Q&A 10 SOFTWARE 9 SUSTAINABILITY 26

The top scientist on NASA’s water surveyer Tracking pilot eye movements The challenges for hydrogen-powered jets

250 grams of our history

Inside NASA’s plan to deliver bits of the asteroid
Bennu to the Utah desert on Sept. 24 PAGE 18

SEPTEMBER 2023 | A publication of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics | aerospaceamerica.aiaa.org
 Powered by

23–25 OCTOBER 2023 | LAS VEGAS, NEVADA

EARLY BIRD REGISTRATION

ENDS 15 SEPTEMBER
We envision a sustainable economy
in space that looks a lot like the
one on Earth. ASCEND promotes
collaboration between the space
community and adjacent industries.
Together, we are working to accelerate
market development and embrace
the opportunities that come with
increased activity in space. Join us
at the world’s premier outcomes-
focused, interdisciplinary space event
to propel new ideas and help forge our
sustainable off-world future for all.

FEATURED SPEAKERS

A.C. CHARANIA KAM GHAFFARIAN
Chief Technologist, NASA CEO and Founder, IBX, and
Executive Chairman, Axiom
Space
JAY KIM PAM MELROY KAY SEARS
Chairman and CEO, Deputy Administrator, Vice President and
Boryung NASA General Manager, Space,
Intelligence, and Weapon
Systems, Boeing Defense,
Space & Security

REGISTER NOW & SAVE

www.ascend.events/register

CORNERSTONE INDUSTRY PARTNER PLATINUM SPONSOR SILVER SPONSORS BRONZE SPONSOR

 FEATURES | SEPTEMBER 2023 MORE AT aerospaceamerica.aiaa.org

NASA collected its first asteroid dirt and rocks in October 2020, when the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft reached out its arm and touched asteroid Bennu. The sampler
head at the end of the arm made contact for six seconds, releasing a puff of nitrogen gas that stirred up the regolith and pushed it into the sampler.

NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center/University of Arizona

18
Bringing bits of
26
Where’s my hydrogen
aircraft?
36
The perfect SAR process
As the U.S. National
Calls are growing to establish a Reconnaissance Office works to
Bennu home Manhattan Project for hydrogen- establish a large-scale program
powered aircraft, as the air for purchasing commercial radar
NASA’s OSIRIS-REx planners drew lessons transport industry struggles to imagery, four experts offered their
from history to devise their sample return chart a viable path to net-zero visions for how best to get these
strategy. On Sept. 24, we’ll found out how carbon emissions by 2050. products to U.S. troops.
they did.
By Paul Marks By Debra Werner
By Keith Button

aerospaceamerica.aiaa.org | SEPTEMBER 2023 | 1

 IN THIS ISSUE

S E PT E M BE R 2023,
VOL . 61, NO. 8 Keith Button
Keith has written for C4ISR Journal and Hedge Fund Alert, where he broke
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
news of the 2007 Bear Stearns scandal that kicked off the global credit crisis.
Ben Iannotta He is based in New York.
beni@aiaa.org
PAGE 18
ASSOCIATE EDITOR
Cat Hofacker
catherineh@aiaa.org Moriba Jah
Moriba is an associate professor at the University of Texas at Austin and
STAFF REPORTER
chief scientist at Privateer. He helped navigate spacecraft at NASA’s Jet
Paul Brinkmann Propulsion Lab and researched space situational awareness issues at the
paulb@aiaa.org
U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory.
PAGE 64
EDITOR, AIAA BULLETIN
Christine Williams
christinew@aiaa.org
Jon Kelvey
CONTRIBUTING WRITERS Jon previously covered space for The Independent in the U.K. His work has
Keith Button, Moriba Jah, Jon Kelvey, appeared in Air and Space Magazine, Slate, Smithsonian and The Washington
Paul Marks, Robert van der Linden, Post. He is based in Maryland.
Debra Werner, Frank H. Winter PAGE 9

Laura McGill AIAA PRESIDENT

Daniel L. Dumbacher PUBLISHER
Paul Marks
Rodger Williams DEPUTY PUBLISHER Paul is an award-winning journalist in London focused on technology,
cybersecurity, aviation and spaceflight. A regular contributor to the BBC,
New Scientist and The Economist, his current interests include electric
ADVERTISING
aviation and innovation in new space.
advertising@aiaa.org
PAGE 26

ART DIRECTION AND DESIGN

THOR Design Studio | thor.design
Debra Werner
MANUFACTURING AND DISTRIBUTION
A longtime contributor to Aerospace America, Debra is also a correspondent
Association Vision | associationvision.com for Space News on the West Coast of the United States.
PAGE 36
LETTERS
letters@aerospaceamerica.org

CORRESPONDENCE
DEPARTMENTS
Ben Iannotta, beni@aiaa.org

4 Editor’s Notebook
Aerospace America (ISSN 0740-722X) is published monthly 5 For the Record
except in August by the American Institute of Aeronautics
and Astronautics Inc., at 12700 Sunrise Valley Drive, Suite
7 Flight Path
200 Reston, VA 20191-5807 [703-264-7500]. Subscription 42 From the Institute
rate is 50% of dues for AIAA members (and is not deduct-
ible therefrom). Nonmember subscription price: U.S., $200;
foreign, $220. Single copies $25 each. Postmaster: Send
45 AIAA Bulletin
62 Looking Back
8 9
address changes and subscription orders to Aerospace
America, American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics,
AeroPuzzler R&D
at 12700 Sunrise Valley Drive, Reston, VA, 20191-5807, Why do clouds in Jupiter’s This eye-tracking software
Attn: A.I.A.A. Customer Service. Periodical postage AD INDEX Great Spot rotate could measure pilot fatigue
paid at Reston, Virginia, and at additional mailing counterclockwise?
offices. Copyright 2023 by the American Institute of
Ansys ........................................ 35
Aeronautics and Astronautics Inc., all rights reserved.
The name Aerospace America is registered by the AIAA in
the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.
Career Opportunities ................. 60

Estes Education........................... 2
10 64
SAE International ...................... 16
Q&A Jahniverse
NASA’s Vinogradova Shiffer Don’t fear the AI revolution
SpaceX ...................................... 25 on SWOT, the agency’s
newest water surveyer
Textron Aviation........................... 2

aerospaceamerica.aiaa.org | SEPTEMBER 2023 | 3

 EDITOR’S NOTEBOOK
Why do we fear flying more
than driving? Here's a hunch
I
n the United Kingdom, an unwritten rule says that two heirs to
the British throne should not travel together by air, according to
Business Insider and others. The intent, I suppose, is to avoid the
royal equivalent of the speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives
becoming the leader of the free world.
The heir rule sounds a bit like “amygdala hijacking,” the psy-
chology term for when this almond-shaped cluster of neurons in
our brains unnecessarily triggers our fight, flight or freeze response.
I say hijacking because, as we all know, air travel is far safer, statis-
tically speaking, than riding in a car, and yet up to 40% of us suffer
from “flying-related anxiety,” according to a 2016 paper in Frontiers
in Psychology. By contrast, just one in 10 U.S. adults report experi-
encing amaxophobia, the fear of driving a car or riding in one, ac-
cording to the Cleveland Clinic. Put another way, most of us don’t
hesitate to hurtle past trees and cement poles at 70% of the terminal
velocity of a human being. Some of us even need to be coerced by
the threat of a ticket to wear a seatbelt. It’s quite a paradox.
I’ve been reading up in search of a scientific explanation for all
this. My inspiration came partly from the letters we received (see
page 5) in response to the opinion piece in the July/August issue,
“Safety versus innovation: It’s time for rebalancing.” Let’s set aside,
for now, the controversial contention that safety standards for air
travel should be aligned with those governing automobiles. What
I’m looking for is any logic and science that could explain how we
humans arrived at this place where so many of us respond to flying
as though it’s riskier than driving.
What follows is a guess from Googling and reading for about
two hours, so I would not dare to call it a theory. I welcome any
crowdsourcing about studies or principles that could support or
dispel this notion.
Imagine a couple of rambunctious pre-adolescent ancestors of
ours approaching the edge of a forbidden cliff. Let’s say it’s about
400,000 years ago and, in this period, the prefrontal cortexes of our
ancestors suddenly expanded. That’s the part of the brain that turns
fear into wise action. The tween whose brain recognized the risk
likely stayed farther back from the edge and survived when the rocks
4 | SEPTEMBER 2023 | aerospaceamerica.aiaa.org
suddenly gave way. Th is person lived long enough to have children
and pass on a set of superior genes. On this point, I see a strong
signal in the literature that exactly how the brain detects danger
and our reactions to it is poorly understood. For sure it’s complicat-
ed, involving more than just the amygdala and prefrontal cortex.
Maybe our wise pre-teen had a previous close call with a fall, and
the memory of this, encoded and later retrieved by the hippocam-
pus, drove an appropriate fear response.
The point is, our ancestors in many regions had to regularly
navigate terrain and climb trees to find food. They probably evolved
to do so with risk in mind. A strong respect, if not fear, of heights
became ingrained in us over the course of our evolution. Flashing
forward: Perhaps when you experience turbulence during a fl ight,
the shaking harkens back to the rocks at the edge of a cliff starting
to give way.
In that same ancestral era, however, no one roared along hori-
zontally faster than any creature could propel itself. Therefore, no
one died foolhardily before passing on their genes. If anyone was
smart enough to fear speed, there was no evolutionary advantage
to that fear. Going fast today does not harken back to anything in
our evolution, so for most of us, riding in or driving a fast car doesn’t
spark fear the way flying does for some.
Could our evolutionary history partly explain why safety stan-
dards for automobiles and road infrastructure are weaker than for
aircraft? Maybe, but it’s just a hunch.
Ben Iannotta, editor-in-chief, beni@aiaa.org
 FOR THE RECORD

Q&A 10 LUNAR EXPLORATION 8 COMMENTARY 44

de Crespigny on single-pilot operations Navigating autonomously Is there such a thing as too safe?

Reacting to lower safety

standards, tailor-made
Tailor-made The U.S. and other nations lack enough
air tankers to fight wildfires on a hotter,
drier planet. Is it time for another clean-sheet
firefighting planes and deep
space comms
design, just as the 1990s gave us the CL-415s?
It’s an idea that’s percolating. PAGE 26

JULY/AUGUST 2023 | A publication of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics | aerospaceamerica.aiaa.org

Proposing lower safety standards materials and systems,” so comparing a DC-6 to a

is unethical 787 is like comparing “a Model T to a Tesla.”
Regarding the July/August commentary, “Safety versus On the topic of novel aircraft designs, O’Flarity
innovation: It’s time for a rebalancing,” Jim Coder, AIAA notes that “The biggest issues in the industry are
associate fellow, writes that he’s “disappointed” by the emissions and airport noise. A blended-wing-body
publication of author Mislav Tolusic’s argument that might aid both if challenges related to gate and ramp
aviation should “align our risk tolerance for air travel constraints, emergency egress, line maintenance
to that of automobile travel.” Coder notes that the 2022 access, airline and passenger acceptance, and en-
road fatalities reported by the U.S. National Highway tirely new manufacturing processes logistics, etc. are
Traffic Safety Administration “correspond to approxi- resolved.” Scan to read
mately 117 passenger deaths per day. In terms of our AIAA senior member Gary O’Neill notes that he’s the complete
industry, this statistic suggests we should be complacent “absolutely in favor of innovation and creating new and letters online.
if a widebody jetliner crashed every 2-3 days.” better ways to transport people and goods by air, and
Coder also believes that “Tolusic’s article stands lowering the costs to do so,” but he suggests that safety
in direct contrast to AIAA’s own code of ethics (and standards are not the only hurdle. “Mundane things
the fundamental ethics canons of every other engi- like wingspans that change the spacing between gates
neering professional society), which states that mem- or taxiway clearances sometimes result in expensive
bers ‘Hold paramount the safety, health, and welfare and time-consuming alterations. Creating a shorter
of the public in the performance of their duties.” time cycle for such changes could result in fewer city
AIAA member Steven O’Flarity writes that the pairs to fly the aircraft, which in turn affects the eco-
cost examples cited in the article are “nearly mean- nomics of purchasing new aircraft, no matter how cool
ingless.” Both the DC-6 and Boeing 707 “had a mili- the new technology is. Also, training for manufacturing
tary derivation, lowering costs,” writes O’Flarity, a personnel, pilots and cabin personnel, maintenance
former director of systems engineering at Pratt and technicians and ground operations personnel needs to
Whitney. “The 787 was the most innovation-packed be factored into the transition cycles.”
airliner in decades with remarkable advances in CONTINUED ON PAGE 6

CORRECTION
The Aug. 16, 1948, entry in the July/August Looking Back column should have
made clear that the accompanying photo shows the Northrop XF-89, a proto-
type of future versions of the F-89 Scorpion fighters. Also, the entry should
have noted that the final Scorpion variant, the F-89Js, had pylons under the
wings to hold Falcon missiles and nuclear-armed Genie rockets.

aerospaceamerica.aiaa.org | SEPTEM BER 2023 | 5

 FOR THE RECORD CONTINUED

The middle ground in the firefighting
debate
On the question of whether clean-sheet designs are
needed to fight wildfires, an idea explored in the July/
August cover story, “Tomorrow’s fi refighting fleet,”
AIAA senior member Bill Fredericks writes that “this
is NOT a binary decision, and the right answer is
likely half way between” retrofitting existing aircraft
and creating clean-sheet designs. “Take an existing
design and apply external modifications to the design
under a supplemental type certification process (or
similar process depending on the relevant regulatory
authority) to adapt the existing design to be better
suited to the water bombing mission,” writes Freder-
icks, who is chief technology officer of Advanced
Aircraft Co., a Virginia-based drone manufacturer.
Specifically, he likes the idea of modifying the am-
phibious ShinMaywa US-2.
For his part, Robin Harrison, a retired U.S. Forest
Service employee and AIAA senior member, notes
that “just about any airframe can be adapted to do the
fi refighting job,” but an airtanker’s efficiency is mea-
sured by “the pattern and consistency of the retardant
when it reaches the ground, which are dependent on
the tank design.” While the Canadian Super Scoopers
“can load from just about any body of water large
enough, they are limited to dropping plain water or
foam suppressant, not the long-term retardant that is
most effective in building fi re-line.”
Also, “I would have liked to have seen some men-
tion of helicopters used in wildland fi refighting. It is
my opinion that in terms of response time and effec-
tiveness, the heavy snorkel-equipped helicopter is the
best initial attack vehicle.”
An idea for better lunar comms
After reading our July/August feature, “Live from the
moon in HD,” AIAA senior member Stanley Clark
has a possible solution for ensuring adequate band-
width for future missions: Th ink of “Earth, Moon as
a two node communication system with a trunk line
connecting them,” writes Clark, a former systems
engineer at United Space Alliance. High-bandwidth
could be achieved “by setting up several lasers con-
necting Earth and the Moon in a laser trunk line and
routing all Lunar space RF through the Lunar Node
to be digitized, then sent to the Earth Node from the
Lunar Node.” Th is would offload “a large chunk of
communication requirements from the Deep Space
Network and the NSN.”

8–12 JANUARY 2024

ORLANDO, FL

YOUR ORGANIZATION
AT THE WORLD’S LARGEST EVENT FOR AEROSPACE R&D
5,000+ high-profile decision makers, entrepreneurs, scientists, technologists, and other
professionals from government, military, industry, and academia will convene at the
2024 AIAA SciTech Forum in Orlando, Florida.

Don’t miss the chance to be seen at the forefront of our industry as we expand the
boundaries of aerospace to enable a faster, farther, and better future for all.

PLAN TO SPONSOR AND/OR EXHIBIT AT THE FORUM

For more information, visit

aiaa.org/SciTech/exposition-sponsorship
or email sales@aiaa.org

6 | SEPTEMBER 2023 | aerospaceamerica.aiaa.org

 FLIGHT PATH
ASCEND is Building Our
Sustainable Off-World Future
Through Collaboration
T
he ASCEND community continues its journey, looking
forward to its fourth apex event: 2023 ASCEND, 23–25 Oc-
tober, Caesars Forum, Las Vegas, Nevada. We see positive
signs of progress that ASCEND has made in four years by convening
the space industry to make space for all, by expanding our reach to
involve adjacent industries in this interdisciplinary and inclusive
community, and by driving the conversation toward delivering
outcomes. Th is year, the apex event is accelerating us toward build-
ing our sustainable off-world future through collaboration.
Since its inception, ASCEND has directly engaged more than
15,000 people across the space community and beyond. During last
year’s apex event, the audience was largely non-AIAA members, at
57% of attendees. We are especially benefiting from the diverse
voices from adjacent industries, having welcomed representatives
from a number of brands like Bechtel, Cedars Sinai, Colgate-Palmolive
Company, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Barclays, Morgan Stanley,
and Proctor and Gamble (P&G), to name a few. Th is year, we look
forward to welcoming 3V Company, Boryung, Husqvarna, ICON,
PickNik Robotics, and more, to the ASCEND stage.
ASCEND continues delivering on its mission as the catalyst for
the global space conversation. Consistently, the event brings lead-
ers from international space agencies together to share how they
are cooperating around the globe to accelerate space exploration.
The type of collaboration they are pursuing extends beyond nation-
al agencies to include commercial entities and private companies.
In addition to its speakers, the ASCEND audience is global – with
attendees at last year’s apex event hailing from 19 countries.
A key differentiator of ASCEND from other space events and
initiatives is its attention to delivering outcomes. Every aspect of
ASCEND starts with a vision and progresses through a program of
activities, presentations, and conversations that focus on actionable
outcomes. They are published on the website at www.ascend.events/
outcomes for ongoing reference, including a report from 2023 AS-
CENDxTexas, the “Satellite Orbital Safety Best Practices” reference
guide, and the full text of the Diverse Dozen Op-Eds from the past
three years. Th is growing body of work is advancing the knowledge
base of the whole ASCEND community.
One of the most valuable assets ASCEND leverages is the
43-member 2023 ASCEND Guiding Coalition (www.ascend.events/
about/guiding-coalition). They bring a wealth of experience and
expertise as leaders in commercial space operations, government
space policy, science and technology policy, new entrepreneurial
ventures, and business strategy. Th is advisory board of technology,
science, engineering, and business leaders helps maximize ASCEND’s
reach and impact. It has been my pleasure to work closely with them
designing the content for this year’s apex event.
2023 ASCEND is the nexus for
addressing the most important
opportunities and challenges that
come with increased activity in
space today:
■ Space and Sustainability: Discovering ideas to
protect Earth from environmental impact and
advance space-based sensing tech, clean energy,
asteroid mitigation, and more
■ Space Exploration and Infrastructure: Building the
necessary infrastructure to support human presence
in low Earth orbit, cislunar space, and beyond – from
habitats and life-support systems to reliable commu-
nication networks and propulsion technologies
■ Space Security and Protection: Exploring mission
cybersecurity, policy partnerships, detection, and
new technologies for space asset protection
■ Space Traffic Management: Collaborating on efficient
space traffic management to mitigate collision risks
and safeguard valuable resources
■ Expanding and Evolving the Space Economy:
Shaping the expanding space economy includ-
ing emerging markets and investment approaches
with a forecast value of $1 trillion by 2040 – from low
Earth orbit to cislunar space
■ Education, Outreach, and Workforce: Focusing on
workforce challenges, diversity, and education in the
commercial space industry
We are eagerly anticipating thousands of diverse dreamers and
doers at 2023 ASCEND. Th is year’s attendees will share their visions
for space in the next few decades and connect with the key players
who can help them bring those visions to life. We can’t wait to see
you there. The momentum is growing for 2023 ASCEND.
Julie Van Kleeck
ASCEND Executive Producer and AIAA Space Domain Lead
aerospaceamerica.aiaa.org | SEPTEM BER 2023 | 7

