” he recalled. “We discovered a lot of things. One of them was a single stage orbit is not possible. It wasn’t then and it still isn’t today. We learned how to design air-breathing hypersonic vehicles. What we learned about scramjet (supersonic combustion ramjet) engines in this program eventually flew on X-43A by NASA,” he recalled.
Today, that same enthusiasm is evident in Bowcutt, who has been named an AIAA Fellow, a Fellow of the Royal Aeronautical Society, and a member of the National Academy of Engineering.
“I know from my 40 years of experience that hypersonic vehicle design is really fun and interesting because it’s really hard and very challenging,” he explained.
“One of the things we want to do is get from point A to point B in the world faster than we currently can at about Mach 0.8,” he added.
Bowcutt detailed the multitude of challenges of hypersonic aircraft design, including the balancing act of navigating extreme aerodynamic heating and temperature spikes, which results in the introduction of different materials, notably high-temperature metals and ceramics. But those materials are not necessarily easy to build or affordable to buy, he noted.
The hypersonics pioneer also described both the advantages and challenges of different hypersonic systems, explaining the effects of temperature, propellant type, and size of an engine that could affect drag and other performance issues on the aircraft. Often solving one challenge created another.
“It’s challenging to integrate a relatively larger engine on an airframe,” said Bowcutt to illustrate one common difficulty with these systems. “These vehicles must be highly integrated to make the whole system work together – every component, every discipline, the aerodynamics, propulsion, thermal protection, the structures – are all interrelated and interact with each other. You’re operating on relatively small margins.”
A positive development, he noted, was the emergence of multidisciplinary design optimization, developed over the last 25 to 30 years, which he credits with helping hypersonic system designers optimize their designs through modeling tools to help solve integration challenges faster.
The idea of air-breathing hypersonic flight – where the plane gleans oxygen for combustion from the air, just as conventional jets do – began in 1958 when a NACA researcher came up with this idea, “Could we burn fuel in a supersonic air stream?”
Bowcutt said it took five decades to prove the technology. Not carrying oxygen on board for fueling the engine significantly reduced the vehicle’s size and weight. In 2004, NASA flew the X-43A with Boeing support, and proved the aircraft could generate positive net thrust with a scramjet propulsion system. It set several airspeed records for jet aircraft. At the time, it was the fastest jet-powered aircraft on record at approximately Mach 9.6.
In the 2010–2013 timeframe, the Boeing X-51 Waverider, an uncrewed research scramjet experimental aircraft for hypersonic flight, was successfully flown by the Air Force with participation of DARPA, proving that air-breathing hypersonics could be practical.
“For good or bad, we now have air-breathing cruise missiles that fly at hypersonic speed,” said Bowcutt, adding that the industry now seeks to achieve hypersonic reusable flight in the form of point-to-point travel and access to space using aircraft flight approaches.
During the Q&A, Bowcutt was asked if he thought passenger hypersonic aircraft was feasible.
He indicated yes, noting that Boeing in 2018 began work on designs for an aircraft that could fly people globally at hypersonic speeds.
“I had the opportunity to explore the design, looking at the future possibility. We innovated a number of things that suggested to us that it was at least technically feasible. It’s another thing to look at the market and the economics,” Bowcutt said.
Environmental concerns, he added, could be the biggest hurdle, one example being concerns about airport noise since supersonic aircraft engines use small fans, which result in higher jet noise.
Also, engine emissions are another issue. “When you fly at 40,000 feet, using sustainable fuels allow carbon dioxide to be recycled in the bio-environment. If you fly at 100,000 feet, CO2 doesn’t cycle very quickly. Not only that, water is a greenhouse gas as well as CO2 and water and nitric oxide both destroy atmospheric ozone. So, there’s some interesting challenges we still have to conquer.”
A final question to Bowcutt was what has he learned from the successes and failures he has experienced in his career.
