Tag: Science & Technology

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.

Celebrating Diverse Voices in Aerospace at AIAA SciTech Forum

By Anne Wainscott-Sargent, AIAA Communications Team

ORLANDO, Fla. – On the final evening of the 2025 AIAA SciTech Forum, female aerospace leaders, students, and allies gathered for an engaging discussion on the unique experience of women in aerospace and how to navigate interpersonal, gender, and cultural dynamics for long-term professional and personal success.

“Throughout my career I have witnessed the power of diverse perspectives and how they drive innovation, tackle complex challenges, and lead technology through development,” said panel moderator Soumya Patnaik, a principal aerospace engineer at the Air Force Research Lab. “This evening is all about celebrating that diversity.”

Patnaik added that aerospace isn’t just about technology; “it’s about people – our ideas, our collaboration, and our shared drive to keep moving forward.”

How does one attract people of different backgrounds and experience? Sonya Smith said it starts by being inclusive. Smith is professor and executive director of the Research Institute for Tactical Autonomy at Howard University. “Make sure that you’re going beyond your comfort zone, to reach out to different populations, to people with different experiences.”

In academia, that might mean reaching out to community colleges instead of only four-year universities.

“I look to raise the voices of women and bring them to more leadership positions,” added panelist Melike Nikbay, professor of Aerospace Engineering and chair of the Astronautical Engineering Department at Istanbul Technical University.

Her outreach to young people extends to her role representing Turkey with NATO’s Science and Technology Organization Applied Vehicle Technology Panel, where she has served for over 16 years and contributes scientific work to the research task groups.

Clearly, the issue of diversity isn’t just about gender – it can be about diversity of experience, be it cultural differences or age. While sharing their own experiences, the panelists offered practical advice to current professionals and the up-and-coming generation of engineers.

“Success is defined by you, nobody else,” said panelist Anna-Maria McGowan, national senior engineer for complex system design at NASA Langley Research Center. “We are so much more than our job.”

McGowan, a native of the Caribbean, said she turned down promotions because she knew the new roles would take her away from her family. McGowan’s son, an undergraduate engineering student attending Pennsylvania State University, watched his mom on stage as he attended his first AIAA SciTech Forum.

Afterward he said, “What she said reflected a lot of how she raised me – it was very familiar. My mom really encouraged me to get into a lot of different things. I’ve lived in ice caves for days in Colorado; I’ve studied abroad in Singapore. I run a product design team right now where about half (the members) are underrepresented.”

Smith advised engineering graduates who are looking to start families to be selective about where they choose to work. “Look for organizations that support family-friendly policies. Choose carefully where you start your career.”

“Be who you are,” urged Karen Roth, deputy director of AFWERX, the innovation arm of the Department of the Air Force, who also serves as the president of the Society of Women Engineers. Roth said those times when she wasn’t her authentic self to fit in never worked out.

Embracing Diversity Makes Business Sense

“Wall Street requires organizations to have diverse boards because they know that diversity has a profitability impact,” noted Roth.

As a mother, she brings skills to the work setting that allow her to be a better communicator, which is helpful when dealing with people interpersonally who may not have strong communication skills. In those instances, “understanding context” proves extremely helpful.

McGowan acknowledged that conversations about diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility have become a challenging topic for everybody.

“People are afraid if they mention it, they’ll (be viewed as) ‘pulling the race or gender card,’” the NASA career professional said.

She urged people to resist staying silent and for leaders to have honest discussions with their teams.

“Let’s make the conversation about diversity comfortable and engaging. It may mean we need to educate ourselves. We as leaders and future leaders need to have those conversations.”

After the panel, first-time AIAA SciTech Forum attendee Funmi Adeeye said her decision to attend the panel was easy. “I get inspired whenever I see women doing something great.”

The Nigerian native and Stanford University engineering student said she liked the advice from one of the panelists – to accept that you will make mistakes and to extend grace to yourself and to others.

“Be kind to yourself. In school, there’s always a chance to make things better,” she said.

Also in the audience was Joseph Connolly, an aerospace engineer with NASA Glenn Research Center in Cleveland and former member of the AIAA Diversity Working Group.

“I’ve been coming to the Women at SciTech discussion every year since I’ve been attending the forum,” he said. “The panels are always phenomenal. There’s usually some inspirational and refreshing words of ways to work through tough situations, and how to make sure you’re giving yourself a nice balance between your family life and your work life.”

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.

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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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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.

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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.