Great spot
FROM THE JULY/AUGUST ISSUE
Q: The clouds in Jupiter’s Great Red
Spot rotate counterclockwise, just as
the clouds of a tropical cyclone in
Earth’s Northern Hemisphere do.
The trouble is that this fierce storm
is located in Jupiter’s southern
hemisphere, where we might expect
a clockwise rotation, as is the case
with cyclones below Earth’s equator.
Why does the Great Red Spot seem
to defy the rule?
SEND A RESPONSE OF UP TO 250 WORDS
that someone in any field could understand to
aeropuzzler@aerospaceamerica.org by noon
Eastern Sept. 13 for a chance to have it
published in the next issue.
Scan to get a head
start on the October
AeroPuzzler
8 | SEPTEMBER 2023 | aerospaceamerica.aiaa.org
Email us at aeropuzzler@aerospaceamerica.org
A DIMPLE-FREE
GOLF BALL
We asked you why golf balls have
dimples but aircraft wings don’t.
WINNER One important goal for golf balls and aircraft alike is drag
reduction. Aerodynamic drag can be described by the different
mechanisms that generate it; two important sources of drag in this
context are form drag, the drag caused by pressure changes as
air moves around an object, and skin friction drag, caused by the
viscosity of the air shearing across the surface of the object. Golf
balls are approximately spherical, and this blunt shape is difficult
for the airstream to wrap neatly around, resulting in a large pressure
differential and high form drag. The dimples induce turbulence in the
airstream and can be thought of as “adding energy” to the boundary
layer air, helping it to flow around the golf ball and reducing form drag.
This drag-reducing turbulence is not free; it comes at the price of
increased skin friction drag. Because the golf ball’s area is small and
the form drag is comparatively large, this trade-off is worth it. Aircraft
are designed to be slender and aerodynamic, minimizing form drag at
speed, meaning aircraft have a larger surface area and a comparatively
lower form drag contribution. Adding dimples would actually reduce
form drag but at the cost of increased skin friction drag over a larger
area. In most cases, this trade-off increases the total drag for an
aircraft. When aircraft have historically used corrugated skin, it was
to aid in the rigidity of the thin sheet metal, which was a part of the
structure, and the increased surface area hurt drag and performance.
Tim Tichgelaar, AIAA Young Professional member
Elgin, Illinois
tnt3@illinois.edu
Tim is a systems engineer in Northrop Grumman’s Mission Systems
division. He graduated in May from the University of Illinois Urbana-
Champaign with a bachelor’s degree in aerospace engineering.
 R&D SOFT WARE
Tracking pilots’ eyes
BY JON KELVEY | jonkelvey@gmail.com
S
ince 2013, software designed by Australian company Seeing
Machines has alerted drivers of luxury cars and commercial
trucks when they are drowsy or inattentive. Someday soon,
that same technology could be installed in passenger, cargo and
military aircraft.
Today, the software is paired with optical and infrared cameras
on the dashboard of 250-ton mining trucks and Cadillac brand cars.
If the cameras detect that a driver’s eyes are drifting from the road
or closing for a certain amount of time, the software triggers a seat
vibration to alert the driver.
A similar setup in cockpits could do more than monitor pilot
drowsiness, says Mike Lenné, chief science and innovation officer
at Seeing Machines.
“What we’ll be is the mechanism to provide an understanding
of what the human is doing, what they’re looking at, where their
attention is,” says Lenné. “It’s really important as the levels of au-
tonomy continue to go up in the aviation industry that there is a
system in there that isn’t only about automation, but that there’s a
system in there that’s actually concentrating on the human.”
Work is underway with Collins Aerospace, whom Seeing Ma-
chines struck an exclusive intellectual property licensing agreement
with in May. Plans call for Collins to develop the cameras and
other avionics required to install the Seeing Machines technology
in cockpits. Initially, the software would only monitor pilot perfor-
mance, but Seeing Machines believes the technology could one day
be modified to interact directly with the fl ight controls. In one such
scenario, automation could be prompted to take control of the
aircraft if the software determines a pilot is incapacitated or unaware
of an imminent danger.
In addition to airlines, Seeing Machines also plans to market its
eye-monitoring software to pilot trainers — and the company has
An illustration of Seeing Machines’ eye-tracking software, which
the company wants to install in airliner cockpits to measure pilot fatigue
and other facets of their performance.
Seeing Machines
already garnered some interest. Since late 2019, the software has
been operating in a Qantas Airlines 787 fl ight simulator in Sydney.
Two eye-tracking cameras built by L3Harris, one for each pilot, were
installed in the coaming of the glare shield panel that shades the
cockpit displays. From this position, the software measures where
each pilot’s eyes are focused, how often blinking occurs and the
position of their heads and bodies, among other metrics. By gauging
not only how tired the pilots are but also where they are focusing
their attention when alert, “They can actually see exactly where the
pilot is looking and how they make those decisions,” says Pat Nolan,
the Seeing Machines general manager for aviation.
And Seeing Machines isn’t the only organization that’s identified
a need for such technology. Researchers at NASA’s Armstrong Flight
Research Center in California are studying ways to monitor breathing
patterns and other measures to predict pilot performance. Across the
pond, the European Union Aviation Safety Agency since 2022 has been
studying whether it is possible to reduce the number of pilots in the
cockpit. Under one of these concepts, Single Pilot Operations, a lone
pilot would fly a cargo aircraft aided by increased automation.
Nolan says that although Seeing Machines does not have a
position on single-pilot proposals, the eye-tracking software could
be a useful tool for airlines and regulators looking to quantify the
effects of making any changes to fl ight crews, including practices
such as controlled rest or reduced crews for long-haul fl ights.
“It’s certainly not something that we advocate,” Nolan says of
shifts to smaller fl ight crews, but “unless you understand the exist-
ing, how do you support the change?”
aerospaceamerica.aiaa.org | SEPTEM BER 2023 | 9
 Q&A NADYA VINOGR ADOVA SHIFFER, PROGR AM SCIENTIST FOR SWOT

NA DYA
VINO G R A DOVA
SH IFFER
POSITIONS: Since 2019,
manager of the Ocean
Physics Program at NASA
Headquarters, overseeing
seven satellite missions,
including Surface Water
and Ocean Topography
(SWOT), that explore the link
between the world’s oceans
and the climate. Doubled as
top scientist of the U.S.-
European Sentinel-6 Michael
Freilich radar altimeter
satellite that measures sea
surface height. 2016-2019,
founder and principal
scientist at the Cambridge
Climate Institute in
Massachusetts, a nonprofit
that created atmospheric
models based on NASA
satellite observations. 2005-
2016, conducted ocean
physics and climate research
as a member of the science
team of various NASA Earth
observation missions.

Q&A
NOTABLE: Grew up in Ukraine
and came to the U.S. in
2000 to earn a Ph.D. at
the University of Southern
Mississippi’s Department
of Marine Science, at
NASA’s Stennis Space
Center. Defined the science
objectives for SWOT, the
first satellite to measure the

Water whisperer surface elevation of Earth’s

fresh and salt water bodies,
including rivers of 100
meters in width and more,
and lakes with a surface area

A
s a tempest of wildfires, floods and record-breaking temperatures swept across Earth in of 6 hectares and greater.
June and July, Nadya Vinogradova Shiffer and her colleagues at NASA and the French
space agency CNES were preparing to begin science operations with a satellite that AGE: 46
could help climate researchers predict which regions are at the greatest risk of those
RESIDES: Washington, D.C.
and other long-term impacts of our warming planet. Both agencies have satellites that
survey the oceans, but SWOT, launched in December, will be the first to measure the cycling of water EDUCATION: Master’s degree
across Earth’s entire surface, including its oceans, lakes and rivers — hence the satellite’s full name, in applied mathematics
Surface Water Ocean Topography. Success of the three-year mission hinges on turning the interfer- from Nizhny Novgorod
ence patterns of reflected microwave radar signals into measurements of surface height, a technique State University in Russia,
1999; Ph.D. in physical
never before applied in Earth observations. I reached Vinogradova Shiffer, the top scientist for
oceanography from the
SWOT, at her summer home in New Hampshire. We discussed the satellite’s brush with failure and University of Southern
the revelations SWOT could bring now that that problem is behind it. Here is our video conversation, Mississippi, 2004.
compressed and lightly edited. — Cat Hofacker

10 | SEPTEMBER 2023 | aerospaceamerica.aiaa.org

Q: Between the wildfires, floods and record temperatures, it feels like
we’re getting a glimpse of the severe weather ahead if the planet con-
tinues to warm. What role will SWOT play in answering questions about
what is happening on Earth and what can be done about it?
A: All water originates over the ocean, then travels through the atmosphere
and sinks on land, where it’s being used or stored in lakes and rivers, or used
for drinking water, agriculture, energy, you name it. Then, it comes back to
the ocean through rivers. Any deviations from this perpetual cycle result in
what we call hydrological extremes. If the supply of the water from the ocean
is too large, you get storms and floods — which is what we have now in New
“SWOT is the
England, where I am. Or if the ocean supply becomes interrupted and there’s
a deficit, you get droughts, you get heatwaves; sometimes droughts could
become big enough that they produce fires on land. SWOT is the first mission
first mission that
that allows you to look at this complete distribution, storage and cycling of all
water in one mission, so you don’t have to stitch together different missions, allows you to look
like one over the ocean, one over land. That means consistent measurements;
it means also that predictability is better. Think of the ocean as a warehouse
of moisture. If you go to a grocery store and there are no strawberries, that’s
at this complete
too late to prepare, right? But if somebody had previously told you back at the
warehouse that there is the shortage of strawberries, that’s lead time for you
to prepare. So when we predict floods or droughts on land, it helps to see what
distribution,
happens with the sources of moisture before it travels or it doesn’t travel on
land. So this complete look between the supply and demand chain, it’s very storage and
critical for prediction of those weather extremes.

Q: You alluded to the stitching together of measurements collected by cycling of all

different satellites. Why can’t today’s government and commercial remote
sensing satellites do what SWOT is doing?
A: With SWOT, we kind of redesigned the way we look at water. For 30 years,
water in one
NASA and international partners have been using altimeter technology, but
the resolution of these measurements were not always useful for decision mission, so you
makers to address rapid changes we see at the coast. So at some point 20
years ago, there was a push to increase the resolution of water measurements.
The idea was instead of just using a nadir altimeter that constantly emitted a
don’t have to
single pulse, like a dot, as a satellite travels around the globe, what if we cre-
ate a two-dimensional picture of the water with a wide swath in one scan? It’s
like instead of painting with a little brush, you use a roller. The final product
stitch together
was the interferometry concept that SWOT is using. It has a large antenna with
a boom, and then two antennas sending a microwave signal. The signals are different missions,
a little bit out of sync because they travel different distances to come back to
two different sides of the antenna. Because the signals are out of sync, there’s
differences in phases and basic geometry that let you compute the height of
like one over
the water column as a 2D swath. And because of the long boom, you have this
big, 120-kilometer roller that you are making the swath with one pass. It does
require a lot of stability. This antenna has to be stable to about 1 micron —
the ocean, one
thinner than a piece of my hair. So it’s not really a viable commercial endeav-
or as I would call it, because commercial satellites are useful, but there’s a over land.”
difference between a bunch of bicycles versus a Rolls-Royce.

Q: Many of the previous altimeter satellites focused specifically on ocean

measurements. Why were lakes and rivers left out?
A: Mainly because of the footprints. If it’s a more than 100-kilometer lake
— major lakes in the U.S. or if the lake is big enough — we do have some in-
ventory, and we have some lake scientists who keep track of the water stor-
ages. We also have, of course, other missions like Landsat that are helpful for
land hydrology. But in terms of floods or water storage, Landsat gives you just
the extent. It’s a map that looks like a photograph, which shows you “Oh, it

aerospaceamerica.aiaa.org | SEPTEM BER 2023 | 11

 After its launch by a
SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket in
December, the Surface Water
Ocean Topography satellite
deployed its 10-meter boom,
as shown in this illustration.
The antennas on either end
of the boom send microwave
radar pulses to measure the
surface height of rivers, lakes
and oceans.
CNES
12 | SEPTEMBER 2023
flooded this direction,” but it doesn’t give you the
height. So imagine a flood: It could extend this way,
but it could be ankle deep, or it could be neck deep.
SWOT would add this 2D view for water storage, for
water management for dams or anything related to
water, power, energy production, agriculture, stor-
age. And with other altimeters, the limitation is
mostly the resolution. Right now, there is a database
of thousands of lakes. Now that we have 10x reso-
lution with SWOT, we are hoping to have 5, 6 million
lakes being observed. So it’s just now we can real-
ly focus on the smaller water bodies or water bod-
ies that feed larger water bodies, etc., and the same
with rivers. One hundred meters is what we’ve
promised to the world, but based on our first results,
I think we’re going to do better — 15, maybe 30
meters. In our first images, we saw a small channel
in New York Harbor that’s 30 meters.
Q: It makes me think about the unknown un-
knowns — all of the things you might discover
that you haven’t yet considered.
A: When we were launching SWOT, I thought about
it in a similar way as our colleagues from the Plan-
etary Science division that launched the James
| aerospaceamerica.aiaa.org
Webb Space Telescope. They’d been using Hubble
since the ’90s, and it was amazing. Then we launched
Webb and boom, “Is that a new exoplanet? Oh, what
is that?” They also had some expected mission
scientific goals, but then when you start doing it,
you are open to new things that you did not plan.
With SWOT’s improved resolution, it’s a similar
feeling. One of the interesting questions that we
want to discover is what happens with the Earth
energy as a planet. Ninety percent of global warm-
ing is being absorbed by the ocean. We’ve never
observed it before, but our models suggest that a
big portion of the energy exchange and energy
budget happens at smaller scales. And so if this is
true, SWOT gives us an opportunity to kind of close
this climate puzzle. Our models suggest that some-
times one-third of the work is done by those ener-
getic eddies, the small features that constantly
move in the ocean. We think of the ocean as big
inert machinery, but actually it’s very, very turbulent.
So what is the tipping point when we saturate the
ocean with heat and it starts releasing it and kick-
ing it back? It’s like boiling a teapot. It takes forev-
er to boil, but then at some point it boils and the
heat is released.
Measuring rising sea levels
Determining the global mean sea level requires measuring spatial variations in surface height. Until now, this has been
done with satellites with relatively narrow fields of view, resulting in coarse spatial resolution, such as the blocks at left
below. The “first light” data from SWOT shows dramatically improved spatial resolution, due to its dual radar antennas,
separated by about 10 meters.

Sources: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Copernicus Marine Service of the European Space Agency

"With SWOT, we kind of redesigned

the way we look at water."
Q: So much of SWOT’s mission hinges on its star
instrument, the Ka-band Radar Interferometer.
Because the KaRIn instrument had never flown
on a satellite before, how did that influence
mission planning?
A: We thought, “What kind of a campaign do we
need in order to maximize this 2D imaging of the
ocean of the satellite versus 2D imaging of the ocean
on the ground?”
The two dimensions are height and width.
— CH
In other words, how do we make sure that what we
are seeing from space is actually reality? So we were
just trying to design a robust calibration/validation
— cal/val — experiment. When we launched the
observatory, it had this dedicated special orbit
that’s a little bit lower than we were targeting for
operations.
SWOT was temporarily placed in an 860-
kilometer orbit so the satellite would pass the
same areas each day at the same time during
the six-month commissioning period. The
multiple measurements collected in this
“fast-sampling orbit” sped up validation of
SWOT’s measurements against those taken
by ground probes and other devices. — CH