“I tend to not be risk averse. I tend to like to push the boundary,” he responded. “When you’re pushing the edge of the envelope, you just have to know that not everything is going to go perfect. But the thing I find thrilling is what you learn from it. That’s what makes life exciting – to continue to learn, to grow, to understand the world around us, and how to manage and tackle it.”
Following the talk, Dilip Srinivas Sundaram, associate professor at the Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar, called Bowcutt’s presentation “very interesting. …I don’t think prior to this lecture I had a good understanding of the complexity of hypersonics flight. This talk gave me a sense of how difficult it is. It may take another 40 years to realize hypersonic flight.”
“I think Dr. Bowcutt gave a very comprehensive story of hypersonics from where it began and even new details that a common person might not know like the U.S. taking an old missile, which started the journey of the U.S. into hypersonics,” added Alex Cintron, a member of the AIAA High Speed Air Breathing Propulsion Technical Committee who is pursuing a master’s in aerospace engineering from the University of Florida in Gainesville.
“One of my goals is to go into hypersonics,” he added, after getting a photo with Bowcutt on stage.
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USAF Science & Technology Chief: New Urgency to Embrace Digital Transformation to Strengthen the Force’s Resiliency and Ability to Compete Against Near-Peer Rivals
By Anne Wainscott-Sargent, AIAA Communications Team
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ORLANDO, Fla. – The ability to field critical capabilities in the U.S. Air Force (USAF) has never been more urgent, a senior Air Force official told AIAA SciTech Forum attendees.
“We are in competition with near-competitive nations and China in particular is now on par to deliver new capabilities in seven years or less,” said Kristen Baldwin, deputy assistant secretary of the Air Force.
She noted that in comparison, USAF programs take an average of 16 years to deliver new capability. “We see digital transformation as a true disruptive business practice that we can bring to bear. We have to invest now – we have to invest in new capabilities.”
Baldwin, speaking via Zoom on the second day of the forum, oversees a $5 billion budget across multiple research sites worldwide, focusing on digital engineering, cyber resiliency, and the service’s science and technology portfolio.
She described the Air Force’s digital materiel management approach, which includes six key initiatives to enhance data security, training, and IT infrastructure. Baldwin also outlined the integration of digital strategies across the Air Force and Space Force, including putting the government’s Modular Open Systems Architecture (MOSA) and other government reference architectures as requirements in contracts. MOSA is the cornerstone of new and legacy platforms and weapons.
Baldwin also mentioned the five pillars of the Air Force’s engineering strategy that has been embraced by U.S. allies, particularly in the UK and Australia. Her team’s Digital Materiel Management (DMM) approach has led to both schedule acceleration and technology improvements.
She stressed the need for continuous engagement with industry partners and international collaborations to drive digital transformation forward. The USAF has created two digital consortia – the Industry Association Consortium (IAC) and the Digital Acceleration Consortium (DAC). The IAC provides an open collaborative opportunity for the defense industrial base to help identify barriers and develop solutions associated with the rapid, full-scale adoption of DMM. The DAC recommends solutions modernizing IT infrastructure, compatible Integrated Digital Environments, secure access to data, and common data standards, policy, and contracting language.
During the Q&A, Baldwin agreed that as government goes more digital, it will be more vulnerable to cyber attacks.
“We have to implement that cyber resilience to really manage our data. We can’t rely on just network and perimeter defense. We’ve got to be able to implement and manage that security of our data, so these environments we’re building and the way we classify that data is a key foundational element of our digital transformation approach. We have to be agile in the way we can maneuver to respond to cyber threats. We have to be continuously aware and adapt,” she said.
The final question ended on a fun note: What did Baldwin consider the most feasible technological innovation from the Star Wars universe that could be developed within the next 50 years, and what challenges would engineers and scientists face in making it a reality?