Oak Ridge exascale supercomputer — Pictured above is the Frontier exascale supercomputer in Oak Ridge. Capable of performing two quintillion calculations per second, or two exaflops, Frontier features 74 Olympus rack HPE cabinets, each the size of a refrigerator and weighing 8,000 pounds. Each cabinet contains 128 AMD compute nodes. (Photo by ORNL)

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.

Dryden Lecturer Addresses Future of Getting to Greener Aviation

By Anne Wainscott-Sargent, AIAA Communications Team

As the aviation sector looks to achieve net zero carbon emissions by 2050, the biggest gains may not happen in the air but on the ground, stated Tim Lieuwen, the 2025 AIAA Dryden Lecturer in Research, during the 2025 AIAA SciTech Forum in January.

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“The least cost way to get to a net-zero society is to take a system view about economy-wide CO2 emissions and where and how aviation fits into that, rather than trying to zero out CO2 emissions sector by sector. It makes sense if you think about it – it’s a whole lot cheaper to manage your CO2 emissions from something that’s sitting on the ground, potentially sitting right above a depleted oil reservoir versus trying to manage something that’s flying around and has to deal with all the safety issues of aviation,” said Lieuwen.

The Georgia Tech executive vice president for Research, Regents’ Professor, holder of the David S. Lewis, Jr. Chair, and the executive director of the Strategic Energy Institute explored the interconnectedness of energy sources, carriers, and storage systems, noting the significant role of fossil fuels in the current U.S. energy system and the potential for synthetic fuels.

He highlighted four different options for zeroing out climate impacts using a high-fidelity model of the entire energy system. Organized in a 2×2 matrix, the model showed the option of economy-wide decarbonization, where different sectors contribute in a coordinated way. Then he presented a visual of sector-by-sector decarbonization, where each sector individually zeroes out its contributions.

According to the EPA, transportation is the largest contributor of CO2 emissions, with the aviation sector contributing roughly 2.5%, compared with 28% from automobiles.

Lieuwen noted there is a difference between zero CO2 and net zero. Net zero focuses on the overall CO2 emissions budget, allowing for some sectors to potentially emit CO2 and some sectors to be net-negative CO2. In this scenario, the least-cost role of aviation in an economy wide net-zero CO2 society is a mix of conventional fossil fuels and renewable hydrocarbons like sustainable aviation fuels (SAF). If aviation’s aim is to pursue “a least-cost societal net-zero target,” then he advocated for an economy-wide net zero strategy.

Using a least-cost model, the energy expert showed some surprising insights where fossil fuels and renewable fuels are equally split 50/50.

“Half are fossil fuels and the other half are synthetic fuels that you can manufacture like SAF. You see big growth in renewables and big growth in biofuels,” he explained.

Lieuwen also observed that in this least-cost world, half of all energy will rely on electricity which will prompt big growth in electrification, going from 20% to 50%. He also predicted significant R&D investments around power electronics, high-voltage motors, batteries, and energy storage.

Fossil Fuels Dominate Current Energy Economy
Another big takeaway was how society moves and stores energy will continue to use fossil fuels, although in a significantly diminished role from today.

“We’re in an 80/20 split with the current U.S. energy economy as a whole, which means that we use fossil fuels roughly for 80% of the means by which we move energy around and store it. We use electricity as an energy carrier for the other 20%. These are multi-trillion-dollar sectors. It’s important to recognize the interconnectedness of all this. For example, the aviation sector is leveraging and contributing technologically to and is also benefiting from infrastructure of existing industrial sectors, such as oil pipelines and the oil refining industry.”

Aviation’s Critical Role
Part of achieving this least-cost societal net-zero target in aviation is developing SAF, which currently are more expensive than fossil fuel, and will likely require policy levers, carbon taxes, or tax credits to become a reality, Lieuwen predicted.

There will continue to be a premium placed on aviation advances that offer thermal efficiency as well as operational flexibility.

“The ability to have systems that are low emission/high efficiency, but yet don’t surge/don’t stall, where your flame stays attached, where the system is stable, is very, very important,” said the researcher before briefly sharing highlights of his research that focuses on better understanding the interaction of how fast waves of flames move in combustion engines.

“The interaction of acoustic waves… create interference patterns which are controlled by how fast vortices move versus how fast waves on flames move,” he explained. “If a vortex is not moving at the same speed, what’s happening is you have two periodical disturbances moving at different velocities.”

This phenomenon leads to destructive instabilities in rockets, in home heaters, and in aircraft engines, Lieuwen shared.

Asked after his presentation if he thought the increased tempo in rocket launches would hurt efforts to decarbonize, Lieuwen said, “I would suspect the overall carbon footprint that is going to those direct launches will pale relative to other sectors.” He predicted major follow-on secondary impacts from all the satellite activity, however.