aerospaceamerica.aiaa.org | SEPTEM BER 2023 | 13

 “The world community has really
mobilized across the whole globe for our
commissioning period by sending ships
and airplanes and water instrumentation.
So in addition to the NASA and CNES
calibration/validation campaign, there
were more than 50 field campaigns,
self-mobilized in a coordinated manner.”
And then for about six months, we’ve been flying
in that lower orbit and collecting measurements
every day over a certain location over the globe. It
was what I called a “daily water show.” So every
day we would have the view of the water, whether
it is over the ocean or it’s a lake or a river or a coast.
That allowed us to really fine-tune our measurement
algorithms and our calibration system, so we would
be more comfortable and ready to boost the satel-
lite into its science orbit. The world community has
really mobilized across the whole globe for our
commissioning period by sending ships and airplanes
and water instrumentation. So in addition to the
NASA and CNES calibration/validation campaign,
there were more than 50 field campaigns, self-mo-
bilized in a coordinated manner. They were helping
us by collecting ground data that helped us validate
these novel measurements with SWOT that nobody
has collected before.
Q: You had a scare during commissioning when
KaRIn shut down for about two months. What
was the cause?
14 | SEPTEMBER 2023 | aerospaceamerica.aiaa.org
A: The component that shut down is essentially a
very sensitive circuit breaker. There are just so many
electronics on the KaRIn instrument that the circuit
breaker just blew, so we turned it off to protect the
whole instrument. Then we did a series of tests to
understand, “All right, is it really something going
on? Or just by design, the system shuts down?” We
tried to restart it. We tried to analyze a bunch of
voltage experiments jointly with NASA and CNES
engineers. What we finally ended up doing is switch-
ing to a similar unit on the spacecraft. NASA, in its
wisdom, when we launch something new, we build
two of them. So we had two KaRIns on board, and
we’ve always treated side A and side B completely
identical. So we decided to switch to side B and
restart, and it paid off.
Q: That was a lucky break. So there are two of
this specific component, or duplicates of every
single component on KaRIn?
A: It’s not every single component of the observa-
tory, but for the key subsystems, we have a unit A
and unit B — two redundant units.
Q: You gotta love that redundancy. I know the
extra weight makes it challenging when you’re
designing —
A: Like imagine I ask you, “Hey, build me a nice
Porsche, and you have to build two of them because
you’re not sure!”
Q: Right. So you switched to unit B, and it seems
like everything’s working as expected?
A: Yes, it was perfect. We’re still looking at the
failure, but it is still a mystery to us. It could be just
that we did not program it in the right way. We don’t
know; we never came to the bottom of it. Also,
because it happened during commissioning, we
were restricted on what we could and couldn’t
communicate about the mission. It probably looked
worse than it actually was because NASA just goes
quiet. We give no updates. We’d already taken our
“first light” measurements on Jan. 25, but then
KaRIn went dark. So do we release the first light
image? It was a little bit of a delicate dance around
what’s happening with SWOT, so we were sitting on
the first light image for six weeks and not sleeping
[laugh]. It’s like you deliver a baby, and then the
baby was in the ICU [intensive care unit]. You wait-
ed for it, but you cannot take it home.
Q: Switching gears: I was really interested in
the decision to release SWOT data much
earlier to the public, instead of giving the
science team first dibs on publication. Did
the progressively strange weather we’ve
experienced the last few years influence that
decision at all?
A: This is a good question. SWOT was the catalyst
for NASA to move to the cloud maybe about 10
years ago. At some point we realized that NASA
Earth Science data streams were going to triple
with SWOT on orbit, because it was going to be such
a large volume of data — from 5 petabytes to like
15 petabytes. So there needed to be a paradigm
shift, because people couldn’t just download the
data on their laptops. So we’ve been going through
these birthing pains — what is a better word?
Q: I like birthing pains since we talked about
SWOT being in the ICU.
A: [laughs] Right, so how do you transition to the
cloud? How do we give people access to this data?
And then, step by step, we expanded toward this
concept of open science. NASA has had open data
since I can remember, meaning all the data is
available, but what we decided to do is also make
available the tools. We are creating new tools to
work with the cloud any way, so let’s just give
people that. So we started thinking of giving the
tools and the codes and how to handle the data,
how to analyze, how to make a plot to publish it
and so on. And since we are doing all that, let’s
just also have free knowledge: If you publish a
paper, make it open access. As program scientist,
I made it a requirement. When people submit a
proposal to us, they have to agree that they share
their codes, they share their results. And of course
I said, “Let’s create a framework where you are
also rewarded for your authorship.” It’s not like
people steal your work; they take it, and they
reference your work. They acknowledge your work.
When I was a scientist, somebody would ask me,
“Oh, you did such a good job, can you just email
me your script?” I would email the script, I would
get no credit for it, and they would use my tool to
write their paper with no attribution. But now,
because I published my tool, now there is a refer-
ence. It’s a win-win situation. So in the spirit of
open science, we thought, “All right, let’s deliver
the data not in this science-ready format but in
this pre-validated state.”
She means that scientists would process the
SWOT data with the aforementioned tools to
make it ready for publishing in papers in
Nature and other scientific journals. — CH
We’re kind of expanding the number of cooks in the
kitchen. Of course, not everybody wants to do that.
But we are opening this process to those who are
interested, as long as there’s understanding what
is this data good for — it’s not yet ready for Nature
papers, but it is ready to help us to improve the
quality of the data products.
Q: As a scientist, are you at all conflicted about
releasing information before it’s been exten-
sively vetted?
A: I mean, it is a culture change, and it’s an exper-
iment that we are going through. The goal is to be
more open in the future. With SWOT, we are doing
pre-data. I think with the next-generation missions
that would launch in the next 10 years, NASA wants
to share everything. But it is a process. How do you
work out the kinks? How do you create a framework
where you are both opening the process, but you
also do not jeopardize credibility or the quality of
your data product? There can’t be too many cooks
in the kitchen; there has to be a robust process
where the quality is vetted, and this is what we’re
trying to figure out. What will work in practice? How
do you stop people from taking precooked data and
submitting it to Nature? You learn as you go, and
we are doing it with SWOT. We are happy to provide
lessons learned and figure out the kinks.
aerospaceamerica.aiaa.org | SEPTEM BER 2023 | 15
 SPONSORED CONTENT SAE INTERNATIONAL
SAE Revamps
Foundational Aviation
Safety Standards for
Changing Industry
Landscape
S
AE International is currently working on the release of revised
versions of two longstanding critical modern aviation safety
standards used for product assurance and certification of
civil aircraft. These updates will affect aviation OEMs and suppliers
across the board, realigning regulators and industry in a rapidly
transforming industry.
The two standards—ARP4754, the development assurance
process, or the ‘what to do book’, and ARP4761, the safety assessment
process, or the ‘how to do it’ book—originally arose from the dis-
cussion and collaboration process in the SAE’s S-18 Aircraft and
Systems Development and Safety Assessment committee, formed
in 1992 based on a recommendation by the FAA.
The two standards were originally released in late 1996.
The committee is currently set to release the second revision of
ARP4754, or revision B. “That is a more general update with improve-
ments to correct potential interpretation issues that we had received
feedback on,” said Eric Peterson, aerospace safety engineer with the
FAA and the vice chair of the S-18 committee during that standard’s
revision process. “We were trying to improve some of that.”
The committee hopes to get both revised standards released at the
same time, or “as close to the same day as practical,” according to Mike
Noorman, an aerospace consultant who has been on the committee
for ten years and took over chairing the committee in April 2023.
Aligning on Safety as Industry Advances
The revised standards will address technical changes in aviation
over the last 20 to 30 years.
Back in the early 90s, during the digital age, Peterson recalled,
things were getting very complicated very quickly in aviation tech-
nology. “It was becoming difficult to compare and ensure that each
aircraft was satisfying the same safety objectives, because everybody
was doing different techniques using different processes. The FAA
came out and said, ‘Hey, we need to get the industry together and,
here’s the best way to do that.’”
Noorman said that he thinks most of the revision activity has
been about just trying to make sure that the industry is in alignment
with what the regulators are looking for when it comes to aircraft
system development processes and safety processes.
 “One of the biggest needs for these updates was to really help
people new to the industry that are maybe not as experienced when
they’re reading them,” Noorman said. “Safety is not about just
generating an analysis document. It’s not about just reviewing
something. You’re an integral part of the development process.”
The Work of the S-18 Committee
Leading up to the revised releases, the committee has been assess-
ing the behaviors designed into aircraft and systems, figuring out
the risks and the criticality of those risks, and then coming up with
a process to assure that those risks have been addressed and make
sure that the vehicles are safe.
David Alexander, senior director of standards at SAE, said that
his team facilitates the development of the standards by, in part,
organizing and facilitating meetings, and providing the online
workspace for the committees to write, discuss, and manage their
standards.
The committee wants to make sure they are producing documents
which are scalable and usable for a number of different applications.
“SAE has strong relationships with regulatory agencies like the FAA,
NASA and their counterparts around the world who use industry
documents like ARP4754 and ARP4761 as an accepted means of
compliance to support the certification process,” Alexander said.
ARP4754 has always been about what you needed to do at the
hardware and software level, according to Noorman. Revision A of
ARP4754, published by SAE in December 21, 2010, got even more
explicit in this regard, he said. “It identified the types of things that
you need to do for developing a function, and then if your function
is made up of hardware and software, this is how you might interface
from a development assurance perspective.”
The committee wants ARP4754B and ARP4761A to align with
each other, Noorman said. “We want you to be able to have both
documents, with no question about what the interfaces between
the system process and safety process are.”
The Challenges
One of the committee’s challenges was dealing with the sheer size
of the documents—ARP4754 comes in at around 115 pages, and is
intended to be used as a reference, while ARP4761 is 331 pages. The
committee wants to couple the two documents together. “These two
Prepare your organization
for compliance.
Understanding the requirements
of SAE ARP4754™, SAE ARP4761™,
and appropriate methodologies
for implementation is critical.
Learn how the SAE team is
creating knowledge and training
packages tailored to your
organization’s needs.
books are huge,” Peterson said. “That’s why it takes so long to create
and get consensus.”
Another challenge is cybersecurity. Noorman said that the
versions of the two documents about to be released don’t address
cybersecurity in any way. “That was intentional. As a committee,
what we like to do is, from a strategy perspective, look at what the
emerging things are within industry, where there’s a team of people
that say, ‘Hey, we think we need to write something on this but it
may not have reached the point of industry consensus yet,’” he said.
They may be standing up their own working group to explicitly
address cyber resilience and safety in the near future.
Revisions Today Working for Tomorrow
Standards like these two are an increasingly important part of the
future because there’s a lot of real dynamism in the aviation indus-
try right now, Alexander said. “Not just in terms of building or de-
veloping the next products to support more long-standing aircraft
types of designs and operations, but also looking at some of the
newer forms of aviation, whether that’s unmanned systems both
commercial and defense, and use of things like supersonic passen-
ger jets and other advanced mobility vehicles,” he said. “These
standards have to be designed in a way that will support different
applications and maintain the integrity and safety for which these
vehicles and operations have to comply.”
 COVER STORY

250 g s of
our history
18 | SEPTEMBER 2023 | aerospaceamerica.aiaa.org
 A lot can go wrong when you’re trying to
collect matter from deep space and bring
it home. Your spacecraft could crash-land
on its target, as a Japanese spacecraft
did in 2005. Your capsule’s parachute
could fail and the capsule could slam into
the ground, breaking into thousands of
pieces, as a NASA capsule did in 2004.
Keith Button spoke to the team that aims
to deliver bits of the asteroid Bennu
home on Sept. 24 without any drama.

BY KEITH BUTTON | buttonkeith@gmail.com

aerospaceamerica.aiaa.org | SEPTEM BER 2023 | 19

 T
he scene unfolding on a campus TV screen
was troubling.
“A train wreck,” says Dante Lauretta, a
Universit y of Arizona planetar y sciences
professor who was among those watching the
landing of NASA’s Genesis capsule in 2004.
It was returning after a three-year mission to collect
solar wind ions. The NASA video feed showed a
distant dot in the sky that came into focus as it
plummeted like a fl ying saucer wobbling and tum-
bling end over end.
“I knew right away they were in trouble. You’d
never want your capsule to get into the tumbling
configuration,” Lauretta says.
Tumbling meant that the drogue parachute and
main chute had failed to deploy, so the recovery heli-
copter could not grasp the chute and set the capsule
down gently on the desert floor. The range controller
on the broadcast confirmed this: “We do not see a
drogue chute. Negative drogue.” The camera stayed
on the capsule all the way to its impact with the ground
about 30 seconds later, at 311 kph. It was embedded in
the Utah desert mud like a half-buried truck wheel,
cracked open with pieces scattered around.
“It was like a gut punch right below my solar
plexus,” Lauretta says. “All the wind just got sucked
out of my lungs.” He immediately thought of what his
friend Donald Burnett, principal investigator for
Genesis, must have been going through. He remem-
bers thinking, “Th is is a bad day.”
Nineteen years later, Lauretta is principal inves-
tigator for another NASA mission to deliver extrater-
restrial matter to Earth — OSIRIS-REx — with a
parachute landing planned for Sept. 24 in the same
patch of desert: the U.S. Department of Defense’s
Utah Test and Training Range. At each step of the
mission, he’s been fi xated on avoiding the pitfalls of
Genesis and other missions.
OSIRIS-REx (short for Origins, Spectral Interpre-
tation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith
Explorer) is NASA’s first asteroid sampling mission. If
the $1 billion mission succeeds, scientists will have
250 grams of rocks and dust from the near-Earth
asteroid Bennu — about the weight of a cup of water.
“It doesn’t sound like a lot, but it is huge,” says
Eileen Stansbery, chief of the Astromaterials Research
and Exploration Science division at NASA’s Johnson
Space Center in Houston. By comparison, the Japan
Aerospace Exploration Agency’s fi rst Hayabusa mis-
sion yielded less than 1 milligram — inadvertently
gathered when the spacecraft crash-landed on the
asteroid Itokawa — and Hayabusa2 collected 5 grams
from the asteroid Ryugu.
From direct samples, “you can tell the pressures
and temperatures at which specific mineral compo-
nents were born, and that tells you when and how in
the evolution and formation of our solar system a
20 | SEPTEMBER 2023 | aerospaceamerica.aiaa.org
particular body was formed,” says Stansbery, who
headed the team that recovered the broken Genesis
capsule and its collector plates.
How Earth formed is among the questions that
scientists hope to explore with the study of the Ben-
nu sample. Where Earth acquired its water and or-
ganic (carbon) molecules — the ingredients that made
life possible — is still an open question. Because
Bennu orbits the sun on nearly the same path as
Earth’s orbit, the asteroid is a potential window into
how Earth coalesced 4.5 billion years ago from debris
and possibly from planetesimals that were about the
same distance from the sun.
Earth and these original ingredients are like a
chocolate chip cookie that has already been baked, says
Beau Bierhaus, a Lockheed Martin planetary scientist
on the OSIRIS-REx team.
“All of the original ingredients that went into mak-
ing the Earth in some sense are still kind of there, but
they’ve just been baked up to the point that we don’t
know what the source material may have been like,” he
says. Bennu could show scientists what the cookie dough
looks like without baking, or heating from Earth’s core,
in this analogy.
Scientists have tried to discern similar answers
about Earth’s origins from meteorites, but that ma-
terial has been altered by the heat of reentry and
contaminated by terrestrial material and water, like
cookie dough that’s been dropped on a dirty floor,
Bierhaus says.
Nearly any material from a carbon-rich asteroid
like Bennu wouldn’t survive entry into Earth’s atmo-
sphere — it would burn up — unlike meteorites that
originated from metallic asteroids, for example.
“We have some meteorites on Earth that we think
might be like Bennu, but they’re a tiny fraction of the
overall meteorite collection,” Bierhaus says.
Lessons from Genesis
Though the big test will come on Sept. 24, OSIRIS-REx
has so far avoided trouble. It was launched in 2016,
and in 2020 reached its robotic arm down to Bennu’s
surface to collect rocks and dust. If all goes as planned,
the sample will be recovered and delivered to a tem-
porary clean room at the Utah test range, uncontam-
inated by earthly material. There, the sample will be
wrapped and crated for a fl ight aboard a C-17 cargo
plane to NASA Johnson the next day.
From the early days of OSIRIS-REx, Lauretta and
the Lockheed Martin spacecraft designers, builders
and operators vowed to learn from mistakes made
on earlier robotic sample return missions, including
Genesis, which Lockheed Martin also built and
operated.
Ultimately, NASA recovered nearly all of the solar
wind ion collection surfaces from the 14,000 broken
pieces of Genesis, with ions etched deeply enough
Hard but doable: the history of robotic sampling
Over the span of six decades, robotic sampling spacecraft have brought home about 2 kilograms of material from
space, including 5 grams of asteroid bits. NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission aims to increase by 50 times the amount of
asteroid material available for study. What does history say about the odds of success? Nine missions out of 17 failed,
and two experienced serious complications.

Country Mission Return Dates Purpose Outcome

China Chang’e 5 Dec. 17, 2020 Return lunar regolith from Landed in the Inner Mongolia region of northern China via
the Mons Rümker volcanic parachute with 1,730 grams of lunar dirt and rocks.
mound northwest of the
moon’s equator.

Japan Hayabusa2 Dec. 6, 2020 Return rocks and dirt Landed by parachute in Australia with 5 grams of material,
from near-Earth asteroid 540 milligrams of which were shared by the Japan Aerospace
Ryugu. Exploration Agency with NASA, which plans to return the favor
and share a portion of the OSIRIS-REx samples with JAXA.

Russia Fobos-Grunt August 2014 (planned) Return 200 grams of soil Became stranded in Earth orbit when the Fregat upper stage
from Phobos, one of the did not fire its engines. In early 2012, the spacecraft reentered
two Martian moons. the atmosphere.

Japan Hayabusa June 2010 Return samples from Landed by parachute in Australia carrying about 1 milligram,
near-Earth asteroid 15,000 grains. The collecting mechanism was damaged during
Itokawa. its first sampling attempt, but scientists believe some particles
were pushed into the sample container during the impact with
the asteroid.

U.S. Stardust January 2006 Collect particles from the Landed in the Utah desert by parachute with 10,000 particles
tail of comet Wild 2 and larger than 1 micrometer from Wild 2, plus separately collected
from space dust. samples of space dust, including seven rare microscopic parti-
cles that dated back to the origins of the solar system.

Genesis U.S. September 2004 Collect solar wind ions. Drogue and main parachute failed to deploy, foiling plans for
a helicopter to swoop in with a dangling hook and snatch the
chute and gently lower the capsule to the ground. The capsule
impacted the ground at 311 kilometers per hour in the Utah
desert, but scientists salvaged most of the samples.

Soviet Luna missions 1969-1976 Return samples of lunar A combined 301 grams of lunar soil was returned. Eleven Luna
Union dirt and rocks. probes were launched; three managed to deliver samples
to Kazakhstan. Some failed in spectacular fashion: Luna 18
crashed some 500 kilometers from the Apollo 11 site while
Armstrong and Aldrin were on the moon.

SOURCE: Beyond Earth: A Chronicle of Deep Space Exploration, 1958–2016

into the metal plates not to be disturbed by contam-
inants from the crash. Even so, 2004 was a discour-
aging year for Lauretta, then the deputy principal
investigator, and colleagues, who were trying to win
approval for their mission to Bennu on the heels of
the Genesis crash. The team’s fi rst proposal was re-
jected by NASA.
“We got hammered on engineering, and Lockheed
is our aerospace provider, and they just crashed in
the desert,” Lauretta says.
On top of that, still percolating in memories was
the loss of NASA’s Mars Climate Orbiter, which in
1999 missed its orbit altitude and disintegrated in
the Martian atmosphere due to a navigation error
caused by one team using metric units and another
using English units. Also in 1999, Mars Polar Land-
er crashed during its descent when its main engines
shut down prematurely.
“There were a lot of failures in planetary science,”
Lauretta recalls.

aerospaceamerica.aiaa.org | SEPTEM BER 2023 | 21

 But Lauretta’s mentor, Michael Drake, who was
principal investigator at that time, fl ipped the per-
spective: The Genesis crash was good news, he told
Lauretta, because their team would learn from the
mistakes, not repeat them and grow stronger because
of them.
“He was right about that. We studied that failure
intensely,” says Lauretta, who became principal
investigator in 2011 when Drake died of cancer.
The design of the OSIRIS-REx capsule is similar
to that of Genesis: It is intended to detach from the
top deck of the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft about four
hours and 97,000 kilometers before the capsule’s
landing in Utah. Once detached, the capsule will be
autonomous; it won’t be able to receive any commands
from the ground. Should the detachment not work,
the spacecraft would be put in a backup orbit for a
second attempt in September 2025. If all goes as
planned, though, the capsule will enter the atmosphere
and release the drogue and main parachute that will
carry it to the desert floor. (Unlike Genesis, no heli-
copter is involved at this point.) Meanwhile, the
spacecraft will maneuver to continue in an orbit
around the sun.
After the Genesis crash, the NASA-convened
investigative board traced the cause to the mission’s
autonomous fl ight phase. Four spring-loaded switch-
es, each the size of the metal cylinder on the eraser
end of a pencil, were supposed to initiate a timer that
would trigger pyrotechnics to release the capsule’s
parachutes. But the switches were installed backward,
so the weighted plungers inside the switches couldn’t
press down in response to the capsule’s deceleration
as it entered the atmosphere. The electrical circuit
needed to arm the timer could not be completed.
Lockheed Martin engineers installed the switch-
es backward because that’s how they were drawn in
22 | SEPTEMBER 2023 | aerospaceamerica.aiaa.org
the blueprints. The lesson for OSIRIS-REx — besides OSIRIS-REx team
the obvious, “Don’t install the switches backward” members conducted
rehearsals at the Utah
— was to test the entire assembly that contains the
Testing and Training Ground,
switches for its pyrotechnics under the most fl ight- where the craft is due to
like conditions that can be reproduced. Genesis land on Sept. 24. With a
planners hadn’t done that. The error went undetect- mock capsule, they practiced
ed in part because of a “lack of involvement” by the assessing the capsule for
damage and packaging it
Jet Propulsion Lab managers, the board concluded.
for transport via helicopter
To simulate flight conditions, the OSIRIS-REx to a nearby clean room (next
team decided to test the trigger assembly under the page). There, the container
same g-forces expected during reentry. In early 2016, would be opened to extract
they took the assembly from Lockheed Martin’s the asteroid sample.
facility in Littleton, Colorado, to the Geotechnical NASA/Keegan Barber
Centrifuge Laboratory at the University of Colorado
Boulder, about an hour away.
“You put an astronaut on a centrifuge to make
sure that they can survive the launch environment
and the reentry conditions. We put our return capsule
through the centrifuge for exactly the same reason,”
Lauretta says.
But the process would be more complex. From
earlier tests, they had determined that they also
needed to cancel out the 1-g effects — Earth’s natural
gravity — for the centrifuge to realistically mimic
reentry forces, says Josh Wood, who led OSIRIS-Rex’s
system design at the time.
The solution: They attached the loaf-of-bread-sized
trigger assembly to a plate that would spin it like a
Lazy Susan as the centrifuge arm spun the unit. The
spinning of the plate would cancel out the lateral
g-forces. They ran the centrifuge to replicate the full
range of g-forces the capsule would experience during
entry, a maximum of 40 gs. The results showed that
the trigger assembly would work as planned.
They also tested the switches that must react when
the capsule impacts the ground, sparking another
pyrotechnic device that shoots a knife through the
bridle connecting the capsule to the main chute. That
step ensures that if it’s windy, the capsule isn’t dragged
across the desert surface. And they also tested the
capsule’s aeroshell on a larger centrifuge with a
5.5-meter arm.
Adding to their confidence were drop tests they
had conducted two years prior with the parachute
canister at Mountain Home Air Force Base in Idaho.
They had a helicopter hover at 1,500 feet while dangling
a 55-gallon drum, weighted to mimic the mass of the
capsule, with the canister mounted on top. The hook
holding the drum was released, and as the drum fell
away, a line attached to the helicopter pulled the
drogue chute from the canister. A few seconds later,
a timer triggered the main chute to unfurl and a
pyrotechnic device to fi re a knife that cut away the
drogue, similar to the apparatus for cutting away the
capsule’s main chute after landing.
These tests revealed a problem with the apparatus
for cutting the drogue free: The Kevlar loop that held
the drogue’s bridle straps together sometimes prevent-
ed the drogue from unfurling quickly, which in turn
delayed the unfurling of the main chute by about 3
seconds. They redesigned the drogue to remove a piece
of Teflon tape that had held the loop rigid for easier
cutting. Instead, they coated the loop in a liquid epoxy
to harden its fibers, explains Sajjad Reza, who was the
principal engineer for the OSIRIS-REx parachute system.
After ground testing and another series of helicopter
drop tests, they proved that the fi x worked: The chutes
deployed on time.