“I love the idea of robotics and image holograms. The advancement of robotics as well as holograms can really help to transform the way that we support our forces. When we think of this urgency in national security, we’re going to find ourselves in situations where we are not going to have the ability to wait for delivery of future capability. We’ll have to reset and regroup in place.”
Responding to Baldwin’s presentation, Terry Hill, digital engineering program manager for NASA in Washington, D.C., said, “It’s good to hear the Air Force’s plan. Their approach to MOSA and their commitment to moving to a digital ecosystem is refreshing because that’s where NASA is wanting to go and we’re trying to work across agencies to best leverage all our different investments.”
Hill added that the Air Force’s emphasis on cybersecurity also benefits civil agencies like NASA. “Focusing on different areas and sharing solutions is definitely the way forward,” he said.
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ORNL: Troubleshooting Turbulence – the Next ‘Killer App’ for Exascale Supercomputing?
By Anne Wainscott-Sargent, AIAA Communications Team
ORLANDO, Fla. – The aerospace community got a rare look at the capabilities and processing might of the world’s first exascale supercomputer during a plenary session at the 2025 AIAA SciTech Forum.
Taking the stage in Orlando, Bronson Messer II, director of science for the Leadership Computing Facility at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in eastern Tennessee, admitted that while he is an astrophysicist, not an engineer, he shares common interests with the AIAA community: namely, solving tough problems in a world where the pace of technology advances continues to slow – even as the need for smarter, more advanced problem-solving is accelerating.
“I’ve heard throughout my career that Moore’s Law is dead. It’s finally actually true. This…doubling of performance…every 18 months has hit the end of the road,” he explained.
Messer said Moore’s Law’s demise requires scientists to think about how they’re going to reformulate problems and solve them in a much different way. And one of the biggest technical challenges facing the aerospace engineering community is turbulence.
“Turbulence may be the killer app for exascale computers,” Messer said.
Turbulence has a complex and unpredictable nature, making it difficult to accurately model and predict. That’s especially true for “clear-air turbulence,” which is invisible to radar. A 2023 study found that aircraft turbulence soared by up to 55% and some regions, including North America, the north Atlantic, and Europe, are set to experience several hundred percent more turbulence in the coming decade.
Enter Frontier, ORNL’s exascale supercomputer, which became operational in 2022 with 100 times the computing power found in typical universities, labs, or industrial environments. It can process billions upon billions of operations per second. Frontier’s processing speed is so powerful, it would take every person on Earth combined more than four years to do what the supercomputer can in one second.
“Frontier has more in common with the Hubble Space Telescope or the Large Hadron Collider (a particle accelerator) than with your laptop,” Messer emphasized.
Messer shared how GE Aerospace did one of the largest turbulence simulations ever attempted to study ways to negate the effect of turbulence on commercial flights. NASA is leveraging Frontier to understand the role of turbulence in flying and landing on Mars.
Concluding his talk, Messer invited proposals year-round from the audience to get time on the Frontier system, which is open to U.S. and most global researchers with some exceptions. He cautioned that only projects with the right level of computing complexity will benefit from exascale computing.
During the Q&A he said that his team has concluded an RFP for Discovery, the next exascale supercomputer that will replace Frontier.
When asked about exascale computing’s role in quantum computing, Messer said, “I’m a quantum advocate. My suspicion is over the next decade quantum computing will make the biggest impact on what I would call quantum problems – problems like computational chemistry, which may have an impact on things like aerospace.” He said there is a small team at ONRL looking at doing compressible hydrodynamics using quantum computing.
“I think the ability to do that on a very large scale is a way off,” he concluded.
“It was a very interesting talk,” said forum attendee Mike Ferguson, a flight test engineer at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab in Maryland. “I definitely think there are problems at our lab that could use that kind of computing infrastructure, but it would take some investigating and some actual deep thinking from all of us to figure that out.”
