Unmanned Systems Technology reports, “Volatus Aerospace Inc. has launched its new ‘Surveillance as a Service’ solution, aiming to deliver unparalleled scalability and rapid deployment capabilities. Monitored from Volatus’ state-of-the-art Operations Control Centre (OCC), this flexible, secure and multi-modal surveillance offering empowers clients with faster response times and actionable intelligence.”
Full Story (Unmanned Systems Technology)
Tag: January 2025
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)
Saab Providing Drone Swarming Capability for Sweden’s Armed Forces
Aviation Week reports, “Sweden’s armed forces have revealed a secret drone swarming program using software developed by Saab. The system, developed over the past year, is designed for sub-25-kg (55.1 lb.) uncrewed aircraft systems (UAS). It allows individual soldiers to control as many as 100 drones at a time to gather intelligence, defense officials say.”
Full Story (Aviation Week)
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)
Airline Industry Revenue to Reach $1 Trillion in 2025 Per Avolon Report
Aerotime reports, “Dublin-based aircraft leasing company Avolon has published a new market outlook report, predicting that the global airline industry will reach US$1 trillion in revenue for the first time ever during 2025. According to this analysis, the main driver behind this growth is the Asia-Pacific region, which will be adding more capacity than all other regions of the world combined.”
Full Story (Aerotime)
The Next Generation of Spacesuits Being Designed Digitally
Former Astronaut Leads Development of Virtual Digital Twins for High-Performance, Custom-Fit Extravehicular Activity (EVA) Spacesuits
By Anne Wainscott-Sargent, AIAA Communications Team
ORLANDO, Fla. – During her astronaut career flying on five Space Shuttle missions, Professor Bonnie J. Dunbar recalls the challenges of ill-fitting EVA “modular, mix-and-match” spacesuits. Ironically, it was during training in Russia as a crewmember traveling to the Russian Space Station Mir, that she experienced the advantages of a customized, pressurized spacesuit.
Speaking on day three of the 2025 AIAA SciTech Forum in Orlando about spacesuit advances, Dunbar shared how she was so comfortable in the customized Sokol Pressure suit, that she napped for four hours while testing the suit/SOYUZ seat combination in a vacuum chamber at Star City, home to the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center in Moscow.
Challenges with Fit and Customization
“Poorly fitting pressure suits that reduce mobility and have a high energy cost impact both mission success and safety. But customization had not been used since the Apollo program, where each crewmember had three custom suits: one for flight, one for back-up, and one for training,” she explained.
During the Shuttle program era, NASA went to a modular design for suits with five “chest sizes” and mix-and-match set of arms and legs, said Dunbar, recalling that the result was “suits that didn’t fit everyone as well as they should.” Some astronauts experienced injuries during missions such as shoulder issues that required surgery when they returned home. These problems are currently captured as risks by both the NASA engineering and human research organizations.
She asked: “How can we use new modern digital engineering tools to revisit customization to maximize performance, and reduce injury, in a cost-effective and schedule-sensitive manner?”
Today, as director of the Aerospace Human Systems Laboratory in the Aerospace Engineering Department at Texas A&M University, Dunbar is bringing her unique experience to bear, spearheading research that could inform what future astronauts will wear on missions to Mars and teaching students about “Human Systems Integration.”
NASA Funds Digital Thread Research
NASA was so interested in her digital concept that they gave her a Phase 1 NIAC (NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts) grant for the development of an EVA suit digital thread. Using tools such as 3D human scanners and finite element (FEA) technology to model the pressurized fabric layers of the suits, she hopes to create a digital system where custom spacesuits, optimized for joint mobility and energy expenditure before manufacture, will become a reality. This step in the digital thread is called “the virtual twin.”
“Spacesuits are not a fashion statement,” said the former NASA astronaut. Instead, think of it as “a human-shaped spacecraft.”
In addition to being pressurized, the 14-layer EVA suit generally includes a communication system, life support (oxygen for breathing and CO2 removal), thermal management, displays and controls, battery power, computers, advanced materials, radiation mitigation, micro-meteoroid protection, and sensors. When pressurized, fabrics become rigid (think of a balloon). If the joints are not properly designed or positioned with respect to the astronauts’ joints, an astronaut can lose as much as 50% of their effective strength, experience reduced mobility, and expend more energy in required EVA exploration tasks.
Dunbar’s research could also benefit current efforts by Axiom Space, which is designing the new EVA suit for the lunar Artemis mission. Axiom unveiled the AxEMU (Axiom Extravehicular Mobility Unit) prototype in spring 2023. Featuring new tech, safety features, and enhanced comfort and mobility, the AxEMU includes innovative life-support systems, pressure garments, and avionics. It’s designed to accommodate 1%-99% of the U.S. population.
Having a future tool to virtually evaluate the suit for that large range of anthropometric sizes before manufacturing could mitigate future performance challenges. SpaceX is currently designing customized suits, but could also benefit from virtual performance evaluations (virtual twin) prior to manufacture.
The Gold Standard for Spacesuit Design
Dunbar considers the dual goals of maximizing mobility and reducing energy expenditure “the gold rings” for spacesuit design.
“I wanted to take it [spacesuit design] from the Pillsbury Doughboy stage to ‘The Martian’ stage,” said Dunbar, referring to the advancements in suit design from the 1970s and 1980s to what was shown in the futuristic Mars adventure film starring Matt Damon.
Using human digital scanners such as 3dMD and VITUS in her lab that can deliver millimeter accuracy, she took the approach of aircraft designers: building a virtual twin.