Prepare for landing

In July, under clear skies at the Utah test range,
Lauretta wore sunglasses and a broad-rimmed cap
with a neck flap as he walked gingerly through an-
kle-deep mud. Though strikingly similar to the des-
ert mud that had coated the Genesis shards, this mud
was created with water hauled in by a tanker truck
to rehearse a what-if scenario: Retrieve the OSIRIS-
REx capsule after heavy rains. Th is was one of nine
rehearsals the team will have conducted by the time
of the landing on Sept. 24 to make sure everyone
knows their roles in locating, bundling and transport
the 50-kilogram, car-tire-sized capsule to a hangar
at the test range, where the temporary clean room
has been set up.
On the day of the landing, a 10-person recovery
team, including Lauretta, will wait just outside the
50-kilometer-wide ellipse where the capsule is pro-
jected to land. Once landing occurs, the members
will swoop in on three helicopters, with a fourth
carrying a NASA TV crew to document the recovery
from the air.
Speed is of the essence to prevent or limit possible
contamination. “You want to just go on muscle mem-
ory at that point,” Lauretta says. “It’s kind of like a race
car team. When you go into a pit stop, if you rehearse
everything, you get those tires replaced and the fuel
thing done in seconds. As opposed to if you haven’t
done it, you could be wasting minutes on that.”
During the mud rehearsal, Lauretta practiced his
landing day role: collecting samples of soil from the
landing area — mud and water, in this instance —
without slipping. Technicians picked up the mock
capsule from the goo, while Lauretta and others on
the environmental monitoring team held vials to
collect any water that drained out of the capsule as
it was lifted. They also syringed up samples of water
from the ground and collected mud in Teflon baggies.
On landing day, simular samples will be collect-
ed and cataloged so scientists will be better equipped
to rule out the possibility that something they fi nd
in the asteroid sample isn’t a contaminant from Earth.
“It’s like a forensics investigation. You want to
have control of the evidence all the way back,” Lauret-
ta says: a record of all the environments that OSIRIS-
REx passed through, from the building of the space-
craft to the Utah landing site to the clean rooms. If a

aerospaceamerica.aiaa.org | SEPTEM BER 2023 | 23

protein chain is discovered in the sample, for exam-
ple, scientists need to determine its origin, he says.
“If this was from the asteroid, this is a really huge
science result. If it’s from the Earth, then I just need
to understand that it was contamination and not write
a science paper about it.”
“We have all of these witnesses to the history of
the sample collection that will allow us — we expect
in most cases — to be confident in our science and
not have contamination fool us,” he says.
On landing day, plans call for the recovery team
to wrap the capsule — expected to have a temperature
of about 54 degrees Celsius initially, from the heat of
reentry — in multiple Teflon bags and a tarp. Then
they will place it in a cargo net harness at the end of
a 30-meter line for the helicopter ride to the clean
room. The goal is to transport the capsule within one
hour of landing, says Richard Witherspoon, Lockheed
Martin’s ground recovery lead for OSIRIS-REx.
At the clean room, a team must remove the tarp
and bags and disassemble the capsule. The heat shield
and back shell will be pulled off to reveal the alumi-
num canister that contains the sample. A hollow
needle and tube will be stuck into a port in the can-
ister, starting a flow of nitrogen gas meant to keep it
purged of earthly contaminants. The canister will be
sealed inside four Teflon bags and a shipping con-
tainer for transport the following day to its permanent
clean room at NASA Johnson.
Th is consistent nitrogen purge is a lesson learned
from colleagues on the Japanese Hayabusa missions,
Lauretta says. On one of the missions, some of the
asteroid sample spilled, and the team noticed it re-
acted with the atmosphere, changing its chemistry.
Keeping the Bennu sample in quarantine-like
conditions to prevent contamination is a chief goal
of the recovery team.
24 | SEPTEMBER 2023 | aerospaceamerica.aiaa.org
What about the opposite scenario — that the The 2004 crash of NASA’s
sample could contaminate Earth with a deadly ex- Genesis sample return
capsule in the Utah desert
traterrestrial microorganism, like in Michael Crich-
looms large for OSIRIS-
ton’s bestseller, “The Andromeda Strain”?
REx mission planners. Its
“We do not have to worry about that,” Lauretta parachutes did not deploy,
says, due to the cosmic radiation that Bennu has been and the capsule could not
exposed to for hundreds of millions of years. The be caught by a helicopter
as planned. The flat discs
radiation “should sterilize any lifeforms that we are
containing samples of solar
aware of.”
wind shattered on the desert
Plus, Bennu’s orbit around the sun crosses Earth’s floor.
orbit, so rocks that the asteroid regularly throws off
U.S. Air Force 388th Range Squadron
its surface have almost certainly already landed on
Earth. NASA assessed the OSIRIS-REx mission for
planetary protection concerns — contamination on
Earth by a life from another world — and cleared it
for unrestricted return to Earth, Lauretta says.
Meanwhile, at Lockheed Martin’s OSIRIS-REx
control room in Littleton, officials have rehearsed
various scenarios based on previous sample return
missions. Some of that planning was based on the
experiences of the control room for Stardust, the
Lockheed Martin-operated comet dust collector that
landed safely at the Utah range in 2006. For instance,
15 minutes before the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft is
supposed to release the sample capsule on Sept. 24,
the batteries that power the avionics for parachute
deployment must come online for the fi rst time in
seven years. When the batteries for Stardust came
online, also after a seven-year hiatus, the Littleton
fl ight operators were a little surprised by a voltage
reading they saw on their computer screens. After
some discussion, they determined that the batteries
were working as planned, but because they had not
viewed the readings and their format for seven years,
there was some confusion about what they saw, says
Sandy Freund, the Lockheed Martin program man-
ager for OSIRIS-REx.
 To avoid surprises on the 24th, before OSIRIS-REx
was launched and the capsule avionics batteries put
into sleep mode for the seven-year round trip, the
team took screenshots of the capsule’s normal battery
voltage readings. They also created various problem
scenarios with the spacecraft on the ground and took
screenshots of those, such as if battery voltage was
low or if cables had been severed between the space-
craft and capsule, as they are designed to do before
reentry, says Freund, who worked in the control room
for the Stardust and Genesis landings. They reviewed
those screenshots this year to train the fl ight opera-
tions crew for “off-nominal scenarios” when the
battery readings aren’t normal.
“That way, we know there’s absolutely no confu-
sion,” she says. “Although we do have a handful of
people still on the team” from when OSIRIS-REx
launched, “that’s a long time ago and a long time ago
for people to remember details like that.”
Starting in January, flight operators also practiced
diagnosing and solving other problems that could
arise, with scenarios generated by a computer mock-
up of the spacecraft. For example, if the batteries
show no voltage or not enough voltage to deploy the
SpaceX designs, manufactures, and launches advanced rockets and
spacecraft including Starship, a fully reusable transportation system
designed to carry both crew and cargo to Earth orbit, the Moon, Mars
and beyond.
For more information, visit spacex.com.
parachute, the flight operators may repeat the sequence
that brings the batteries online — turning on a heat-
er again to burn through a depassivation layer, a thin
layer that forms on the batteries’ electrodes when
they’re not in use, Freund says. Or they might try
commanding the batteries to come online via a dif-
ferent path, such as through redundant hardware on
the spacecraft.
“Ultimately, the team is going to do whatever they
possibly can to get that voltage to the appropriate
level,” she says.
In all, the full flight operations crew was planning
to run through about 30 scenario tests with the
spacecraft test lab by the end of August.
As the days count down to the planned OSIRIS-REx
landing, Lauretta will be rehearsing and mulling over
what could go wrong. He says he has been almost ob-
sessively rereading articles and reports about the
Genesis crash and rewatching the YouTube videos of it.
“I’ve actually watched that footage a lot, probably
too much lately,” he says, maybe to prepare himself
emotionally “in the event that for some reason, we’re
in a similar situation. I’m kind of fascinated with it
at this point.”
aerospaceamerica.aiaa.org | SEPTEM BER 2023 | 25
A a at a
j ct or
he li te
Airbus in 2020 released three concepts for hydrogen-powered aircraft that could be built in 2035 and added a fourth a few
months later. See chart on page 33.

Airbus

| R 3 | g
Even if a new breed of aircraft powered by hydrogen
were available by 2035, that might not be fast enough to
help much with the industry’s goal of reaching net-zero
carbon emissions by 2050. Paul Marks takes us inside the
technical challenges facing hydrogen aircraft — and the
case for vastly increasing the resources currently applied to
the necessary technologies and infrastructure.

BY PAUL MARKS | paulmarksnews@protonmail.com

g | | 27

Airbus plans to assess
liquid hydrogen and fuel
cell propulsion by trying
out the technologies on
its ZEROe demonstrator, a
modified A380. A series of
research flights are planned
for the mid-2020s. This
illustration shows a fuel cell
engine installed upstream
of the aircraft’s tail. Liquid
hydrogen stored in the
fuselage would generate
electricity for propulsion. At
right, a turbofan engine has
been installed instead. The
green cylinders represent
the internal hydrogen tanks.
Airbus
28 | SEPTEMBER 2023
E
arlier this year, two budget airlines in India
and one in Ireland placed a series of colossal
orders for kerosene-fueled jetliners. These 1,270
aircraft contributed to the aviation industry’s
best sales in the fi rst half of any year since 2010,
but the early 2030s delivery dates for many of
the aircraft means they will be flying, and emitting
climate-warming carbon dioxide, well past the mid-
dle of the century. That’s the very time period when
the Montreal-based International Air Transport
Association, whose member airlines carry 83% of the
world’s passengers and cargo, wants to achieve
net-zero carbon dioxide emissions for air travel,
specifically by 2050.
How can net-zero be possible with so many
kerosene-burning jets on order now? IATA has an
answer, but it’s one that hydrogen fans aren’t convinced
is feasible: IATA is encouraging the introduction of
sustainable aviation fuels, SAF, made from renewable
feedstocks like recycled cooking oils, agricultural
waste and forestry debris. These fuels, which are just
starting to be used, can be “dropped in” existing
aircraft and burned just like fossil fuels. Today, they
are blended with kerosene, but the aim is to fly aircraft
on 100% SAF. No additional CO2 would be added to
the atmosphere, because as the crops grew, they
extracted CO2 to make their biomass.
| aerospaceamerica.aiaa.org
In a rival approach, Airbus has teamed with CFM
International, while Rolls-Royce has teamed with
easyJet, a budget airline in the United Kingdom, to
get hydrogen-powered aircraft onto the market by
2035. Even so, IATA doesn’t expect enough of those
to be flying in time to make a major contribution to
the net-zero goal. In fact, it places hydrogen combus-
tion and hydrogen fuel cell options as only part of the
13% contribution it anticipates from “new technolo-
gies.” IATA expects the lion’s share of the contribution
(65%) to be made by SAF. The balance of the way to
net-zero would be achieved by capturing carbon from
the air, planting additional trees to “offset” CO2
emissions and tightening fl ight routes, among other
operational efficiencies.
If the aviation industry is to get hydrogen airliners
flying sooner than 2035, what’s needed is a focused
research and development effort akin to J. Robert
Oppenheimer’s Manhattan Project, says Rob Miller,
a professor of aerothermal technology and director
of the Whittle Laboratory at the University of Cam-
bridge in the U.K. Why might a project on such a scale
be needed? The tempest of wildfi res, heatwaves and
other severe weather this year suggests we’re rapidly
approaching the 1.5 degree Celsius threshold that
could have catastrophic consequences, including
severe flooding prompted by meters of sea level rise.
 Founded by turbojet engine inventor Sir Frank
Whittle, the Whittle Lab is charged with leading the
U.K.’s research on zero-carbon flight, which it accom-
plishes in part by “silo busting” — encouraging dispa-
rate research organizations to work together to get results
all the faster. To do this, Miller leads what he calls an
“agile, multidisciplinary Skunk Works” at the lab,
working to develop advanced hydrogen-fueled jet engines
alongside engineers from Rolls-Royce, the University
of Oxford and engineers from a host of other companies
with relevant specialties.
It’s an approach he’d like to see global hydrogen
researchers adopt. “If we had a more warlike spirit and
we really focused and said, ‘We’re going to do this,’ I
think we could really tighten up the timescales to hy-
drogen jet aviation,” Miller says.
As for the goal of flying hydrogen aircraft in 2035,
“I think that’s doable, but I don’t think we’re going to
get much earlier than that,” he adds, unless we have
a Manhattan-scale project. Currently, hydrogen
aircraft research is spread across multiple distinct
domestic and pan-regional efforts. Among them is
the European Union’s 27-nation, 654 million-euro
Clean Aviation program, which includes the German
Aerospace Center’s Ultra Performance Wing project,
in which researchers are developing an efficient
airliner wing for hydrogen aircraft and another design
for SAF aircraft. Other projects include the Airbus/
CFM and Rolls-Royce/easyJet initiatives.
One organization that could focus minds on hy-
drogen aviation to a Manhattan Project scale, Miller
suggests, would be the U.K.’s Advanced Research and
Invention Agency. ARIA was founded in January 2022
to pursue development of as-yet unspecified “high-
risk, high-reward” ideas, much as DARPA does for the
U.S. Defense Department.
And it’s not just the engines: He stresses that re-
search must be expanded to include light, durable
cryogenic fuel tanks, the valving systems for the hy-
drogen and the control systems.
For its part, the nascent ARIA says it’s too early
to say what the organization will be focusing on
technologically, as it is still in the process of hiring
its “founding cohort of program directors,” says a
spokesperson.
The climate challenge
Atmospheric scientists calculate that commercial
aviation today is responsible for 5% of global radiative
forcing, the trapping of heat in the atmosphere. CO2
emissions are responsible for about 2.5% of the forcing,
and the balance comes from emissions of other green-
house gases, nitrogen oxides, and also particulates
and water vapor that turn into contrails and clouds.
aerospaceamerica.aiaa.org | SEPTEM BER 2023 | 29
The path to net-zero
The International Air Transport Association anticipates that hydrogen-powered aircraft will make a relatively small
contribution to achieving net-zero carbon emissions by 2050.

Business-as-usual CO2 growth

1.80

1.35
Gigatons of C02

21.2 gigatons
0.90

0.35

0
2020 2035 2050

Estimated contribution to net-zero

19%
65%
Sustainable aviation fuels

Offsetting/carbon capture

3% New technologies like

hydrogen-powered aircraft

Infrastructure/operations
efficiences like flight routing
13%

Graphic by Thor Design, reporting by Paul Marks | Source: International Air Transport Association

That 5% isn’t a lot right now, but the share could grow
without advances in clean technologies. Other sectors
are working to cut their emissions. Meanwhile, pas-
senger numbers are projected to double or even triple
by 2050, sending aviation’s share of emissions to
anywhere from 10% to 37% of the global total, accord-
ing to calculations by the Aviation Impact Accelerator,
an offshoot of the Whittle Lab that develops comput-
er models for sustainable fl ight researchers.
While Boeing is focused on SAF, and IATA is
largely counting on it, no one can say for certain that
enough SAF can be produced to meet the envisioned
65% contribution to net-zero. IATA estimates that
about 449 billion liters of SAF will be needed annu-
ally by 2050 to meet that goal, but in 2022, just 300
million liters were produced. Liquid hydrogen com-
busted directly in jet engines or converted into elec-
tricity via fuel cells to drive motors, however, would
automatically rid fl ights of CO2 emissions, as there’s
no carbon in their chemistry to emit. So why exactly
is it taking so long to develop these new aircraft?
“There’s three embedded challenges,” says Alan

30 | SEPTEMBER 2023 | aerospaceamerica.aiaa.org

Newby, director of aerospace technology and future
programs at Rolls-Royce in Derby, U.K., where the
company is developing hydrogen jet turbine tech-
nology with a number of industrial partners. “First,
there are the technical challenges in developing the
engine and the airplane.”
Rolls is focusing on hydrogen combustion “because
for any kind of reasonable range and size of airplane,
you’re going to need to fuel it with liquid hydrogen.
So you have all the attendant challenges of having
cryogenic tanks on an airplane, and then managing
cryogenic fuel all the way till it gets to the engine, and
then burning it.”
“The second challenge is a lack of green hydrogen
infrastructure,” he says, referring to the production
of hydrogen through the electrolysis of water using
only renewably sourced electricity. “Over 95% of the
hydrogen produced today comes from fossil fuels, and
so industry in general has got a massive challenge on
its hands to develop a green hydrogen production
industry. Even if I had a viable aircraft today, I still
wouldn’t have a viable aviation system.”
On that supply point in particular, Newby supports
Miller’s notion of a hydrogen-specific Manhattan
Project. “If we’re going to move quicker, the industry
needs to receive more funding, not just on the tech-
nology but on the hydrogen infrastructure as well.”
And the third challenge? “There’s some uncertain-
ty, though we think it’s all positive, about the non-CO2
pollutants of hydrogen combustion and the water vapor
and contrails produced. But we think that’s soluble, Rolls-Royce and British
quite frankly.” (As will be seen ahead, researchers at airline easyJet powered this
modified Rolls-Royce AE
ARPA-E in the U.S. think it’s a solvable problem too.)
2100-A turboprop with liquid
Newby and Rolls-Royce are not alone in recog- hydrogen fuel. The ground
nizing these challenges and attacking those that they test, conducted late last
can. Rival CFM International, the joint venture of GE year at an outdoor facility in
in the U.S. and Safran in France, is teamed with Boscombe Down, England,
was the first in a planned
Airbus on its ZEROe initiative to develop two kinds
series toward the goal of
of hydrogen engines and assess four candidate jet- flying a Rolls-Royce Pearl 15
liners that would burn hydrogen and/or generate turbofan modified to burn
electricity with fuel cells. Other organizations are hydrogen.
also conducting research on enabling technologies, Rolls-Royce
including the Whittle Lab, the U.K.’s Aerospace
Technology Institute, and Cranfield University —
focusing on everything from test rigs to combustors,
fuel injectors, cryogenic pumps, on-aircraft fuel
transport issues and fuel storage.
On Newby’s fi rst point (the technical challenges
of the aircraft and engines), one has to take into account
the curious energy density and volumetric properties
of liquid hydrogen. “A kilogram of hydrogen produc-
es three times the energy of a kilogram of kerosene,
which is great because aircraft are always weight
restricted,” he says. “The downside is that the kilogram
of liquid hydrogen takes up four times the volume of
a kilogram of kerosene.”
And that has major implications for two key features
of the airframe layout: where you put the fuel tanks
and the passengers. “With hydrogen aircraft, the
combination of the fuel and tanks is lighter than with
aerospaceamerica.aiaa.org | SEPTEM BER 2023 | 31
 kerosene,” Miller says. But that additional volume
requires extra large tanks that must be vacuum insu-
lated to keep the liquid hydrogen at cryogenic tem-
peratures of minus 235 C. So “you have to move those
tanks from your wings into the fuselage,” he says,
referring to the fact that today’s kerosene-fueled jets
store most of their fuel in wing tanks.
And that change requires a complete redesign. “You
can’t just retrofit an existing aircraft with hydrogen jet
engines since, if you did that, moving the tanks from
the wings into the fuselage pushes loads of passengers
out,” Miller says. “And so, the number of passengers you
fly on your aircraft becomes really small.”
For which read: utterly uneconomic. Th is means
novel fuselages must be designed to accommodate
these vacuum-insulated cryogenic tanks, and that
must be done without heavily impacting seat numbers.
That’s why, in its ZEROe project, Airbus is evalu-
ating four concepts to determine which is feasible to
bring to market by 2035. Two have pretty convention-
al-looking cylindrical fuselages — one for a twin
hydrogen-combusting turbofan and one for a twin
hydrogen-combusting turboprop. On both, the air-
craft’s pressurized volume ends near the trailing edge
of the wings, and the cryogenic liquid hydrogen tanks
are placed in the unpressurized region behind the
aft-pressure bulkhead.
If you’re wondering, the fact that jets cruise through
frigid air at temperatures of minus 55 C is actually of
little help.
“It will be cooler behind the rear-pressure bulk-
head, but that won’t be significant in maintaining the
hydrogen as a liquid,” explains Glenn Llewellyn,
Airbus vice president for zero-emission aircraft, who
has teams working on various aspects of hydrogen in
France, Germany, Spain and the U.K. “We have to
keep the hydrogen below minus 253 degrees Celsius
across all fl ight altitudes and atmospheric tempera-
tures. The insulation chosen will maintain the hydro-
gen as a liquid for a significant period of time on the
ground, as well as during the fl ight, so airlines can
operate the aircraft in a similar way to today.”
In the third candidate, a blended wing body,
Airbus places the turbofans in a shroud atop the wing,
and the cryogenic fuel tanks sit beneath the wing,
hidden inside the aerodynamic composite structure.
All three designs have a potential hybrid feature:
By gasifying some of the liquid hydrogen, fuel cells
might generate electricity to supplement the liquid
hydrogen combustion, as well as provide each aircraft’s
“nonpropulsive” electrical energy needs — powering
undercarriage, control surfaces, cabin systems and
avionics, for instance. But Llewellyn says it’s too
early to say if that will happen.
“We are studying a number of architectures with
separate and integrated electrical power systems. We
w i l l have to demon st r ate t he s a me le vel of
32 | SEPTEMBER 2023 | aerospaceamerica.aiaa.org
redundancy and availability as on today’s aircraft, as
a minimum. So it’s yet to be decided how we do that.”
With the fourth ZEROe candidate, Airbus is study-
ing an even larger role for fuel cells: providing all of
the power and propulsion. Multiple “pods” — each
containing hydrogen fuel cells, a liquid hydrogen tank
and an electric motor — would be arrayed along the
aircraft’s wings, freeing up precious space in the fu-
selage. The total number of pods is yet to be determined,
but four (two on each wing) and six (three on each
wing) are among the configurations that Airbus is
considering. The advantage of this design would be
that pods could be swapped out as needed, making
for easy refueling and maintenance, and that the
design could easily be tailored for different flight
ranges by changing the number of pods.
Start your engines
So much for the airframes — what about the engines?
The Airbus fuel cell concept would be for medium-haul
fl ights of up to 2,000 kilometers, but most of the other
companies evaluating fuel cells energized by com-
pressed hydrogen gas stored in noncryogenic tanks
are targeting short-haul regional flights. And test
fl ights are underway: ZeroAvia in the U.K. has flown
a 19-seat Dornier-228 twin prop a number of times,
as has California-based Universal Hydrogen with a
40-seat De Havilland Canada Dash 8-300. For safety
of fl ight, both companies to date have replaced just
one of their aircraft’s conventional turboprop drives
with an experimental hydrogen drivetrain.
Newby, the Rolls executive, follows such fl ights
with interest but maintains that “all the work we and
others have done suggests the gas turbine is the ultimate
power plant” for long-haul, large passenger airliners.
At Rolls-Royce, he says, engineers began their
hydrogen jet quest with tests — fueled, they stress,
with wave-power-derived “green” hydrogen — in
which they converted a kerosene-burning turboprop
gas turbine to hydrogen operation. To do this, they
modified one of their AE 1200 jet engines from a Saab
2000 regional twin prop. “It’s very closely related to
the engine on the C-130 Hercules,” Newby notes.
“We converted the fuel injectors and the fuel
nozzles to run on gaseous hydrogen and basically
tested whether we could start the engine, whether we
could handle it and run it — and we did. It was a very,
very successful test,” he says.
What Rolls found is that the turbomachinery in
the engine does not have to change; it’s components
like fuel injectors that do. “It’s not like you’ve got to
rip the whole of the engine apart and change every
component. Quite the opposite. The only bit that re-
ally had to change was the fuel injector. So that was a
very interesting piece of learning,” says Newby.
Meanwhile, in the Airbus/CFM project, engineers
are also fi nding that turbomachinery architecture
The contenders
Medium or long haul, fuel cell propulsion or liquid combustion — these are among the factors that Airbus plans take
into account to determine the design of its inaugural hydrogen-powered airliner. That decision must come by 2028
if the aircraft is to begin flying passengers in 2035, the company says. Here are the concepts under consideration.