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Sustainable Aviation Fuels and Advanced Propulsion Tech Will Help Industry Achieve Net Zero Goals by 2050
By Anne Wainscott-Sargent, AIAA Communications Team
ORLANDO, Fla. – An expert panel composed of three top aviation original equipment manufacturers (OEM), NASA, and the U.S. Department of Energy tackled how propulsion technology will drive the industry to achieve its goals for net zero carbon emissions by 2050 during the 2025 AIAA SciTech Forum.
Panelists emphasized fleet renewal, sustainable aviation fuels, and advanced propulsion technologies to help the industry achieve its carbon-mitigation goals.
“Aerospace is one of the hardest sectors to decarbonize,” noted Peter de Bock, program director for the Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E).
Organized similarly to DARPA, ARPA-E advances high-potential, high-impact energy technologies that are too early for private-sector investment. ARPA-E awardees are unique because they are developing entirely new ways to generate, store, and use energy.
“We take high-risk bets on the next generation of technology. What are things that the world would need 10 years from now?”
His agency is focusing closely on the transportation sector, which leads emissions over power generation, said de Bock, who predicts that the industry will get more scrutiny starting in 2030 and through the next decade.
“We see multiple modalities to be the path to the future. Anything you can do fully electric… can push the efficiency to 75 or 80%. That’s a big deal. It’s extremely hard but worth the try.”
ARPA-E supports innovative technologies across the spectrum, including high-temperature alloys, atmospheric sensors, and sustainable aviation fuel production.
Low-hanging fruit for several aviation engine builders centers on technology improvements that drive fuel efficiency given how much fuel costs airlines’ bottom lines.
More Efficient Propulsion
Michael Winter, chief science officer at RTX, and senior fellow of Advanced Technology at Pratt & Whitney, said 30–40% of the cost of running an airline and a modern airport is fuel.
“Propulsion efficiency really comes down to the fan or propulsor and the bypass in the nozzle,” he said.
Pratt & Whitney in 2016 introduced a geared-fan architecture that has enabled a 16% improvement in fuel efficiency, noted Winter. Its geared turbofan (GTF) engine technology uses a specially designed fan that rotates at a slower speed while still achieving high bypass ratios, leading to significant fuel savings and reduced noise emissions compared to previous engine designs.
“As we look to the future, we see opportunities for greater efficiency – number one, going to higher thermal efficiency in engines, which over the last 85 years has improved about 400%.” Winter added that higher thermal efficiency creates higher temperatures requiring new material systems and better cooling.
Saving Fuel with Propulsive Technology
On the propulsion technology front, GE Aerospace is embracing open fan technology. While not a new technology, it has matured over the last decade and a half, allowing it to be “as fast as a jet, [quiet], and 20% more efficient than today’s engines,” according to a recent GE Aerospace blog post.
GE Aerospace recently was awarded 840,000 hours on the Frontier supercomputer through the agency’s INCITE program. INCITE is a highly competitive program that supports the world’s most computationally intensive projects. Frontier was introduced in depth at another session during the forum by Bronson Messer II, director of science for the Leadership Computing Facility at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). (Read more on Frontier here.)
In November, the company announced a new project with Boeing, NASA, and ORNL to model the integration of an open fan engine design with an airplane.
UK-based Rolls-Royce is pursuing continuous improvement in its gas turbine and power systems, including materials, cooling, and cycle efficiencies. Steve Wellborn, the company’s senior fellow, said enhanced integration at the platform level will be critical for achieving these breakthroughs in fuel efficiency.
Embracing Whole-System Integration
Wellborn added that he sees a lot of manufacturing, digital, and service technologies coming together. “You’re no longer just bolting engines onto an aircraft; you have to think of the whole system together.”
“At the forefront of this has to be safety,” he said.
Kathleen Mondino, manager of RISE Technology Maturation at GE Aerospace, also considers integration a critical trend. She predicts the future will be one that leverages open fan technology – “that means viewing the engine and aircraft together as one system, which hasn’t been done before.”