Nuclear’s Potential
Another question concerned the role of nuclear energy in getting to net zero. “Nuclear is really important,” said Lieuwen. “In fact, if we could solve this problem of low-cost nuclear [energy] it would totally transform what least-cost net zero looks like.”

Amanda Simpson, former deputy assistant Secretary for Energy under the Obama administration who also directed the U.S. Army Office of Energy Initiatives, found Lieuwen’s remarks timely and on target. The former VP for Research and Technology and head of Sustainability for Airbus Americas said that the aviation sector has grappled with the question of whether net zero by 2050 is the right commitment.

“While it’s an admirable goal, is it a realistic? It’s a very expensive and difficult goal,” she said.
Simpson added that addressing the CO2 issue in aviation is also hard, and she agreed with Lieuwen that it’s easier to decarbonize something on the ground.

“There’s so much to be done in the remaining 26 years, we have to go after everything. There is not going to be a silver bullet – we have to tackle everything to start bringing the [greenhouse gas usage] totals back,” she said.

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The ‘Golden Age’ of AI and Autonomy

Panel Highlights Critical Role of AI and Autonomy on Earth and in Space

By Anne Wainscott-Sargent, AIAA Communications Team

ORLANDO, Fla. – In the future artificial intelligence (AI) and autonomous systems will transform how people and assets are tracked, whether on Earth or in space, noted speakers on an AIAA SciTech Forum plenary on AI and Autonomy last Thursday, 9 January.

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Advances in real-time monitoring and connectivity will help first responders act fast, said one panelist, recalling a 2012 Sausalito, California, road fatality caused when a man crashed his car following a heart attack. He was traveling alone at night, with no one aware of his location.

“In a world where we have a fully connected comms system, that plays out very differently,” said Eric Smith, senior principal, Remote Sensing and Data Analytics at Lockheed Martin Space.

Redefining Accident Response

Not only would AI wearable tech proactively monitor the man’s medical condition, it also would alert EMS and even coordinate traffic control systems to ensure the speediest response to his location.

The plenary session highlighted advancements in AI and their applications in simulation, safety, and decision making, as well as how autonomous systems are reshaping the future of space exploration.

“This is a golden age for robotics and autonomy,” noted Marco Pavone, lead autonomous vehicle researcher at Nvidia and an associate professor at Stanford University in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics.

His focus is fourfold: 1) develop visual language models for vehicle autonomy architectures, 2) find other ways of architecting autonomous tasks, 3) explore simulation technologies to enable end-to-end simulation of autonomous tasks in a realistic and controllable way, and 4) research AI safety – building safe and trustworthy AI systems, particularly in space systems and self-driving cars.

Pavone also co-founded a new center at Stanford – the Center for AEroSpace Autonomy Research (CAESAR), which was formed to advance the state of the art by infusing autonomous reasoning capabilities in aerospace systems.

“At the center we are looking at AI techniques for constructions tasks for other space systems and we’re even developing space foundation models that take into account specific inputs and outputs,” he said.

Lockheed Martin is using AI in all four domains of its business – Space, Missiles and Fire Control, Rotary Systems, and Aeronautics. The company envisions AI for autonomy in unstructured environments like the surface of the moon or Mars, with multiagent cooperative autonomy for manufacturing and assembly.

Smart Robots Likely to Precede Humans to Mars

“I foresee the first habitable, critical infrastructure on the surface of Mars being constructed by a team of robots using material and tools and high-level instructions that say, ‘Do the following things’ [in preparation] for humans to arrive,” said Smith.

On the ground, autonomy and AI advances will play an important role in land-use monitoring, to manage and coordinate disaster response and asset tracking, and will work even if objects pass under bridges or under cloud cover. Lockheed Martin Missiles and Fire Control has a department called Advanced Autonomy concerned with autonomous ground vehicles.

Better Fire Prediction and Detection

According to Smith, the group is exploring advanced technologies to help firefighters better predict, detect, and fight wildfires. The technology could predict and locate a fire hours before it even starts from a lightning strike. Using the power of AI, Lockheed’s technology could also analyze fire behavior in near real-time to enable fire growth predictions and to deliver persistent communications across multiagency air and land suppression units, so they might respond quicker to a large complex fire. Unfortunately, the technology is only in test mode; it’s not currently helping fight the fires ravaging southern California, said Smith.

Moderator Julie Shah, Department Head and H.N. Slater Professor in Aeronautics and Astronautics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), discussed how much the world has changed in the context of AI over the last two decades.