PASSENGERS RANGE ENGINES PROPULSION

Blended w g 200 3,700 km 2 Hybrid turbofans driven by

hydrogen combustion and
possibly electricity
generated by fuel cells

od 100 1,850 km Multiple Wholly fuel-cell powered;

configura- removeable pods each
tions being containing hydrogen fuel
studied, cells, a liquid hydrogen
including 4 tank and electric motor to
and 6 turn a propeller

u bo a 200 3,700 km 2 Hybrid turbofans driven by

hydrogen combustion and
possibly electricity
generated by fuel cells

p p 100 1,850 km 2 Hybrid turbofans driven by

hydrogen combustion and
possibly electricity
generated by fuel cells

Graphic by Thor Design, reporting by Cat Hofacker and Paul Marks | Source: Airbus

can be similar, “requiring only combustion and fuel
system adaptation for hydrogen,” says Llewellyn. “The
igniter technology may not differ too greatly from a
kerosene one, but injectors will have differences in
design to cope with hydrogen’s fuel characteristics
and to minimize non-CO2 emissions.”
Those non-CO2 emissions include oxides of
nitrogen gases, or NOx, created when nitrogen and
oxygen from the air react as the hydrogen burns.
Rolls’ next move will be to take one of its Pearl 15 jet
turbines — which power the Mach-0.9-capable Bom-
bardier Express 6500 business jet — and convert it to
burn hydrogen. This will involve developing all the
cryogenic fuel distribution systems that the engine will
need around it. Plans call for conducting ground tests
and later flying the modified engine in a demonstrator.
“We’ll be looking at the combustion of hydrogen:
Can we burn it safely and successfully and manage
the pollutants [like NOx] that come with it?” says
Newby. “Second, can we move it around the engine,
control something which is running on hydrogen,
and pump liquid hydrogen at minus 253 degrees
Celsius, for example. And third, can we package an
engine with all the new heat exchangers that we will
need, plus the new fuel system and pumps. There’s a
whole engine packaging challenge to meet.”
Aiding this research is Rolls’ involvement in a
number of collaborative research programs with its
prime hydrogen jet engine project sponsor easyJet,
plus partners Spirit AeroSystems of the U.S. and Re-
action Engines of the U.K., the latter having a cryo-
genic heat-exchanger technology that was originally
developed for Skylon, a putative single-stage-to-orbit,
air-breathing spaceplane.

aerospaceamerica.aiaa.org | SEPTEM BER 2023 | 33

“If we’re going to move quicker, the
industry needs to receive more funding, not
just on the technology but on the hydrogen
infrastructure as well.”
— Alan Newby, Rolls-Royce
On the Airbus side, flight tests are also in the works.
Plans call for installing a CFM-built hydrogen combus-
tion engine onto a modified A380 test aircraft and flying
it between 2026 and 2028, powered by four liquid hy-
drogen tanks in the fuselage. Comparable flights are
also planned with an in-development fuel cell engine.
“Clean” flying?
It’s not just NOx from hydrogen jet engines that will
need careful controlling. Like kerosene engines do
today, hydrogen turbines would produce water vapor
as a result of the chemistry of hydrogen combustion
in air: two hydrogen molecules combining with one
oxygen molecule to create a whole lot of heat, plus two
water molecules. And when warm, moist air from the
engine exhaust contacts the frigid air at cruise altitudes,
ice crystals can form reflective condensation trails,
or contrails. These in turn may form cirrus clouds that
trap heat in the atmosphere through radiative forcing.
Atmospheric scientists have strong evidence that
the climate impact of contrails from kerosene-fueled
planes could be as much as that caused by the CO2
they emit — in other words, an additional 2.5% of
global warming could be due to contrails. The finding
fi rst appeared in September 2020 in what has turned
out to be a highly influential research paper written
by a team of 21 scientists, led by David Lee of the U.K.’s
Manchester Metropolitan University, in the journal
Atmospheric Environment.
“Only about one in 20 [kerosene-fueled] flights
produces a persistent contrail that forms into cirrus
cloud,” says Miller of the Whittle Lab. “The CO2 that’s
produced by the flight is in the atmosphere for hundreds
of years, but the contrail is only there for a fraction of
a day. But for those few hours, we think the climate
34 | SEPTEMBER 2023 | aerospaceamerica.aiaa.org
impact of the contrail could be about the same as from
the CO2 from the flight hanging around for 100 years.”
If the brave, new world of hydrogen aviation were
to produce a great deal of contrail-based climate
warming — perhaps even more than kerosene jets
produce — the point of switching to hydrogen would
be lost, as Aerospace America reported earlier this
year [“The dark side of green,” page 24, June 2023].
As a result, engineers want to measure just how
the emissions from a hydrogen engine differ from those
of a kerosene one. To find out, DLR, the German Aero-
space Center, alongside Airbus, plans to undertake a
series of live in-flight experiments in which two jet-pow-
ered sailplanes — one propelled by kerosene, the
other by hydrogen — will be followed by a DLR plane
brimming with atmospheric sensors. The data har-
vested should reveal the size, distribution and densi-
ty of water vapor, contrail ice crystals, NOx levels and
particulates, allowing scientists to make some action-
able comparisons between kerosene and hydrogen jet
engine contrail formation at different altitudes.
Help may be at hand, and from an unlikely source:
artificial intelligence. The frequency and conditions
surrounding contrail formation has given the Advanced
Research Projects Agency-Energy in Washington, D.C.,
an idea: Could it be possible to recognize the combi-
nation of atmospheric and engine exhaust conditions
necessary to produce contrails and cirrus clouds?
If the answer is yes, pilots could then be advised
to change altitude or engine settings and effectively
switch off the climate-harming contrail. Peter de
Bock, formerly a principal scientist working on jet
engines at GE Global Research in upstate New York,
thinks so. In February, he established the $10 million,
18-month PRE-TRAILS research program to solicit
proposals from academia and industry on ways air-
craft — both kerosene and hydrogen fueled — can
sense and avoid contrail generation.
Short for Predictive Real-time Emissions Tech-
nologies Reducing Aircraft Induced Lines in the Sky,
PRE-TRAILs is “designed to set up a mechanism where
we can, with 80% accuracy, predict whether an aircraft’s
emissions at any point of flying will generate a cloud,”
de Bock says. “But right now, according to the data,
we are 90% wrong in predicting whether we’re going
to make a cloud or not. So let’s fi x that fi rst. I want to
get up to 80% right.”
ARPA-E is hoping that researchers come up with
ways to harness multiple data sources to train a
deep-learning artificial intelligence model to recog-
nize the blizzard of conditions suspected of combin-
ing to forge a persistent contrail.
“Th is is a fuel-independent mechanism. Basical-
ly, you have to study the atmosphere and know what
your engine is producing and then corroborate using
observations and other mechanisms during [AI mod-
el] training time, whether it is generating cloud,” says
de Bock. The deep-learning model, he says, could
ingest data from satellites, weather stations, engine
sensors, multispectral cameras and humidity sensors.
From the crucial role of open
environments to the essential
principles of implementation,
Ansys invites you to explore how
organizations can unlock the
transformative potential of
digital engineering.
WHITE PAPER AVAILABLE NOW.
How does he envisage pilots being advised of a
need to change altitude? “That’s up to the teams to
decide. But currently, there is information on the
turbulence radar that’s fed back to ground control
— so there is actually a feedback loop there already.
So they could start rerouting fl ights, perhaps. There’s
many implementation options that can be explored.”
The PRE-TRAILS program’s aims were developed
in association with Steven Barrett, an MIT aeronautics
and astronautics professor, and his colleagues at the
university’s Laboratory for Aviation and the Environ-
ment. They have been working with Delta Air Lines
to begin identifying the airliner movements that can
prevent contrail formation on live Delta fl ights.
Miller of the Whittle Lab is impressed with this
line of research: “What’s important about this ARPA-E
research, from the hydrogen point of view, is that it’s
likely that by 2035 we will be able to switch off most
contrails by clever flying,” says Miller.
If it works as expected, contrails from kerosene
flights could be switched off, too, so even those airlines
currently buying airliners in record numbers today
will be able to instantly cut their climate impact. But
whether it will take a latter-day Manhattan Project to
get us there remains to be seen.
UPL.INC /AIAA-PAPER
aerospaceamerica.aiaa.org | SEPTEM BER 2023 | 35
 Perfecting
the SAR
process REPORTED BY DEBRA WERNER | dlpwerner@gmail.com

36 | SEPTEMBER 2023 | aerospaceamerica.aiaa.org

F
innish startup ICEYE stunned the space industry in 2018 by publishing imagery
from a dishwasher-sized synthetic aperture radar satellite. Until then, convention-
al wisdom held that SAR imagery could only be collected by car-sized satellites,
and there were not many of them, at least in the commercial world. There was a
four-spacecraft constellation funded by Italy, a Canadian satellite and a German
one. Today, half a dozen startups around the world operate small SAR satellites
whose numbers could exceed 100 within a couple years. For customers, the attraction
of radar is the ability to image targets at night and in nearly all weather conditions.
Seeking to apply commercial SAR to its role of “making intelligence possible,” the U.S.
National Reconnaissance Office, which operates its own radar satellites, in early 2022
began purchasing commercial SAR imagery on a small-scale basis. Contracts were
awarded to five companies: three in California — ICEYE U.S., a subsidiary created in 2020
for American national security contracts; Capella Space, founded in 2016; and Umbra,
founded in 2015 — along with Virginia-based Airbus U.S. and PredaSAR of Florida. In
addition to evaluating image quality, the agency has been assessing industry cyberse-
curity practices, determining how quickly companies can deliver data and purchasing
radar imagery for military and intelligence operations in Ukraine and elsewhere.
An open question is how efficiently NRO and the National Geospatial-Intelligence
Agency, which tasks NRO and commercial satellites, would deliver imagery once a
larger-scale, systematic effort is established.
NRO declined to discuss the SAR acquisition process but provided a statement: “The
Executive Branch is working through the process of developing a large-scale commercial
radar program. NRO is ready to move forward with an acquisition as soon as a decision
has been made. In the meantime, NRO will continue to purchase commercial radar prod-
ucts” for the Defense Department and intelligence community “using our Strategic
Commercial Enhancements Broad Agency Announcement contracts” — the same process
under which the contracts were awarded to the five companies — “ensuring the users
have seamless access to commercial radar as we scale up.”
With a larger-scale acquisition effort on the horizon, I asked four commercial SAR
experts one simple question: “What’s your vision of the perfect process for getting com-
mercial SAR products into the hands of U.S. troops?” — Debra Werner

aerospaceamerica.aiaa.org | SEPTEM BER 2023 | 37

 Thomas Ager
Author of the 2021 book “The Essentials of SAR” and adviser to ICEYE U.S.
Former NGA manager of research and development programs. A former fellow
in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and former vice chair of a
U.S. Intelligence Community SAR forum.
I
do not claim to know the “perfect” process, but I’m pretty sure
it would be like a prototype we built nearly a decade ago to
support tactical users and fi rst responders.
I was once the SAR program manager in the NGA Infor-
mation Technology Directorate. I was responsible for trying
to do new things with SAR. We prototyped a lot of wonderful
ways to access SAR data easily and process it using apps.
After I left NGA in 2013, they started a project called iView, a
joint initiative between NGA and the Air Force Research Lab to
build a system to order, access and exploit the SAR commercial
imagery sources of that time: the Italian Cosmo SkyMed constel-
lation; the German Aerospace Center’s TerraSAR-X satellite; and
Radarsat-2, the Canadian Space Agency-MDA Ltd. satellite. I
worked on iView as a subcontractor. iView was an imagery store-
front. With a prototype budget, we offered browser-based access
to a collection-management tool for image ordering, electronic
linkage to the SAR vendors that confi rmed orders within seconds,
delivery of SAR complex data to a cloud server and apps to mess
with it interactively. Users could view traditional grayscale SAR
images, but they could also use the complex data to quickly make
things like color subaperture images that highlight human-made
objects.
We completed iView in 2015, and our users from U.S. Southern
Command, Joint Interagency Task Force South, the Federal Emer-
gency Management Agency, the Polar Geospatial Center and NGA
gave it the most enthusiastic evaluations I have ever seen. Here are
two examples:
SOUTHCOM: “Being able to identify accesses and ordering
specific images at the constraints we require streamlines the
current process by days. It puts the collection management pro-
cess in the combatant commands’ hands, versus hoping someone
else understands your needs and will collect the right location at
the right time.”
38 | SEPTEMBER 2023 | aerospaceamerica.aiaa.org
Joi nt I nteragenc y Ta sk Forc e Sout h: “ W it h t he r ig ht
implementation, this system can be the way ahead and the #1
system for collecting and exploiting commercial imagery. In the
near future, I would like to see this working with other data. It is
easy, user friendly and I would have loved to use this system when
deployed to one of the countries that we support. Th is is the best
project I’ve worked on in my collections management career. I
sincerely hope this continues ... and helps to change and shape the
future of GEOINT management.”
Since we completed iView, commercial SAR use has greatly
expanded. SAR was once limited to spy satellites and large govern-
ment-commercial partnerships, but it’s now fully commercial. We’ve
got a problem in helping people understand how to use SAR, but the
first crucial goal is ordering and delivery that is easy and fast.
Users should be able to order commercial SAR through a web-
site, a single interface with access to all the commercial SAR con-
stellations. It should be linked to Google Earth so that they can
draw a box around the area and say, “I need this resolution of this
place on this day or as quickly as possible.” You might even be able
to say, “I don’t want the whole damn image, because I’m a remote
user and I don’t have a lot of communications. Send me this part
of it right here.”
Some remote users don’t have access to the cloud. They would
get direct downlink, or we would send data via secure fi le transfer
protocol as an image or an image chip, if the image is too big. And
we would give people some simple software to do stuff with it. If
you’re an advanced user, you can do things with the complex data.
Most users just need simple grayscale images.
How much have project ordering code, processing hardware
and the cloud improved in the near decade since iView was com-
pleted? What are military users doing now to order and access
commercial SAR imagery? If SAR is not easy and fast, it loses much
of its value.
 David Gauthier
Former director of NGA Commercial Operations, where he assessed and
contracted for commercial geospatial imagery and data, and former
director of NGA’s Office of Strategic Operations, which focuses on
strategy, performance and risk. Left NGA in February to become chief
strategy officer of GXO Inc., a California-based consulting firm. AIAA
senior member.

I
’m an engineer. I start with thinking of the technical solution.
I will preface this by saying there are two ways to consume
commercial SAR. One would be to get the imagery and then
exploit that as a military unit. The other way would be to get
information derived from commercial SAR, which at NGA
we’ve been calling radar commercial analytic services.
A lot of units still want to consume imagery. Today, it’s a hub-
and-spoke model. Government procurement and functional man-
agers gather all the imagery, put it in a central library and allow
users to pull from that library. It’s not bad, but it’s also too slow for
the warfighter because we introduce all these communication delays.
At NGA, we put in place some faster processes for delivering SAR
imagery to Ukraine. We allowed the field units to pull directly from
company web portals on the internet. Once the imagery was available
from the company, it was instantly available to the field unit.
We’re right on the cusp of optical intersatellite links. When those
mesh networks get realized in space, the imagery can go from the
point of collection to the end user at the speed of light. Optical
satellite links and direct downlinks will get imagery to the warf-
ighter faster and more efficiently. Then, the combatant command
operations centers will have instant access to the imagery when it’s
collected. They can have battlefield situational awareness. Imagery
from companies can be aggregate to achieve a less than one-hour
revisit rate, and that imagery can then be shared with coalition
partners.
That would be how I would technically do the imagery. There’s
probably an acquisition solution that is a marketplace model that
would allow combatant commands to pre-buy capacity. If they pre-
buy it for the warfighter, all of this direct tasking and direct down-
link works perfectly.

“Optical satellite links and direct down-

links will get imagery to the warfighter
faster and more efficiently.”
aerospaceamerica.aiaa.org | SEPTEM BER 2023 | 39
 Keith Masback
Geospatial intelligence consultant and former CEO of the U.S. Geospatial
Intelligence Foundation, a nonprofit group that hosts the annual GEOINT
Symposium. A former U.S. Army infantry officer, he oversaw the Army
Intelligence Master Plan as the service’s intelligence, surveillance and
reconnaissance integration director. Later led NGA’s Source Operations
Group, which tasks imaging and missile-warning satellites.