Filling Capability Gaps
NASA Glenn Research Center provides avionics providers with the tools and capabilities for optimization and simulation they need when looking at new architectures.
“We also look at where there might be a gap where there are lower technology readiness levels and do some work in that,” said Joseph Connolly, deputy for Electrified Aircraft Propulsion Integration at NASA Glenn Research Center.
NASA is supporting several papers at the forum looking at concepts for hybrid-electric configuration with distribution propulsion to see what benefits the technologies might offer industry partners in the future.
Connolly also shared details on NASA’s work on the Electrified Powertrain Flight Demonstration project, involving GE Aerospace and magniX, to develop a megawatt-class powertrain for commercial aircraft by the 2030s. The project includes a parallel hybrid architecture for a Saab 340 and a regional turboprop demonstrator for a Dash 7.
NASA’s efforts focus on addressing key barriers in electrification, including high voltage at altitude and battery system performance.
Investing in Sustainable Fuels
Sustainable fuels are a big area of investment across the OEM community. “We see huge opportunities in hydrogen,” said Winter, citing the new HySIITE (Hydrogen, Steam Injected Intercooled Turbine Engine) concept, shown to be 35% more efficient while reducing oxides of nitrogen by 99.3% and recapturing one gallon of water every three seconds.
Capitalizing on Coming Fleet Renewals
Moving aircraft to more efficient propulsion will likely occur at the end of this decade, said Mondino.
“GE Aerospace is laser focused on the narrow-body market,” she said, adding that those aircraft fleets are up for renewal toward the end of this decade or at the beginning of the next.
She emphasized that making this transition will require “a big step change” in how the OEM market approaches product innovation and problem-solving.
“You’ve got to break out of the box that you’re currently in,” she said.
SpaceX Falcon 9 Launches 21 More Starlink Satellites from Kennedy Space Center
Spaceflight Now reports, “SpaceX kicked off Wednesday with the launch of a batch of 21 Starlink satellites, heading to low Earth orbit. Among those were 13 satellites equipped to provide text and data cellphone service. Liftoff of the Falcon 9 rocket from Launch Complex 39A (LC-39A) at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center happened at 10:27 a.m. EST (1527 UTC).”
Full Story (Spaceflight Now)
Video
SpaceX Falcon 9 launches 21 more Starlink satellites from Kennedy Space Center (Launch at 01:00:56 mark)
(Spaceflight Now; YouTube)
SpaceX Falcon 9 Launches on First Dedicated Starlink Mission of 2025
Spaceflight Now reports, “SpaceX completed its first Starlink mission of the year on the first Monday of 2025. Onboard the Starlink 6-71 mission were 24 V2 Mini satellites headed to low Earth orbit. Liftoff of the Falcon 9 rocket from Space Launch Complex 40 (SLC-40) at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station happened at 3:43 p.m. EST (2043 UTC), which was the end of the available three-hour window.”
Full Story (Spaceflight Now)
Video
SpaceX Falcon 9 launches 24 Starlink satellites from Cape Canaveral at 3:43 p.m. EST, January 6. (Launch at 01:01:06 mark)
(Spaceflight Now; YouTube)
U.S. Rocket Launchpads Expecting Record Demand
The Wall Street Journal reports, “SpaceX and other rocket companies are planning to increase flights in the years ahead as they ferry their own satellites or payloads for other customers to space. The problem: Only three sites in Florida and California handle most U.S. rocket launches, and those locations are expected to become increasingly congested as companies and regulators schedule more missions.”
Full Story (Wall Street Journal – Subscription Publication)
NASA’s Parker Solar Probe Makes Record-Breaking Approach to the Sun, Sends Back 1st Detailed Update
SPACE reports, “NASA’s Parker Solar Probe sent home its first detailed telemetry data soon after its record-breaking closest-ever approach to the sun. On Wednesday (Jan. 1), mission control at Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland began receiving the Parker Solar Probe’s first telemetry — or housekeeping data — that confirms Parker’s systems and science instruments are ‘healthy and operating normally’ after its historic rendezvous with the sun, NASA shared in an update on Thursday (Jan. 2).”
