Prime Movers Lab Webinar Recap: Enabling Today’s High-Speed Flight Renaissance

Highlights from our discussion with an academic, an entrepreneur, a NASA code developer, and a government modernization expert & board member. Recording linked here.

Last week, my fellow partner Christie Iacomini and I moderated a discussion on the technologies enabling high-speed flight. A huge thanks to our awesome panelists and our audience for all the great questions!

Over the last decade, I have been delighted to see the end of the great stagnation in the aerospace industry. The upswing in aerospace technology development has been driven by a combination of advancements in materials and computers, the public’s increased appetite for technical risk, and the rise of a new great power competition. Our panelists each took a turn answering the opening question: why is there a high-speed flight renaissance now?

Highlights:

Theme #1: there is no substitute for flight tests

• AJ spoke about aerospace startups leveraging the advancements in computer-aided design and massively parallel physics-based simulations to shorten the design cycle. However, these modern engineering design and analysis capabilities do not replace the need for experiments, especially flight tests.
• Joe gave a primer on the different types of ground tests needed to characterize the performance of a hypersonic vehicle, as no single experimental facility can fully replicate the conditions seen during hypersonic flight.

Theme #2: NASA still drives aerospace innovations

• NASA’s Low-Boom Flight Demonstration program aims to replace the current ban on overland supersonic commercial travel with regulations on acceptable sound levels. NASA’s X-59 Quiet Supersonic Transport is designed to produce a “sonic thump” (~75 dB → car door closing) instead of a sonic boom (~100 dB → fireworks display).
• Eric spoke about NASA’s ongoing efforts in high-temperature materials development, specifically mentioning the HEEET material developed from an SBIR for the Mars Sample Return Mission. It’s common for NASA to spend a decade developing a critical new technology and then spinning it out to industry to use in the next generation of innovative products.
• A reminder for our audience that NASA provides hundreds of free engineering design and analysis software programs, as well as one of the most comprehensive records databases available, for aerospace engineers to leverage the expertise and lessons learned by NASA’s top researchers & projects throughout the agency’s history.
• This author would like to start a trend where the public can support projects and researchers of their choice at NASA! #Patreon4NASA

Theme #3: America’s best defense is a strong economy

• Mark recently co-authored an article in Defense Times on one of the unintended consequences of the 2017 tax reform bill: corporate R&D expenses can no longer be deducted in the tax year spent. Instead, these costs must be amortized over 5 years. The response from the Hill on this wound to American innovation has been “deafening silence.”
• Joe and Mark both spoke about the DOD’s recent investment, in partnership with academia and industry, the University Consortium for Applied Hypersonics.
• In response to an audience question on semiconductors, Mark talked about dual-use technologies (those with both military and commercial applications) and the history of DOD’s Trusted Foundries program resulting in generational technology lag.
• As a follow-on to that topic- earlier this week, the US House Armed Services Committee released a report on Critical Supply Chain, with their task force making recommendations regarding semiconductors, rare earth elements, and pharmaceuticals.

Another huge heartfelt thank you to our panelists, whose bios are linked below:

Panelists:

Dr. Joe Jewell is a Professor at Purdue University, overseeing the expansion of its hypersonic wind tunnel capabilities. Joe, a recipient of the Office of Naval Research’s Young Investigator award, previously worked at the Air Force Research Lab, was a Rhodes Scholar, and a judge at the International Wine Challenge.

AJ Piplica is the co-founder and CEO of Hermeus, where he leads a team focused on speeding up the global human transportation network through development of hypersonic aircraft. Prior to founding Hermeus, Mr. Piplica served as the CEO of Generation Orbit Launch Services, Inc. where he led the inception and development of the X-60A, a US Air Force hypersonic X-plane.

Dr. Eric Stern is a NASA research engineer and code author of Icarus, a next-generation Thermal Protection System modeling & simulation tool. Eric is a recipient of NASA’s Ames Early Career Research Award, a planetary defender, and a jazz guitarist.

Dr. Mark Lewis is the Executive Director of the Emerging Technologies Institute, part of the National Defense Industrial Association. Mark is an Adjunct Professor at Purdue University, Professor Emeritus at the University of Maryland, and is a past President of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics. For the US government, Mark has served as the Chief Scientist of the US Air Force and then as its Director of Defense Research & Engineering. Mark was also recently the acting Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Research & Engineering in the Pentagon. He currently serves on boards for several companies including Boom Supersonic.

Prime Movers Lab invests in breakthrough scientific startups founded by Prime Movers, the inventors who transform billions of lives. We invest in companies reinventing energy, transportation, infrastructure, manufacturing, human augmentation, and agriculture.

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