Continually Evolving AI Systems

“When I did my Ph.D., it was on automated planning and scheduling with no machine learning,” recalled Shah. “When I started my career on faculty, I remember a colleague at NASA told me … nothing that learns online will ever fly in space. In the blink of an eye, a few years later, all I did in my lab was machine learning.”

Pavone agreed with Shah that future aerospace missions, especially for space exploration, will need AI systems that can continue to evolve and learn after they deploy.

“Adaptation is needed and so that’s something we are working on,” said Pavone, noting that his lab is collaborating with The Aerospace Corporation on AI systems that can serve anomalies – “How do you use those anomalies to train your system on the ground so that you can still do validation and then improve it?”

Following the panel, Pavone emphasized that foundation models, dark language, and vision language models all provide “several opportunities to rethink how we build autonomous systems.”

He pointed to several breakthroughs in simulation technologies, which will make simulation a powerful tool of autonomous systems.

Aerospace: Lessons from Automotive’s AI Experience

Pavone added that while the application domain he focuses on at Nvidia is primarily automotive (self-driving cars), aerospace researchers can learn from the automotive industry.

“The automotive [industry] has been building AI systems for a while now, and they have built quite a bit of competence in terms of which AI system should be fielded and also how to provide that they are safe and reliable. So, both the methodologies and the safety standards that have been developed by the automotive community could be useful for the aerospace community,” he said.

Forum Attendees Weigh In On AI

Following the plenary, Jorge Hernandez, president of Texas-based Bastion Technologies, said, “Just the opportunity to hear how different organizations are working with AI was fantastic. What Stanford, Lockheed, and MIT are doing is exceptional. We’re all interested in seeing how that will impact us in the future…and we’re all interested getting involved.”

His firm focuses on safety and mission assurance and mechanical engineering, said Hernandez. “We get involved on the risk and analysis side, so how AI plays into that will be an important piece of what we do.”

Rudy Al Ahmar, a PhD student who is completing his aerospace engineering studies at Auburn University’s Advanced Propulsion Research Laboratory this semester, agreed with the panelists – there was a lot of skepticism about AI and machine learning five years ago, but those concerns were addressed within a few years. The same thing has happened with generative AI.

“For a lot of scientists and researchers, it’s not a matter of if they’re going to use AI and machine learning, it’s a matter of when and how they’re going to implement it – whether on a large scale or small scale,” he said.

The doctoral candidate said he hopes to research AI and machine learning integration with computational fluid dynamics (CFD) as a university assistant professor.

“It’s computationally demanding to work on these aerospace applications with CFD. AI and machine learning can reduce the computational cost and make things rapid so you can optimize and study things much, much quicker.”

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AFRL Digital Transformation Champion Urges People to Embrace, Not Fear AI

By Anne Wainscott-Sargent, AIAA Communications Team

ORLANDO, Fla. – If Alexis Bonnell had her way, every person would embrace Artificial Intelligence (AI) fearlessly as a tool that gives them back “minutes for their mission” and enables them to “tackle the toil” of mundane work tasks.

The charismatic former Googler, now serving as chief information officer and director of Digital Capabilities Directorate for the Air Force Research Lab (AFRL), believes technology fails when it fails to serve people.

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While AI and generative AI promise to bring new efficiencies to all industries and in many instances, reinvent how work is done, it also is a transformative force that many people fear will take away their livelihoods. According to Bonnell, the way the work world packages and frames AI makes it difficult for people to accept the tool.

The visionary behind AFRL’s digital transformation doesn’t talk or act like a typical government executive. Speaking before a standing-room-only crowd at the 2025 AIAA SciTech Forum, she stood out among the room of business-dress-attired engineers and managers, wearing a red top, dark jeans and star-studded knee-high boots. She donned multiple black rubber wristbands with her favorite AI catch phrases that she gave away as keepsakes to inquisitive attendees following her talk.

Bonnell’s presentation included advice on bringing about necessary cultural change in how workers and managers view AI, using insights of what she’s learned from her team’s rollout of NIPRGPT, AFRL’s AI Research Platform to explore the power of Generative AI technology. Launched in June, NIPRGPT’s base of volunteer users grew to about 80,000 in four months, reported InsideDefense. Interest in access to AI tools across the Department of Defense shows no signs of slowing.

In a June 2024 news release announcing the tool, Bonnell noted that “changing how we interact with unstructured knowledge is not instant perfection; we each must learn to use the tools, query, and get the best results. NIPRGPT will allow Airmen and Guardians to explore and build skills and familiarity as more powerful tools become available.”