Full Story (SPACE)
Silent Barker Spacecraft Expected to Begin Operation in 2025
Aviation Week reports, “The first spacecraft from a joint U.S. Space Force and National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) program to conduct space situational awareness are close to entering operation next year. The Silent Barker spacecraft were launched Sept. 10, 2023, aboard a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. Since then, the satellites have been undergoing the test-and-checkout phase, which is nearing completion, U.S. Space Command chief Gen. Stephen Whiting told reporters Dec. 11.”
Full Story (Aviation Week)
Starliner Crew May Return Home with SpaceX in 2025
The New York Times reports that for weeks, NASA has downplayed problems experienced by Starliner, but on Wednesday, NASA officials admitted that the issues might be more serious than first thought and that the astronauts might not return on the Boeing vehicle. “The agency is exploring a backup option for the astronauts, Suni Wiliams and Butch Wilmore, to instead hitch a ride back to Earth on a spacecraft built by Boeing’s competitor SpaceX. The astronauts’ stay in orbit, which was to be as short as eight days, could be extended into next year.”
Full Story (New York Times)
Boeing CEO Anticipates Max 7 and 10 Certification in First Half of 2025
FlightGlobal reports, “Boeing chief executive David Calhoun thinks the company could have its 737 Max 7 and Max 10 certificated by the Federal Aviation Administration in the first half of 2025, while cautioning that the regulator will determine ultimate timing. Calhoun laid out the timeframe on 31 July, saying Boeing has made progress in redesigning the types’ engine anti-ice system, which has been holding up the certifications.”
Full Story (FlightGlobal)
AIAA Statement on Confirmation of the Honorable Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
February 5, 2025 – Reston, Va. – The American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) CEO Clay Mowry made the following statement:
“On behalf of the Institute’s nearly 30,000 professional members and nearly 100 corporate members, I would like to congratulate Pete Hegseth on his confirmation as the Secretary of Defense. As the world’s largest aerospace professional society, AIAA is committed to advancing the technologies and innovations that support our warfighters and ensure the security of the United States and its allies. AIAA looks forward to working with Secretary Hegseth and his team to support policies and initiatives that foster innovation, enhance readiness, and maintain the U.S. military’s technological superiority.”
Media Contact: Rebecca Gray, [email protected], 804-397-5270 cell
About AIAA
The American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) is the world’s largest aerospace technical society. With nearly 30,000 individual members from 91 countries, and 100 corporate members, AIAA brings together industry, academia, and government to advance engineering and science in aviation, space, and defense. For more information, visit aiaa.org, and follow AIAA on X/Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram.
SpaceX and Vast Issue RFP for Science Experiments on Crew Dragon and Haven-1 Space Station
SPACE reports, “Vast Space is scheduled to launch the Haven-1 space station to orbit this August. The single-module station will launch on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, to be followed in short order by the launch of a SpaceX Crew Dragon that will ferry a small number of astronauts to temporarily inhabit that station. Now, SpaceX and Vast have issued a joint request for proposals on just what to do onboard once Haven-1 is in low-Earth orbit (LEO).”
Full Story (SPACE)
Supply Chain and Labor Challenges Continue in High-Demand Commercial Market Forecast
Aviation Week reports, “Demand is surging across commercial aviation even as an imbalance persists between supply and demand, according to the Aviation Week Network 2025 Commercial Fleet & MRO Forecast presented at the Aero Engines Americas conference on Jan. 28. Hamstrung by supply chain and labor challenges, deliveries by major aircraft OEMs in the fourth quarter of 2024 were down 17% over 2023 and 20% over 2019. Overall, in 2024, deliveries in 2024 fell 10% on an annual basis.”
Full Story (Aviation Week)