S
AR is vital to the conduct of full spectrum of military op-
erations, from tactical to strategic. As an infantryman, I
learned the importance of understanding and leveraging
the terrain, weather and light conditions. SAR provides
that day, night and most-weather assured imaging. Re-
member that about 70% of the world’s landmass is com-
pletely or partially covered by clouds at any given time, and 50% of
the globe is in darkness. To me, electro-optical imagery was for
planning, and SAR imagery was for operations.
And we ought not be arguing about whether it’s the NRO or the
Space Force or whomever acquiring the commercial data. Th is is a
ridiculous ongoing bureaucratic squabble that is taking away pre-
cious time, energy and resources from being focused on how to most
efficiently and effectively get users — from the foxhole to the White
House — the data, information and intelligence they need to ac-
complish their respective missions.
When I led the Source Operations Group at NGA, our collection
managers had been given the new title “source strategists.” The idea
was that their overarching expertise in the remote sensing platforms
and systems would complement the specific regional and/or func-
tional expertise of an analyst. Source strategists assemble the best
mix from the broad array of assets available to solve intelligence
problems, thinking through the lens of spatial, temporal and spec-
tral diversity. The absolute least efficient and effective way to approach
collection is for an analyst to say, “I want a picture from this satellite
at this time.” The analyst is best served by simply registering a re-
quirement: “I’m trying to figure out something about this facility in
this country. How should I go about getting the imagery I need?”
The source strategist asks questions like, “What type of activity
would you expect there? Do activities occur during the day or during
the night? What things come there? What things leave from there?
Are there any unique pieces of equipment there?” With that context,
the source strategist assembles the right tools to gather the data to
support solving the problem.
Perhaps the solution is something like this: I’ll establish a base-
line by using Planet to get lower-resolution images daily so that I
can develop an understanding of what happens there. (Th is might
also be accomplished by high- to medium-altitude drones, if they
are available and have access.) Then, because it’s an area with a lot
of clouds or because they tend to do things at night, I’m going to use
SAR from ICEYE to reveal more about the facility. Then, I’ll use the
unique capabilities of the classified overhead systems to round out
the source data for the analyst.
When I oversaw this process, there were more requests than ca-
pacity. Now, we have gone increasingly from being data starved to
being data rich. A related consideration is the availability and means
of dissemination. The very best data, information and intelligence
delivered too late is often worthless. From an overarching perspective,
matching resources available to the requirements used to be rather
intensively manual. With machine learning supporting artificial in-
telligence, it’s become increasingly automated and more efficient.
All that said, this largely ought to be transparent to a military
commander. Their intelligence staff translates their operational
needs into intelligence requirements. These requirements are an-
alyzed and parsed and move quickly up to NGA, the National Se-
curity Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency and others.
Newer commercial technologies like onboard processing, data
centers and laser crosslinks in space will help shrink timelines. For
instance, does the commander even need the picture or just the answer
to their question? If the Army has identified a target for a hypersonic
missile, before they hit fire, they may simply need to know if the target
is still there. That image can be captured from space, crosslinked,
processed and analyzed in space. The only thing that needs to come
down is the answer, “Yes.” Then, they hit fire. An image is collected
shortly afterward for battle damage assessment analysis. That deter-
mines whether the strike had its desired effect or if a re-strike is required.

40 | SEPTEMBER 2023 | aerospaceamerica.aiaa.org

 Todd Master
Chief operating officer at Umbra, a SAR company founded in Santa Barbara,
California, in 2015. A former U.S. Air Force Reserve officer assigned to the
Defense Intelligence Agency and NRO, he was a DARPA program manager and
a mission systems engineer at Orbital ATK, now part of Northrop Grumman.
AIAA senior member.

T
he internet is the simplest way to get that data to the field,
even in a deployed fashion. Basically, our system would get
tasked, and data would get processed and put into the cloud.
Then, users could access it. For military users, it’s a question
of latency. Internet access will have some latency associat-
ed with it because it has to get to the internet and then back
to the user.
“Users will always
What if you need it faster? Does it make sense to have the data
transferred through space without ever touching the commercial
cloud? That is defi nitely the lowest latency, from a direct-to-user
want to drive to
standpoint. A lot of people are very eager to jump to that concept of
operations, but that requires some integration upfront with those
users to make sure that they have the ability to task the spacecraft
low latency.”
and to get the data back. That is something we are working on. There
are defi nitely applications where that is desirable. It can provide
things like over-the-horizon remote sensing for a single asset like a
carrier that wants to task a satellite and know when the data will
come back.
I think we should use it when it’s appropriate. If you want to send
data to a military weapon system that’s in fl ight, that’s probably the dozens. As that increases to hundreds of commercial satellites, it
only thing that makes sense. But if you’re trying to send data to an starts to get more interesting. You can imagine a case where any
intelligence cell at the center, you may not need that. I want to make user can task any spacecraft and get the data back directly without
sure that we’re not overlooking the fact that the internet is a ubiq- even touching the internet. It’s a little hard to envision today, but it
uitous and powerful thing that offers a lot of opportunities to get creates new mission applications as you look to the future.
data where it needs to go. People ask, “Why would we need that? Where’s the commercial
The best way to get data has a lot to do with the mission that use case that overlaps with that?” Higher-speed data access and im-
you’re trying to accomplish. What is the latency of the need for that provement in data is always desired by commercial and government
data? Users will always want to drive to low latency. But the difference users. Think of it like GPS. GPS was good enough before we released
between seconds and minutes makes a huge impact in terms of it down to the meter or centimeter level. Now, look at all these com-
which architecture you can use. mercial applications. It may not be immediately apparent today why
It doesn’t necessarily make a ton of sense today to give users you would want direct tasking to a SAR constellation and direct data
direct access to spacecraft when you have a small number of assets downlink. There are probably unforeseen advantages in both the
across the commercial constellations. It’s in the low number of commercial market space and the military market space.

aerospaceamerica.aiaa.org | SEPTEM BER 2023 | 41

 FROM THE INSTITUTE

A NOT SO GIANT LEAP: THE TRILLION-

T
he space ecosystem is growing at an exponential
rate and projected to reach $1 trillion by the year
2040. As the demand for innovation and supplies
increases, the supply chain and workforce begin
to feel the pressure of a rising space economy. What
are the major cost drivers for the ambitious projects
planned by startups and by major corporations?
What type of partnerships will deliver success? How
do governments purchase services in new ways?
Which investment approaches will deliver the
desired ROI? What have we learned from commercial
ventures so far?

IN THEIR WORDS
Members of the 2023 ASCEND
Guiding Coalition and other
industry leaders recently
shared their views on the
challenges and opportunities
Kara Cunzeman Joe Landon
as we leap toward a $1 trillion Lead Futurist for Strategic Foresight, CEO, Crescent Space;
space economy. Hear more The Aerospace Corporation;
ASCEND Guiding Coalition
ASCEND Guiding Coalition
A lot of the work and a lot of the missions that
from these luminaries in their We are building the foundation for infrastructure have gone to space historically have been

video interviews, available to in getting beyond low Earth orbit and

watch on the ASCEND website:
www.ascend.events/attend/
experience-ascend.
geosynchronous orbit. It’s opening up an
aperture for a whole wide range of services that
we don’t have today like asteroid mining,
off-world tourism, and research and
development that doesn’t exist today.
We’re really starting to see the dawn of a
new age of human spaceflight. It is not driven
primarily by governments, but rather by
citizen scientists, the private sector, and
students. There’s a whole new avenue for
space exploration that lies outside of the
traditional lanes we’ve been looking at for
the last 60 years.
“space for Earth.” There are missions that help us
communicate on Earth, help us observe the
Earth, and measure the climate and other parts
of life around us here.
What’s growing, and I think a big opportunity, is
“space for space” as well. Not only can we go out
and learn and explore and help ourselves on
Earth, but we can start to develop an economy in
space that doesn't rely fully on Earth. It’s one
where we’re building things in space, we’re
exchanging goods in space, and we’re building
communities and opportunities to do business.

42 | SEPTEMBER 2023 | aerospaceamerica.aiaa.org

DOLLAR SPACE ECONOMY
AIAA will convene more than 2,000 people to
tackle the challenges and seize the opportunities of
the expanding space economy during 2023 ASCEND.
Set to take place 23–25 October in Las Vegas, this
event will feature collaboration and knowledge
exchange, igniting the brightest sparks of imagination
to envision, design, and construct the future of space
commerce in low Earth orbit and cislunar space.
Join the conversation among leaders, innovators,
and policymakers during 2023 ASCEND, 23–25
October, Caesars Forum, Las Vegas. Register now:
www.ascend.events/register.

Clare Martin John Shannon Hemali Vyas

Executive Vice President,
Astroscale U.S.; ASCEND
Guiding Coalition
I wonder how many people really, truly
understand how vital space is to their everyday
life. It is used for financial transactions, weather
forecasting, making sure we can find the
restaurant to meet friends for dinner tomorrow,
using the map on our phone.
If we put a sustainable space economy in place,
then what we will see is many more applications
in day-to-day life. We may not even be able to
appreciate what that could be right now.
Vice President, Boeing
Exploration Systems
We are seeing a return in space activities. As we
get better, as we get more innovative, and as we
have new companies enter that have a diversity
of thought, then we’re going to end up having
additional applications that you and I can’t even
think about right now. Those will end up driving
the space economy and it will be a bigger and
bigger piece of the overall economy.
Flight Project Support Office,
NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory;
ASCEND Collaborative Program
Deputy Chair; AIAA Economics
Outreach Committee Chair; AIAA
San Gabriel Valley Section Chair
We really want to focus on the supply chain
aspect for the Earth-based applications because
as we grow, given the supply chain constraints
that we have, how do we address that? Whether
it’s parts, whether it’s workforce, whether it’s
education – they are all related aspects of supply
chain. So if you really want to grow exponentially
in the space domain, can we do that? The supply
chain supports that.

aerospaceamerica.aiaa.org | SEPTEM BER 2023 | 43

 8–12 JANUARY 2024
ORLANDO, FL

E X PA N D T H E
BOUNDARIES

SAVE THE DATE

REGISTRATION OPENS 19 SEPTEMBER
The 2024 AIAA SciTech Forum promises to push the limits of
aerospace to pave the way for a faster, farther, and better future
for all. Across five days in January, you will witness breakthrough
science, revolutionary technologies, and generation after next
capabilities that are transforming our industry. The forum will
feature approximately 3,000 technical presentations across 60+
technical disciplines—the largest technical program ever.

Start making your plans to attend the world’s largest event for
aerospace research, development, and technology.

DAILY FORUM THEMES

MONDAY: Breakthrough Capabilities

TUESDAY: Future of Flight

WEDNESDAY: Emerging Capabilities and Challenges in Test

THURSDAY: Future of Space Operations

FRIDAY: Imagining the Aerospace Engineer of Tomorrow

JOIN US IN PERSON
SEPTEMBER 2023 | AIA A NEWS AND EVENTS

AIAA
Bulletin
DIRECTORY

AIAA Headquarters / 12700 Sunrise Valley Drive, Suite 200 / Reston, VA 20191-5807 / aiaa.org

To join AIAA; to submit address changes, member inquiries, or renewals; to request journal fulfillment;
or to register for an AIAA event. Customer Service: 800.639.AIAA (U.S. only. International callers should
use 703.264.7500).

All AIAA staff can be reached by email. Use the formula first name last initial@aiaa.org.
Example: christinew@aiaa.org.

Other Important Numbers: Aerospace America / Catherine Hofacker, ext. 7587 • AIAA Bulletin / Christine Williams, ext. 7575 • AIAA Foundation / Alex D’Imperio,

ext. 7536 • Book Sales / 800.682.AIAA or 703.661.1595, Dept. 415 • Communications / Rebecca Gray, 804.397.5270 • Continuing Education / Jason Cole, ext.

7596 • Corporate Programs / Nancy Hilliard, ext. 7509 • Editorial, Books and Journals / David Arthur, ext. 7572 • Exhibits and Sponsorship / Paul doCarmo , ext.

7576 • Honors and Awards / Patricia Carr, ext. 7523 • Integration and Outreach Committees / Angie Lander, ext. 7577 • Journal Subscriptions, Member /

800.639.AIAA • Journal Subscriptions, Institutional / Online Archive Subscriptions / David Arthur, ext. 7572 • K–12 Programs / Jake Williams, ext. 7568 • Media

Relations / Rebecca Gray, 804.397.5270 • Engage Online Community / Luci Blodgett, ext. 7537 • Public Policy / Ryan Cooperman, ext. 7541 • Section Activities

/ Lindsay Mitchell, ext. 7502 • Standards, International / Nick Tongson, ext. 7515 • Technical Committees / Angie Lander, ext. 7577 • University and Young

Professional Programs / Michael Lagana, ext. 7503

We are frequently asked how to submit articles about section events, member awards, and other special interest items in the AIAA Bulletin. Please contact the staff liaison listed above
with Section, Committee, Honors and Awards, Event, or Education information. They will review and forward the information to the AIAA Bulletin Editor.

aerospaceamerica.aiaa.org | SEPTEMBER 2023 | 45

AIA A BULLETIN | AIA A NEWS AND EVENTS

Calendar
FEATURED EVENT
23–25 OCTOBER 2023
Las Vegas

Building our sustainable off-world future

requires long-term thinking. Strategic
planning, innovation, scientific exploration,
and effective regulations and standards
will help us preserve space for future
generations. Join us at ASCEND and
participate in the technical exchanges
and collaboration that will help forge a
sustainable off-world future for all.

2023 ASCEND www.ascend.events/register

ABSTRACT
DATE MEETING LOCATION DEADLINE

2023

12–13 Sep Fundamentals of Space Domain Awareness Course ONLINE (learning.aiaa.org)

18 Sep–25 Oct Spacecraft Design, Development, and Operations Course ONLINE (learning.aiaa.org)

18–28 Sep Aircraft Reliability & Reliability Centered Maintenance Course ONLINE (learning.aiaa.org)

19 Sep–12 Oct Fundamentals of High Speed Air-Breathing and Space Propulsion Course ONLINE (learning.aiaa.org)

21–22 Sep AIAA Rocky Mountain Section Meet the Employers & Annual Technical Symposium 2023 Fort Collins, CO (www.aiaa-rm.org/)

26 Sep–19 Oct Practical Approach to Flight Dynamics and Control of Aircraft, Missiles, and Hypersonic Vehicles Course ONLINE (learning.aiaa.org)

2–6 Oct* 74th International Astronautical Congress Baku, Azerbaijan (iac2023.org)

2–18 Oct Overview of Python for Engineering Programming Course ONLINE (learning.aiaa.org)

10–13 Oct Applied Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) Course ONLINE (learning.aiaa.org)

10–26 Oct Metal Additive Manufacturing for Aerospace Applications Course ONLINE (learning.aiaa.org)

16–19 Oct Space Domain Cybersecurity Course ONLINE (learning.aiaa.org)

17 Oct–16 Nov Wind Tunnel Testing for Aircraft Development Course ONLINE (learning.aiaa.org)

23–25 Oct ASCEND Powered by AIAA Las Vegas, NV 22 March 23

24 Oct–2 Nov Technical Writing Essentials for Engineers Course ONLINE (learning.aiaa.org)

28–29 Oct SmallSat Education Conference Kennedy Space Center, FL 25 May 23

30 Oct–2 Nov Foundations of Digital Engineering Course ONLINE (learning.aiaa.org)

46 | SEPTEMBER 2023 | aerospaceamerica.aiaa.org

For more information on meetings listed below, visit our website at
aiaa.org/events or call 800.639.AIAA or 703.264.7500 (outside U.S.).

ABSTRACT
DATE MEETING LOCATION DEADLINE

2023

30 Oct–15 Nov Hypersonic Applications: Physical Models for Interdisciplinary Simulation Course ONLINE (learning.aiaa.org)

31 Oct–16 Nov Space Architecture: Designing an Orbital Habitation System Course ONLINE (learning.aiaa.org)

7–16 Nov Business Development for Aerospace Professionals Course ONLINE (learning.aiaa.org)

17 Nov Fundamentals of Space Domain Awareness Course ONLINE (learning.aiaa.org)

17–18 Nov AIAA Young Professionals, Students, and Educators (YPSE) Conference Laurel, MD (www.aiaaypse.com)

27–28 Nov AIAA Region VII Student Conference Canberra, Australia, & Online 7 Sep 23

Aircraft and Rotorcraft System Identification Engineering Methods for Piloted and UAV
4–7 Dec ONLINE (learning.aiaa.org)
Applications with Hands-on Training Using CIFER® Course

2024

6–7 Jan 2nd AIAA High-Fidelity CFD Verification Workshop Orlando, FL (aiaa.org/scitech)

6–7 Jan Design of Experiments Course Orlando, FL (aiaa.org/scitech)

6–7 Jan Propeller Aerodynamics for Advanced Air Mobility Course Orlando, FL (aiaa.org/scitech)

6–7 Jan Spacecraft Design, Development, and Operations Course Orlando, FL (aiaa.org/scitech)

8–12 Jan AIAA SciTech Forum Orlando, FL 25 May 23

14–15 Feb ASCENDxTexas Houston, TX

2–9 Mar* IEEE Aerospace Conference Big Sky, MT (www.aeroconf.org)

16–18 Apr AIAA DEFENSE Forum Laurel, MD 17 Aug 23

14 May AIAA Fellows Induction Ceremony and Dinner

15 May AIAA Awards Gala Washington, DC

4–7 Jun 30th AIAA/CEAS Aeroacoustics Conference Rome, Italy (aidaa.it/aeroacoustics/)

29 Jul–2 Aug AIAA AVIATION Forum Las Vegas, NV 12 Dec 23

30 Jul–1 Aug ASCEND Powered by AIAA Las Vegas, NV 12 Dec 23

9–13 Sep* 34th Congress of the International Council of the Aeronautical Sciences Florence, Italy (icas2024.com)

14–18 Oct* 75th International Astronautical Congress Milan, Italy (iac2024.org)

*Meetings cosponsored by AIAA. Cosponsorship forms can be found at AIAA Continuing Education offerings
aiaa.org/events-learning/exhibit-sponsorship/co-sponsorship-opportunities.

aerospaceamerica.aiaa.org | SEPTEM BER 2023 | 47

AIA A BULLETIN | AIA A NEWS AND EVENTS

N early 3,000 participants, including 765 students, from 41 countries attended the
2023 AIAA AVIATION Forum, 12–16 June, San Diego. Throughout the week, leaders
from industry, academia, and government examined the theme, Revolutionary Leaps
Toward a New Age of Aviation, and discussed the challenges facing the aviation industry
and how we can work to reset expectations, redefine roles, and accelerate change. The
technical program contained over 1,000 technical presentations.