To the AIAA SciTech Forum’s technical audience, she cautioned that some of her insights may be wrong in six months and “that’s okay…. We’re in an era where we may not have the time for the right answer, so we have to become comfortable with ‘right for now,’ be willing to learn and pivot,” she said. She added that when she thinks about generative AI, she doesn’t think about it as a source of answers, but “as a source of options.”

In answering why the world is clamoring to AI tools now, Bonnell said it’s important to realize that “we now live in a fundamentally different age” – one where people in leadership roles must make decisions and adapt quickly and pivot as conditions change. Consider that 90% of the world’s data was created in the last three years, with 94% of it what Bonnell called unstructured “deluges.”

A sign of the changing times is also evident in battlefield decision-making trends. In the war between Russia and Ukraine, Bonnell said the time frame for Russia countering Ukraine’s software has shrunk, in some cases, to only two weeks. That kind of speed requires new information tools and the ability to make decisions fast. As a result, “we have to think about our technology differently than we did before.”

Bonnell dislikes the mixed messages people have historically received about AI: “We tell people we trust you with a weapon, with a $100M budget, with a security clearance and lots of sensitive information, but we don’t trust you with ChatGPT. What are we actually telling people?” she questioned. “It’s important that we make people feel like they are enough, that they’ve got this, that they are capable, and that we trust them to use tools in the right way. Our future as humans is constant adaptation, the only group that benefits when we are afraid of our own technology is the adversary.”

The technologist noted that the world is not communicating the value of AI in the right way; instead, the first thing people hear is that it’s really complicated, technical, and hard. “That kind of tells someone, ‘You’re not smart enough.’”

She urged a change in the AI narrative and a recognition that as public servants and military personnel, they are showing up to their jobs to be intentional and responsible.

The AFRL leader emphasized the main job of AI in its first phase of human adoption is to simplify and shave off time of mundane work, so people can gain back “minutes for their mission.” That’s exactly what the coders and developers on the AI Research Platform have realized: they report that they have gotten between 25–85% in productivity return using AI tools, Bonnell said.

Bonnell noted that AI and genAI are fundamentally different than other technologies because of the level of intimacy of knowledge that the tools deliver.

“Users get to collect information and the data that they think is relevant and then they use the tool to have a curiosity-based relationship with that data.”

Bonnell has observed at AFRL that her team is leveraging genAI to create a “knowledge universe” around themselves without needing to ask her for information, a discovery that has prompted her to rethink her role as a leader. She challenged other people in CIO roles to be similarly introspective: “For those of in roles like CIOs, it’s a question of how are we going to show up? Are we going to be a gatekeeper or are we going to be a facilitator? There’s a lot of interesting things this is putting into motion.”

In her case, Bonnell is looking at how she can get out of the way of this curiosity journey. “How do I foster the ability for someone to need me less and be able to have a dynamic relationship with knowledge?”

After the presentation, several attendees expressed their appreciation for Bonnell’s take on the state of AI attitudes, workplace culture, and the need to lead differently.

“I like how she talked about coming from the direction ‘see what we can do here’ instead of from a caution perspective of ‘I don’t know if we can do that’ to an attitude of ‘let’s figure out how we can make this work,’” said Christine Edwards, a fellow of AI and Autonomy at Lockheed Martin, whose work includes providing cognitive assistance for firefighters and looking at how to use AI to improve spacecraft operations.

Edwards also enjoyed Bonnell’s insights about trust and AI. “She said it’s less about whether I trust this new technology and more about ‘do I have the confidence that it’s going to have the performance I need for this particular part of my mission?’ I really like that perspective shift.”

John Reed, chief rocket scientist at United Launch Alliance, said he appreciated that Bonnell provided tools for mitigating some of the fear the workforce has about AI. “That’s helpful to think through the stages and the fact that there are going to be people who are concerned, ‘Is this going to eat my job?’ It’s really an augmentation technology just like machine learning. It’s best employed when it’s done to augment the algorithms we’re doing today to make it more effective,” he explained.

The talk also resonated deeply with Marshall Lee, senior director of business development at Studio SE Ltd., a consulting firm focused on model-based systems engineering (MBSE) training and coaching.

“Us engineers are all about the tool, the technology, the formula, the detail. She’s really addressing the changes in brain chemistry and emotion [necessary] for the adoption of the technology,” said Lee. “She’s actually saying you have to change the psychology of the person first before they are going to adopt the new technology. It’s all about that emotion and behavior change and understanding people, starting with where they are.”

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