“The goal is to integrate the virtual suit with the virtual person, and to model the torque and forces required to deform a pressurized joint using FEA tools,” explained Dunbar. “By iterating sleeve dimensions, joint designs, material properties, and delta pressures through sensitivity testing, we can identify critical factors for performance.”
Dunbar has advised one Ph.D. student and three M.S. students on this topic, all with published papers, both for modelling and breadboard testing. She plans to present an overview of the current research later this year.
Raising the TRL of the Virtual Twins for Suit Design
“We’re continuing our work,” she said, estimating that her lab’s efforts to build virtual twins for suit design is currently at Technology Readiness Level (TRL) 3-4. To raise the TRL will require industry partners,” Dunbar said.
The Texas A&M researcher’s vision for tomorrow’s astronauts is powerful yet simple: “I step into the scanner. A few days later, I have a suit that comfortably fits and is mobile, and because it may be designed for Mars, it will be reliable, relatively simple, and easily repairable.”
While it’s still early days, Dunbar is hopeful that her lab is on the right path to create a future platform that delivers on that vision.
To learn more about Bonnie Dunbar’s innovative work and the process envisioned to support future spacesuits, check out a 2023 NASA/NIAC book, Made-to-Order Spacesuits featuring NASA Inventor Bonnie Dunbar.
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.
On Demand Recording Available
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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.
On Demand Recording Available
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
Watch On Demand
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.
On Demand Recording Available
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.”
On Demand Recording Available
NASA Underscores Role of Moon as Testbed for Future Human Mars Missions
Space News reports, “NASA engineers working on the agency’s architecture for human Mars missions said during a panel at the AIAA SciTech Forum … that they were skeptical crewed missions to Mars of any kind … could be successful without first demonstrating technologies on the moon.”
Full Story (Space News)
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)
Kratos to Develop Hypersonic Testing Capabilities for Pentagon
Space News reports, “Defense contractor Kratos Defense & Security Solutions won a $1.45 billion contract from the U.S. Department of Defense to develop testing capabilities for hypersonic weapons, marking one of the Pentagon’s largest-ever investments in hypersonic testing infrastructure. The five-year contract, announced Jan. 6, will support the Multi-Service Advanced Capability Hypersonic Test Bed (MACH-TB) program, which aims to accelerate the development of weapons that travel at speeds exceeding Mach 5, or five times the speed of sound.”
Full Story (Space News)
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)
U.S. Marine Corps Still Targeting 2030 to Replace Aging F/A-18 Hornets
Defense One reports, “While Marines wait for new F-35s, officials say recent delivery delays haven’t altered their goal to fully switch to the fifth-generation stealth fighter jet by the end of the decade. The service is replacing its aging F/A-18 Hornets with F-35s, a massive effort complicated by a year-long pause in deliveries of the newest version of the jet. But for that plan to work, Lockheed Martin needs to finish clearing a backlog of deliveries caused by technology-development problems that led the Pentagon to stop accepting the aircraft for a year. In July, Lockheed received the green light to resume deliveries without the full version of the upgrade, dubbed Technology Refresh-3.”
Full Story (Defense One)
FAA’s Enhanced Oversight of Boeing to Continue “Indefinitely”
Reuters reports, “The Federal Aviation Administration’s tougher oversight of Boeing will continue indefinitely, the agency’s outgoing head said on Friday, nearly a year after a door panel missing four key bolts flew off a new Alaska Airlines 737 MAX 9 in mid-air. The Jan. 5, 2024 incident prompted FAA Administrator Mike Whitaker to cap production at 38 737 MAX planes per month and temporarily ground 170 airplanes. The incident exposed serious safety issues at the U.S. planemaker and contributed to the departure of its then-CEO Dave Calhoun.”
Full Story (Reuters)
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)
China Unveils New Advanced Combat Aircraft
Aviation Week reports, “New Chinese combat aircraft broke cover in a flood of social media photos and videos on Dec. 26 showing them in flight and revealing two new examples of China’s evolution as an aerospace innovator. One new aircraft appeared in social media posts revealing a large, three-engine warplane with a cockpit and diamond-style wing with no vertical tails. Yaw control appears to be managed by Northrop Grumman B-2-style split rudders.”
Full Story (Aviation Week)
Florida’s Space Coast Breaks Launch Year Record with 93 Launches
Space News reports, “Florida’s Space Coast capped off a record-breaking year with 93 launches from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station and NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, up from 74 launches in 2023. Brig. Gen. Kristin Panzenhagen, commander of the Eastern Range and Space Delta 45, credited the accelerated pace to innovations by both Space Launch Delta 45 and the private sector. ‘We’ve been able to reach these crazy numbers by leveraging automation, modernizing infrastructure, and streamlining processes,’ Panzenhagen told SpaceNews.”
Full Story (Space News)
SpaceX Falcon 9 Launches 21 Starlink Satellites from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station
Spaceflight Now reports, “SpaceX sent its latest batch of Starlink satellites into low Earth orbit Monday late afternoon. Among the 21 V2 Mini satellites were 13 that feature Direct to Cell capabilities. Liftoff of the Falcon 9 rocket on the Starlink 12-7 mission from pad 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station happened at 5:05 p.m. EST.”
Full Story (Spaceflight Now)
Video
SpaceX Falcon 9 launches 21 Starlink satellites from from Cape Canaveral (Launch at 0:59:42 mark)
(Spaceflight Now; YouTube)