48 | SEPTEMBER 2023 | aerospaceamerica.aiaa.org

aerospaceamerica.aiaa.org | SEPTEM BER 2023 | 49
AIA A BULLETIN | AIA A NEWS AND EVENTS
2023 AIAA Graduate
Award Winners
Dr. Hassan A. Hassan Graduate Award
in Aerospace Engineering
Rutledge Fogel
North Carolina State University
Amount of Award: $6,000
Rutledge is
currently enrolled
as a master’s
student in the
aerospace
engineering
program at North
Carolina State University. He recently
graduated cum laude with his
bachelor of science in aerospace
engineering from the institution. He
intends to begin a master’s thesis
while continuing to perform research
for the Thermal Energy Research and
Management Lab at North Carolina
State University. He also plans to be a
graduate assistant for the aerial
robotics club. Rutledge’s career and
professional goals are to be an
aircraft or propulsion system designer
for a commercial and defense
aerospace company. He also intends
to continue learning about control
systems through his master’s degree
and would also aspire to be a control
systems engineer and designer.
I hope to be a great engineer and a
good education will place me on the
path to accomplishing that goal. This
award will decrease the financial load
caused by attending school and allow
me more free time and resources that
I will spend on my studies, research,
and activities which will shape me
into a great engineer.
Shaan Stephen
North Carolina State University
Amount of Award: $6,000
Shaan is a dynamic
young mind ready
to embark on his
graduate school
journey at NC State
University. Having
earned his
aerospace engineering degree with
the class of 2023, he’s set to pursue
his passion for aerospace by
continuing his studies. During his
undergrad years, Shaan actively
contributed to the High-Powered
Rocketry club, serving as the recovery
lead for his senior design project.
50 | SEPTEMBER 2023 | aerospaceamerica.aiaa.org
E ach year, AIAA distributes over $100,000 in scholarships and graduate awards to undergraduate
and graduate students studying aerospace engineering at accredited colleges and universities
throughout the United States and overseas. In 2023, AIAA scholarship and graduate award winners
came from all corners of the aerospace industry and are studying a variety of topics from digital
avionics to hypersonics. Below we profi le this year’s 24 scholarship and graduate award winners
who are shaping the future of aerospace.
Collaborating with Dr. Venkat
Narayanaswamy, he played a key role
in establishing a hypersonic tunnel on
NC State’s campus and co-authored a
paper on pressure-sensitive paint in
aerospace applications. When not
conquering academic pursuits, you
can find Shaan engaging in video
games or scaling heights through
rock climbing adventures with his
friends. A future trailblazer with a zest
for life!
Winning this award was quite a
shock for me, but I am glad to receive
it and put it to use in furthering the
field of aerospace!
Neil Armstrong Graduate Award
Michaela Hemming
University of Alabama in Huntsville
Amount of Award: $5,000
Michaela is an
Aerospace
Engineering Ph.D.
Candidate at the
University of
Alabama in
Huntsville under the
advisement of Dr. Gabe Xu. Her
dissertation research involves
backflow and recovery experiments
on multi-phase propellant injectors
for use in rotating detonation rocket
engine (RDREs). Her work is funded
through the NASA Space Technology
Graduate Research Opportunities
(NSTGRO) grant through which she
also has the opportunity to support
RDRE research at Marshall Space
Flight Center.
After graduation, Michaela hopes
to continue research and develop-
ment of advanced propulsion systems
either through government research
labs or private industry. She also has
an interest in following the policy
behind dispersal of research funding.
Her ideal job would be one that
allows her to influence the direction
of space propulsion research.
With this award, I will be able to
perform more experiments that take
the fundamental knowledge I’ve
gained and apply it to systems of
interest for the research community. It
will also help expand the reach of
research by allowing me to attend
more conferences I wouldn’t
otherwise have the funds to attend.
Orville and Wilbur Wright Graduate Award
Sandro Salgueiro
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Amount of Award: $5,000
Sandro is a Ph.D.
candidate at MIT
specializing in air
transportation sys-
tems. His doctoral
research focuses
on the design of
aircraft navigation routes while con-
sidering the risk of midair collisions
introduced by rare abnormal aircraft
behavior. By seeking to develop a
better understanding of the collision
risk between aircraft routes, Sandro’s
research aims to enable more effi-
cient and sustainable operations in
the National Airspace System. Sandro
is a multi-engine rated commercial
pilot with industry experience in con-
ceptual aircraft design and flight deck
design. He has also contributed to the
design of multiple instrument flight
procedures currently in use at Boston
Logan Airport. Sandro’s career goals
are to contribute to the development
of future air traffic control technolo-
gies, aircraft navigation systems, and
flight deck architectures.
Having your work recognized is
always a special occasion, but even
more so when the recognition carries
the names of the Wright Brothers.
Having always admired the spirit of
innovation that they impart on the
aviation industry to this day, I feel
incredibly honored and encouraged to
be receiving this award.
Lynn Pickering
University of Cincinnati
Amount of Award: $5,000
Lynn is a UC Ph.D.
candidate in Aero-
space Engineering
at the University
of Cincinnati. Her
research involves
using Fuzzy Logic as
an artificial intelligence (AI) method
that provides the transparency and
explainability to truly advance AI.
Explainability in AI (XAI) is essential
to enhance partnerships with humans
and ensure that AI is being utilized in
a fair and ethical manner. Her short-
term professional goals are to work
toward XAI systems in the aerospace
field that enable humans to place
more trust in AI, making for effective
human-machine systems. Long term,
her plans are to work in explainable
AI and policy to regulate AI so that
it works in the human user’s best
interest in any engineering field.
The Orville and Wilbur Wright
Graduate Award will have a positive
impact on me because I will have ade-
quate funding to continue my Ph.D.
studies. In addition, this award
reinforces my goal that explainable AI
systems be used to have an important
impact in the field of aerospace
engineering.
Guidance, Navigation and Control
Graduate Award
Animesh Shastry
University of Maryland, College Park
Amount of Award: $3,500
Animesh is a Ph.D.
student in the De-
partment of Aero-
space Engineering
at the University
of Maryland. He is
majoring in flight
dynamics and control and minoring
in Rotorcraft. He is passionate about
aerial robotics. His current research
focuses on developing a framework
for concurrent search and tracking of
multiple moving ground targets using
a swarm of UAVs. Previously he has
worked on developing a self-calibra-
tion framework for UAVs operating
in unsteady wind and implementing
it on an embedded platform that he
designed himself. He is skilled in im-
plementing advanced robotics algo-
rithms and building fully autonomous
robots. He aspires to make a mark in
the scientific community and pursue
research-oriented work in the field of
Guidance, Navigation, and Control.
This scholarship will help me
achieve my educational and career
goals. It will relieve some financial
burden, allowing me to focus on
learning and advancing my
professional training. It will help me
accelerate my goals and become a
successful professional in the field of
Guidance, Navigation, and Control.
Luis de Florez Graduate Award
Sybren Bootsma
Delft University of Technology
Amount of Award: $3,500
Sybren is a Master
of Science student
at the Faculty of
Aerospace
Engineering of Delft
University of
Technology,
graduating in the Control and
Simulation department. For his MSc
thesis, he investigates the perception
thresholds of stall models in flight
simulators, which will lead to a better
understanding of the required
accuracy of stall models in flight
simulation and pilot training. Working
to enhance flight safety is one of the
driving motivations for his studies and
enthuses him greatly.
For the future, he aspires to
contribute toward sustainable
aviation. Combining both sustainabili-
ty and safety in aviation would be
perfect future goal. As regarding the
near future, he is working on his
graduation project which is to be
finished in the beginning of 2024.
The award recognizes the important
work that TU Delft Aerospace
Engineering is doing and it makes me
proud to be part of this community.
The award is a great boost toward
finishing my MSc thesis and I am
looking forward to graduating and
starting my professional career in
flight safety and sustainable aviation.
John Leland Atwood Graduate Award
Catherine Nachtigal
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Amount of Award: $1,250
Catherine is a
second-year
graduate student in
the AeroAstro
program at the
Massachusetts
Institute of
Technology seeking a Ph.D. in
aerospace engineering with a
concentration in space propulsion.
She is researching new electrospray
thruster designs in the Space
Propulsion Laboratory with advisor
Professor Paulo Lozano. Following
graduation, Catherine plans to
continue working with electric
propulsion systems at a national lab
to increase the scale, efficiency, and
lifetime of electrospray thrusters for
deep space satellite and other
spacecraft missions.
This generous award will allow me to
purchase additional school supplies
to comfortably continue pursuing my
graduate education and research in
electrospray thrusters.
Gordon C. Oates Air Breathing Propulsion
Graduate Award
Daniel Gochenaur
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Amount of Award: $1,000
Daniel is a Ph.D.
student and NDSEG
fellow in MIT’s
Department of
Aeronautics and
Astronautics. Before
MIT, Daniel received
a Master of Philosophy in supersonic
aerodynamics from the University of
Cambridge, where he attended as a
Churchill Scholar. Daniel also holds a
Bachelor of Science in Aeronautics
and Astronautics from Purdue
University, and he has held
appointments with AFRL’s High Speed
Systems Division, Boeing’s Virtual
Warfare Center, and the JHU Applied
Physics Laboratory Air and Missile
Defense Sector. After graduating from
MIT, Daniel intends to join a
government defense laboratory
focused on developing aerospace
technologies that will enable future
advances in hypersonics and
space systems.
I am honored to receive this
recognition for my research on
supersonic inlet flow control. This
award inspires me to push even
harder toward achieving my career
goals, and is attributed to my
colleagues, advisors, and supporters
of recent years who have continuously
pushed me to perform at the
highest level.
2023 AIAA
Undergraduate
Scholarship Winners
AIAA Lockheed Martin Marillyn Hewson
Scholarship
Anna Maria Zueva
Columbia University
Amount of Scholarship: $10,000
Anna Maria is a
rising freshman at
Columbia University
who will be
majoring in Mechan-
ical Engineering and
minoring in
Computer Science. She currently
researches underwater mechanical
vibrations in the Multiphysics Lab at
the University of Nevada, Reno. She
also earned the Associate of
Engineering and Mathematics
degrees before graduating from her
high school as valedictorian. Anna
dreams of being a test flight engineer
and developing next-generation
aircraft. When she is not in the lab,
she can be found in local coffee shops
writing a novel. She loves practicing
public speaking and hiking around
her second home: Lake Tahoe. No
matter where life takes Anna, she
finds the most fulfillment in helping
others and will continue to do so as
she enters the aerospace industry.
Words cannot express my gratitude
for this award. It means the world that
AIAA members can help fund my
education and fuel my dreams of
becoming a successful test flight
engineer. Without this award, I would
not be able to fully take advantage of
the opportunities offered at Columbia.
With all my heart, thank you.
Priya Abiram
Cornell University
Amount of Scholarship: $10,000
Priya is an aspiring
astronaut and
entrepreneur
pursuing
Aerospace
Engineering at
Cornell Engineer-
ing. She hopes to land on Mars and
develop spin-off s from space life
support technology to improve the
human condition on Earth. She is a
Congressional Award Gold Medalist
and interned at The Boeing
Company as a Systems Engineer for
the 777X jet and at NASA Kennedy
Space Center for the Space Crop
Production team. Priya is a Cadet
Lieutenant Colonel in the Air Force
Auxiliary and a Citizen Science
Astronaut Trainee at the Internation-
al Institute of Astronautical
Sciences, who has trained in
spacesuit evaluation and acrobatic
fl ying, and designed and flew
payloads on microgravity research
flight. She is an innovator of
internationally awarded technolo-
gies and a published researcher.
She is building a satellite to the ISS
and rocketry team.
This scholarship is a big motivator in
helping me pursue my degree. As
someone who hopes to continue with
a graduate degree, this will help me
turn my passions and goals into
reality. Reducing financial commit-
ments also helps me pursue a pilot
license, scuba diving, and more.
Daedalus 88 Scholarship
Lucas Pabarcius
California Institute of Technology
Amount of Scholarship: $10,000
Lucas, from London,
England, is a Senior
at Caltech studying
Physics with a minor
in Aerospace
Engineering. He is
the Chair of Caltech
Air and Outer Space organization
(CAOS), and he led Caltech’s
“Visionary Concept” award-winning
aerospaceamerica.aiaa.org
team, LATTICE, for the 2022 NASA Big
Idea Challenge, and led Team
Explorer at the 2022 Caltech Space
Challenge.
Lucas wants to help enable an
inspiring future full of space activity
that benefits and enriches life on
Earth. He enjoys space engineering
problems and has previously worked
at NASA GSFC on missions including
Starshot, Starshade, ORCAS, PACE,
CUVE, and Europa Clipper. He has
also conducted research at NASA, in
labs, and backyards on laser
communications, Europa melt probes,
adaptive optics, bio-inspired
meta-materials, non-convex optimal
control, and hybrid rockets.
MIT Daedalus was a one-of-a-kind,
profoundly inspiring achievement. It is
an honor to receive the the Daedalus
88 Scholarship for my involvement
with Caltech’s LATTICE project—this
has inspired me to continue pursuing
ambitious, innovative and impactful
projects that can contribute to the
future of space exploration.
Jammal Yarbrough
University of Southern California
Amount of Scholarship: $10,000
Jammal studies
electrical and
computer
engineering at the
University of
Southern California.
He aspires to be an
electrical engineer for Millennium
Space Systems where his focus will
consist of designing satellites that
contribute to our national defense
and global communication networks.
Outside of his career goals, he is
passionate about inventions that
contribute to advances in solar and AI
technology. Ultimately, he will give
back to the community through
encouraging disadvantaged youth to
become engineers by providing
teaching and hands-on engineering
projects through the nonprofit
organization he started in 2021, the
Broken STEM Foundation.
The Daedalus 88 Scholarship enables
me to afford my education. The stress-
ful cost of university is now
manageable and focus will solely be
on my academic performance. By
utilizing the amazing scholarship that
AIAA has provided, I can reach my
goal of providing technological
advances in the realm of aerospace.
| SEPTEM BER 2023 | 51
AIA A BULLETIN | AIA A NEWS AND EVENTS
David and Catherine Thompson Space
Technology Scholarship
Noah McAllister
Rutgers University
Amount of Scholarship: $10,000
Noah is a senior
studying Aerospace
Engineering with a
minor in math at
Rutgers University.
He currently serves
as the AIAA Rutgers
Student Branch Chair and the Chief
Engineer of RU Airborne, the AIAA
Design/Build/Fly competition team,
having previously served as the
Propulsion Lead. During the school
year, Noah researches thin-film
coatings manufactured by self-limit-
ing electrospray deposition in the
Hybrid Micro/Nanomanufacturing
Lab; his senior thesis is on aeroelastic
design optimization in collaboration
with the Aerospace Systems
Directorate of the Air Force Research
Lab (AFRL). He has previously
interned at AFRL, and interned this
summer at Lockheed Martin Space on
the NASA Dragonfly mission.
Following graduation, Noah plans to
pursue a Ph.D. studying structural
design optimization and fluid-struc-
ture interaction.
The David and Catherine Thompson
Space Technology Scholarship will
help me continue my educational path
at Rutgers. I am grateful to AIAA for
this scholarship, as well as the
opportunities AIAA has provided.
Vicki and George Muellner Scholarship
for Aerospace Engineering
Nikolai Baranov
Purdue University
Amount of Scholarship: $5,000
Nikolai is an
aerospace
engineering student
with a strong
interest in
propulsion and
hydrogen
combustion. During high school, he
gained experience with turbomachin-
ery while balancing rotors to fund
their college education. Now, his
focus lies in exploring the possibilities
of hydrogen propulsion with a keen
eye on innovation and sustainability.
Nikolai values diverse hobbies and
takes a systematic approach to their
endeavors, aspiring to make a
significant impact in their field both as
a professional and a person. His
ultimate career goal is to pursue a
research-oriented path and obtain a
Ph.D. in aerospace engineering,
where he aims to contribute
groundbreaking advancements.
Emphasizing the importance of
continuous self-improvement, Nikolai
52 | SEPTEMBER 2023 | aerospaceamerica.aiaa.org
is dedicated to shaping the future of
propulsion and combustion in the
aerospace industry.
This scholarship will allow me to
continue on my academic path, while
allowing me to engage in social and
technical activities that are not
financially motivated. I will continue
learning and working as an
undergraduate researcher and
present my contributions during one
of the upcoming AIAA conferences
before my Ph.D.
Wernher von Braun Scholarship
Ashish Cavale
Georgia Institute of Technology
Amount of Scholarship: $5,000
Ashish is an
aerospace
engineering
undergraduate
student at the
Georgia Institute of
Technology. He has
a strong interest in astrodynamics and
propulsion systems. He actively
engages in research projects,
including various CubeSat propulsion
efforts in the Glenn Lightsey Research
Group at the Space Systems Design
Laboratory. Through internships at
companies like Analytical Graphics
Inc., Northrop Grumman, Blue Origin,
and Ball Aerospace, he has gained
valuable hands-on experience in the
aerospace industry. Ashish’s career
aspirations revolve around
contributing to space exploration and
making a positive impact in the field.
Ultimately, Ashish dreams of
becoming a professor and researcher
to inspire and mentor future
generations of aerospace enthusiasts.
This scholarship brings me closer to
my goals of continuing my education.
With its support, I can pursue a Ph.D.
and work toward becoming a
professor. It provides a valuable boost
on my path to making a meaningful
impact in space exploration and
research.
Dr. James Rankin Digital Avionics
Scholarship
Quintan Ajluni
Purdue University
Amount of Scholarship: $3,000
As an Aeronautical
and Astronautical
Engineering
Undergrad at
Purdue University,
Quintan loves
working on things
that fly. This past summer he had a
great internship with Metro Aviation,
where he worked in the Avionics shop
learning the manufacturing and instal-
lation processes behind much of the
sensor and communication
equipment in air ambulance
helicopters. Going forward, he hopes
to try his hand at rockets and is
interested in working with any of the
numerous new rocket startup
companies. The fast pace and
innovative environment these
companies cultivate is an especially
exciting prospect for the young
engineer. He hopes to keep that
energy in his later career and
continue to strive toward better and
better spaceflight.
This scholarship will allow me to focus
on learning this year. While I had
planned on researching for pay to
help cover my expenses, this will take
some of the stress out of paying for
college and allow me to focus
primarily on learning and researching
what I find most interesting.
Dr. Amy R. Pritchett Digital
Avionics Scholarship
Vikas Patel
Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University –
Daytona Beach
Amount of Scholarship: $3,000
Vikas is a junior in
Aerospace
Engineering at
Embry-Riddle
Aeronautical
University. For the
past two years, he
has been a part of ERAU’s successful
Design/Build/Fly team. At the 2023
AIAA DBF competition, he served as
the team’s Lead Flight Test Engineer,
conducting many tests throughout the
year and guiding the pilot through the
competition flights. In addition, he
has recently been involved with his
university’s Space Technologies Lab,
where he is currently helping the
team send a university camera system
to record the first commercial
spacewalk aboard the Polaris Dawn
mission. He hopes to continue
conducting research at the Lab and
continue studying GNC in graduate
school, with an eventual career in the
aerospace industry.
Ellis F. Hitt Digital Avionics Scholarship
Ethan Traub
Georgia Institute of Technology
Amount of Scholarship: $3,000
Ethan is a 3rd year
undergraduate
majoring in
Aerospace
Engineering with a
minor in Computa-
tional Data Analysis
at Georgia Institute of Technology. As
an undergraduate researcher in
Georgia Tech’s Space Systems Design
Laboratory (SSDL), Ethan is
developing propulsion systems for
small satellite swarms. Ethan also
plans on earning his master’s degree
from Georgia Tech while continuing
research in SSDL. Following
graduation, Ethan intends on pursuing
a career as a propulsion test
engineer.
I am continuously grateful for AIAA
and the opportunities and support it
provides me. This scholarship will
assist me in pursuing my career in
aerospace.
Cary Spitzer Digital Avionics Scholarship
Hampton Wohlford
Virginia Military Institute
Amount of Scholarship: $3,000
Hampton is a
military brat. His
childhood list of
travels and homes
includes North
Carolina, Republic
of Korea, Hawaii,
Japan, Florida, and Virginia. In high
school, he was recognized for
academics, athletics, and leadership
in sports. In his first year as a VMI
Navy ROTC Midshipman, Hampton
was awarded the National Society of
the Sons of the American Revolution
Silver ROTC Medal. He participated in
the summer 2023 Engineering Study
Abroad in Rome, Italy, at John Cabot
University and is now a rising
sophomore and varsity swimmer at
the Virginia Military Institute.
Hampton is a double major in both
Mechanical Engineering and Physics
and hopes to earn a commission in
the Navy upon graduation and serve
as a Naval Aviator.
This scholarship reaches far beyond
my life alone. I have three older
siblings, all of us born within four
years. We are trying to pay for college
for all four of us. Effectively, this
scholarship is not just for me; it is a
contribution to the college degrees of
all four children and is a blessing for
my entire family.
Denise Ponchak Digital
Avionics Scholarship
Sashwat Suman
Hindustan Institute of Technology &
Science
Amount of Scholarship: $3,000
Sashwat is in his
final year of
undergraduate
study, pursing
aerospace
engineering in
India. In his
bachelor studies the exposure to
engines, rockets, spacecrafts, and
constant research work helped him to
explore various disciplines to broaden
his knowledge. Sashwat has worked
on the design and flow analysis of
rocket nozzle to understand the
pressure and heat losses in bell and
conical nozzles. AIAA has given him a
great opportunity to present his work
at the 2022 Region VII Student
Conference. He had learned about
remote sensing, which has the impact
to learn about the different
geographical land of Nepal.
Being an international student in a
country whose economy is higher
than my own country it has been a
Nominate Your Peers and Colleagues!
PREMIER AWARDS
i Distinguished Service Award
i Goddard Astronautics Award
i International Cooperation Award
i Public Service Award
i Reed Aeronautics Award
TECHNICAL EXCELLENCE AWARDS
i Aeroacoustics Award
i Engineer of the Year Award
i Jeffries Aerospace Medicine and
Life Sciences Research Award
i Lawrence Sperry Award
i Missile Systems Award
NOMINATION DEADLINE: 1 October 2023
REFERENCE FORMS DUE: 1 November 2023
PARTNER AWARD: AIAA/AAAE/ACC Jay Hollingsworth Speas Airport Award
Nominations deadline 1 November 2023
Please submit the nomination form and endorsement letters on the
online submission portal at aiaa.org/OpenNominations.
For additional questions, please contact awards@aiaa.org.
challenge to manage the academic
and accommodation expenditure. It’s
a big relief to pursue my final year of
engineering after receiving an AIAA
undergraduate scholarship. This is my
first scholarship ever, which has
elevated my motivation to stay
involved in research to help my
country’s grow in aerospace.
Space Transportation Scholarship
Nelson Pixley
Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State
University
Amount of Scholarship: $1,500
Nelson is a rising
senior studying
Aerospace
Engineering at
Virginia Tech. He is
currently working
with Relativity
Space this summer as a propulsion
test engineering intern. Over the
course of Nelson’s career he hopes to
help develop the next generation of
highly reliable and reusable launch
vehicles, and he wouldn’t say no to a
ticket to the Moon or Mars! Nelson
chose to pursue aerospace because
he loves rockets, and because he
thinks that a future where spaceflight activities, including participation in
is commonplace for the average AIAA and Carolina Flight Club. Recent-
person is radically inspiring and worth ly being honored with the SCSPE
fighting for. Outside of work, Nelson Outstanding Senior Award further
enjoys Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, playing fuels her drive and determination.
guitar, and reading science fiction. Post-graduation, Shruti plans to
pursue a Masters in Aerospace
Engineering at USC, seamlessly
The AIAA scholarship I have received
continuing her educational journey
has empowered me to succeed, by
while gaining valuable insights from
allowing me to devote my time to my
her extracurricular involvements.
academic success and extracurricu-
Ultimately, her career focus includes
lars. I feel quite fortunate to receive
contributing toward the growing field
this award, and I can unequivocally
of aerospace in areas such as
say that it will have a tremendous
sustainability, advanced satellite
impact on my life.
technology, and autonomous flight
systems and making an impact in the
Leatrice Gregory Pendray Scholarship industry.
Shruti Jadhav Receiving this scholarship is a catalyst
University of South Carolina to achieve my goals, as it fuels my
Amount of Scholarship: $1,250 drive to perform the best in my studies
and career. It validates my honest
Shruti, currently a
hard work and dedication throughout
senior at the
these years, while serving as an
University of South
immense support to fulfill my dreams
Carolina’s College
of further and higher education
of Engineering and
without financial constraints.
Computing, is
pursuing a degree
in Aerospace Engineering with a
minor in Computer Science. Alongside
studies, she engages in undergradu-
ate research and extracurricular
aerospaceamerica.aiaa.org | SEPTEM BER 2023 | 53
AIA A BULLETIN | AIA A NEWS AND EVENTS
him, a successful professional
Rocky Mountain Section Scholarship
Jacob VerMeer
career would involve pushing the
aviation industry toward more
University of Colorado Boulder
Amount of Scholarship: $500
Jacob is an
sustainable design to help both
society and the industry meet the
threat of anthropogenic climate
undergraduate
student studying
change. Post-retirement, he would
like to become a high school math
or physics teacher to guide and
Aerospace
Engineering inspire the next generation of engi-
neers and public leaders.
Sciences at the
University of
Colorado Boulder. His career Receiving this scholarship will
aspiration is to find a position that significantly lessen mine and my
family’s financial burden going into
blends his passion in aircraft
design with his newfound interest my final undergraduate year. I plan
in public policy. This passion for to use this money to help pay for
public policy was ignited during his textbooks and any other school
participation in the Colorado supplies I need to ace my classes
Science and Engineering Policy this semester and take one more
Fellowship this past summer. To step toward finishing my degree.
Applications for the 2024 scholarships and grad-
uate awards are being accepted from 1 October
to 31 January. Please visit the AIAA Foundation’s
Scholarship and Graduate Awards website
(aiaa.org/scholarships) for more information.
Special Service
Citations Awarded
T he Regional Engagement Activities Division (READ) awarded
two Special Service Citations this summer to volunteer lead-
ers who have gone above and beyond in serving AIAA.
Duha Bader,
University of California
Davis Graduate
In recognition of exceptional
leadership in the planning and
execution of the 2023 AIAA Region
VI Student Conference at UC Davis.
Sid Gunasekaran,
University of Dayton
For outstanding service to AIAA
and the University of Dayton
Student Branch in the organization
of the 2023 AIAA Region III
Student Conference.
54 | SEPTEMBER 2023 | aerospaceamerica.aiaa.org
AIAA Supports the
Spaceport America
Cup
AIAA staff attended the 2023
Spaceport America Cup – Inter-
collegiate Rocket Engineering
Competition, held 19–23 June,
in Truth or Consequences, NM.
The Spaceport America Cup is
an Intercollegiate Rocket Engi-
AIAA Executive Director Dan neering Competition hosted by
Dumbacher speaks with Alice
Spaceport America and directed
Carruth and the T-Minus Space
Podcast about the importance of by the Experimental Sounding
engagement with collegiate-level Rocket Association (ESRA). It
engineering competitions. comprises 5,913 students repre-
senting 158 total teams, includ-
ing 78 international teams representing 24 countries and 80 domes-
tic teams from around the United States.
Students gathered over the course of five days for a series of ac-
tivities, including a conference day in Las Cruces, NM, to present
their rocket designs to judges and peers. Student teams traveled to
the launch site located at Spaceport America for a chance to launch
their rocket in ideal conditions.
While on-site, AIAA Executive Director Dan Dumbacher and
University Programs Manager Michael Lagana engaged with other
corporate sponsors and spoke to students from universities around
the world about the benefits of membership, the rich career advance-
ment resources available to students, and how AIAA can be more
involved on their campuses.
Educators: Apply for an
AIAA Classroom Grant
I f you are a K-12 classroom educator, don’t miss the opportunity to
receive up to $500 for your STEM programs. The AIAA Foundation
is working to bridge the gap in funding and support for programs
with an emphasis on aerospace. The quick and easy application
process is open through 30 September. For details on eligibility and
to apply, go to: www.aiaa.org/classroomgrants.
Whether you have past experience with grants or none at all, this
is a great opportunity! You can also watch the recording of this recent
webinar to get first-hand advice directly from recipients of last year’s
grants and judges: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KpoSv_3xAao.
“Th e materials purchased with your funds will allow me to create
lessons that require creativity, inquiry skills, critical analysis, team-
work, and collaboration. Not only will these lessons allow me to teach
our digital literacy standards, they will also allow me to challenge
students to use problem-solving skills. The need for creative problem
solving in our schools is stronger than ever.”
-Ms. Farnum, 2nd grade educator from New York
New Discoveries and the James Webb
Space Telescope —2023 SSTC Essay
Contest Winners Announced
T he AIAA Space Systems Technical Committee’s (SSTC) annual
middle school essay contest continues to advance the commit-
tee’s commitment to directly inspire students and to involve local
AIAA sections in educational pursuits. Each year, local sections
sponsor parallel contests to feed into selection of national award
winners recognized by the SSTC.
Seventh and eighth grade students were invited to participate.
Th is year, AIAA local sections from across the country submitted
entries to the contest. Participating sections included Hampton
Roads, Palm Beach, Rocky Mountain, Greater Huntsville, National
Capital Section and Southwest Texas. For each grade, the fi rst-,
second-, and third-place winners were awarded $125, $75, and $50
prizes, respectively. The six students also received a one-year student
membership with AIAA. The 2023 essay topic was “Choose one
aspect of the James Webb Space Telescope, describe how it works,
and explain why it leads us to new discoveries and to answer im-
portant questions about the universe.”
The first-place winner for 8th grade is Celeste Ivanco of Yorktown,
Virginia (Hampton Roads Section). The second-place winner for 8th
grade is Maia Shadrick of Huntsville, Alabama (Greater Huntsville
Section). The third-place winner for 8th grade is Rowan LaRose of
Sedalia, Colorado (Rocky Mountain Section).
The fi rst-place winner for 7th grade is Benjamin Santos of Auro-
ra, Colorado (Rocky Mountain Section). The second-place winner
for 7th grade is Anna Wallace of Owens Cross Roads, Alabama
(Greater Huntsville Section). The third-place winner for 7th grade is
Luke McEwen of Yorktown, Virginia (Hampton Roads Section).
All 2023 winning essays can be found on the Aerospace America
website (https://aerospaceamerica.aiaa.org/bulletin/septem-
ber-2023-aiaa-bulletin). The topic for 2024 is “Explore the profound
effects of space observation on a particular industry of your choice.
Investigate how advancements in satellite technology have revolution-
ized this industry’s practices, strategies, and overall impact. Consider
the differences in data resolution (spatial, temporal, spectral) obtained
on the ground, from an airplane, or in space. Discuss how space ob-
servation has either complemented or replaced the other observation
methods of the chosen industry.” If you, your school, or section is in-
terested in participating in the 2024 contest, contact Shane Vigil
(sjvigil@gmail.com), Smrithi Keerthivarman (smrithik@umich.edu),
or your local section for more details.

2024 AIAA/AAAE/ACC Jay Hollingsworth Speas Airport Award

CALL FOR NOMINATIONS

Nominations are currently being accepted for the
Jay Hollingsworth Speas Airport Award. The recipient will
receive a certificate and a $7,500 cash prize.
This award honors individuals who have made significant
improvements in the relationships between airports
and/or heliports and the surrounding environment,
specifically by creating best-in-class practices that
can be replicated elsewhere.

DEADLINE: 1 November 2023

CONTACT: AIAA Honors and Awards Program
at awards@aiaa.org

This award is jointly sponsored by AIAA, AAAE, and ACC.

For more information, please visit

aiaa.org/SpeasAward

Presentation of the award will be made at the

AAAE/ACC Planning, Design, and Construction Symposium, scheduled for March 2024.

aerospaceamerica.aiaa.org | SEPTEM BER 2023 | 55

AIA A BULLETIN | AIA A NEWS AND EVENTS
Membership Applications Open for 2024/2025
AIAA Technical Committees and Integration and
Outreach Committees
T he Technical Activities Division (TAD) and Integration and
Outreach Division (IOD) work diligently with their committee
chairs to maintain a reasonable balance in 1) appropriate repre-
sentation to the field from industry, research, education, and
government; 2) the specialties covered in the specific TC/IOC
scopes; and 3) geographical distribution relative to the area’s
technical activity. TAD and IOD encourage applications of students
and young professionals (those individuals 35 years and younger).
Technical Committees have a 50-person maximum unless
approval is granted to exceed that limit. Applicants selected for tech-
nical committee membership who are not AIAA members in good
standing must become members or renew their membership
within 45 days of start of the membership term (1 May–30 April).
If you currently serve on a TC/IOC, you will automatically be con-
sidered for the 2024/2025 membership term on that committee.
Applications are submitted online, and applicants may submit
AIAA Announces Next Editor-in-Chief of the
Progress in Astronautics and Aeronautics Series
A IAA has announced that Seetha Raghavan, professor of
Aerospace Engineering and associate dean of Research and
Graduate Studies at the College of Engineering at Embry-Riddle
Aeronautical University, Daytona Beach, will serve as the next
editor-in-chief of the Progress in Astronautics and Aeronautics
book series, with service commencing in September 2023. Ra-
ghavan succeeds Timothy Lieuwen, Regents’ Professor and
David S. Lewis, Jr. Chair of the Daniel Guggenheim School of
Aerospace Engineering and executive director of the Strategic
Energy Institute at Georgia Tech. Lieuwen has served as edi-
tor-in-chief of the Progress Series since 2012. During this time,
he has overseen development and publication of nearly 30 books
on topics ranging from additive manufacturing, to Mars explo-
ration, to laser diagnostics.
The AIAA Publications Committee oversees the search and
selection effort for new editors-in-chief. The search committee
was led by Publications Committee member Steven Beresh, San-
dia National Laboratories. Raghavan was chosen from among a
group of highly qualified candidates.
Raghavan received her doctoral degree in Aeronautics and
Astronautics from Purdue University in 2008, and her master’s
degree in Aeronautics and Space Technologies at SUPAERO,
France. Prior to this, she completed her bachelor’s in mechanical
engineering at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.
56 | SEPTEMBER 2023 | aerospaceamerica.aiaa.org
up to two applications. To apply to two committees, applicants will
need to submit two separate forms. The form can be found on the
AIAA website at aiaa.org, under My AIAA, Nominations and Vot-
ing, Technical Committee Online Application. Applications are
due by 16 October 2023 at 2359 hrs Eastern time, after which
time the system will close.
Information about the committees can be found at:
Integration and Outreach Committees:
aiaa.org/integration-and-outreach-division-
committees
Technical Committees:
aiaa.org/technical-committees
With an extensive AIAA engagement that spans 27 years of mem-
bership, election as Associate Fellow, and contributions as part
of the Structural Dynamics Technical Committee, she comes with
experience as a highly effective leader in research, education, and
service in the publications realm.
Raghavan began her career as an engineer in the aerospace
industry where she gained seven years of experience in mainte-
nance and structural analysis. During the next 15 years as a
faculty member, she built and led a research team in her field of
mechanics of aerospace structures and materials, contributing
significantly to the area of materials for extreme environments
while catalyzing national and international collaboration. Her
academic leadership has led to successful creation of a doctoral
program in Aerospace Engineering, mentorship of students toward
national recognition, and consistent outreach that shapes the
next generation of aerospace leaders. She was nationally honored
by Women in Aerospace with the Aerospace Educator Award in
2019 and the Butler Center for Leadership Excellence Distinguished
Purdue Alumni Award in 2023.
The Progress in Astronautics and Aeronautics series is devot-
ed to books that present a particular well-defi ned subject reflect-
ing advances in the fields of aerospace science, engineering, and/
or technology. In many cases, these are edited collections of
papers with multiple chapter contributors.

Diversity Corner
Ethan Och
NAME: Ethan Och
NOTABLE CONTRIBUTIONS: Ethan is a software
engineer at Northrop Grumman Corporation. He
began his career in the aerospace industry in 2020,
after graduating from the University of Minnesota
Twin Cities with a Bachelor’s Degree in Aerospace
Engineering and Mechanics, as well as with minors
in Astrophysics and Computer Science.
POTENTIAL SOCIETAL IMPACT OF
CONTRIBUTIONS: Och has worked on satellite
ground systems and he currently works on digital
transformation technologies to unify engineering
and manufacturing processes at Northrop Grum-
man. He joined the AIAA Diversity Working Group
in 2021 and has supported the outreach, recogni-
tion, and K-12 education subcommittees. In May
2023, he became chair of the outreach subcommit-
tee. Och is an active member of Disability:IN, and
mentors other emerging professionals with
disabilities. He strives to increase the accessibility of
the aerospace field and aims to increase the
representation of people with disabilities in STEM.
*In collaboration with the AIAA Diversity and Inclusion
Working Group and Claudine Phaire, SAT OC is
highlighting prominent members of the wider aerospace
community in the Diversity Corner.
AIA A BULLETIN | AIA A NEWS AND EVENTS
New Happenings
at SAT OC
By: Amir S. Gohardani, SAT OC Chair
Chi Mai, SAT OC Vice-Chair and a
Senior Aerospace Engineer at the
U.S. Government Accountability
Office (GAO), recently celebrated
14 years of membership
with SAT OC.
Claudine Phaire, Principal
Systems Engineer, Lockheed
Martin Skunk Works; Chair,
AIAA Diversity and Inclusion
Working Group.
R ecently the AIAA Society and Aerospace Technology Outreach
Committee (SAT OC) unanimously voted to ratify its updated bylaws
to ensure a more strategic approach to current and future committee
activities. At the same time, voting was held for the committee chair and
vice-chair positions; voting results revealed Chi Mai was elected as the
vice-chair of SAT OC and myself as the chair. I congratulate Chi on his
new appointment and thank him for his many SAT OC contributions. I
am also grateful to all SAT OC’s members for their votes and for putting
their faith in me as we continue crafting a more impactful SAT OC. In
line with changing times and SAT OC’s bylaws, the committee scope
has been expanded. SAT OC promotes the transfer and use of aerospace
technology for the benefit of society. Moreover, the committee also ex-
amines the relationship and influence that society, culture, and the arts
have on aerospace technology. The success stories of this committee
have always been about its people and SAT OC is fortunate to collaborate
with many committed members in various stages of their aerospace
careers and a variety of different functions across government, industry,
and non-profit entities. These diverse sets of perspectives and a diverse
membership brings unique opportunities for tackling the most difficult
challenges affecting the aerospace sector. Notably, this month also marks
the ninth Diversity Corner spotlight since I initiated this idea back in
March 2022. I am very grateful to Claudine Phaire with the AIAA Diver-
sity and Inclusion Working Group who believed in my vision and whose
tireless efforts have made Diversity Corner possible.
aerospaceamerica.aiaa.org | SEPTEM BER 2023 | 57
AIA A BULLETIN | AIA A NEWS AND EVENTS
Obituaries
AIAA Fellow Bainum Died in April 2020
Peter Bainum, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Aerospace
Engineering, Department of Mechanical Engineering, Howard
University, died on 3 April 2020.
Bainum received a B.S. in Aeronautical Engineering from
Texas A&M, an M.S. in Aeronautics and Astronautics from MIT,
and a Ph.D. in Aerospace Engineering from Catholic University.
He then completed a NASA/ASEE Faculty Fellowship.
Bainum worked for Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Labora-
tory as a senior engineer and consultant; he was a staff engineer
with the IBM Federal Systems Division; and he also was a senior
engineer with Martin Marietta Corporation. Later he consulted
for NASA and other aerospace organizations with a specialization
in spacecraft attitude dynamics and control.
A respected scientist and distinguished educator, Bainum
received numerous awards including the SAE Teetor Award for
Engineering Educators, Outstanding Faculty Award from the
Howard University Graduate School, the American Astronautical
Society (AAS) Dirk Brouwer Award, the Spark M. Matsunaga
Memorial Award for International Cooperation in Space, and the
IAF Malina Award for Outstanding Contributions to Space Edu-
cation. AIAA honored him with a 2005 Sustained Service Award
and the 2008 International Cooperation Award. Bainum was a
Fellow of AAS, the American Astronautical Society, AIAA, the
American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the
British Interplanetary Society, and he was an Honorary Member
of the Japanese Rocket Society.
AIAA Member Narasimha Died in December 2020
Indian aerospace and fluid dynamics scientist Roddam Nara-
simha died 14 December 2020.
After earning a bachelor degree in engineering from Mysore
University (University College of Engineering) in 1953, Narasim-
ha worked with Satish Dhawan, an important scholar in experi-
mental f luid dynamics research in India, during his master’s
degree from the Indian Institute of Science. He then worked with
Hans Liepmann at Caltech, obtaining his Ph.D. in 1961. In 1982,
he founded the Centre for Atmospheric Sciences (now Centre for
Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences), which he headed until 1989.
Narasimha held positions as professor of Aerospace Engi-
neering at the Indian Institute of Science (1962–1999), director
of the National Aerospace Laboratories (NAL) (1984–1993), and
the chairman of the Engineering Mechanics Unit at Jawaharlal
Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research (JNCASR), then
Bangalore. As Director of NAL he initiated several major tech-
nological programs and was instrumental in establishing a
major parallel computing initiative in India. At the end of his
long career, he was the DST Year-of-Science Chair Professor at
JNCASR and concurrently held the Pratt & Whitney Chair in
Science and Engineering at the University of Hyderabad. In 2013,
Narasimha was awarded the Padma Vibhushan, India’s second
highest civilian award.
For many years Narasimha held a visiting position at Caltech as
the Clark B Millikan Professor and Sherman Fairchild distinguished
58 | SEPTEMBER 2023 | aerospaceamerica.aiaa.org
scholar. From 1989 to 1990 he was the Jawaharlal Nehru Professor
of Engineering at Cambridge University in England. Narasimha’s
research focused on transitions between laminar and turbulent
flow, the structure of shock waves, various characteristics of fully
developed turbulent flow, the fluid dynamics of clouds, near-surface
temperature distributions and eddy fluxes in atmospheric bound-
ary layers. He was closely associated with aerospace technology
development in India at both technical and policymaking levels.
Widely honored for his research and scientifi c leadership,
Narasimha received the Trieste Science Prize by TWAS in 2008.
He received the 2000 AIAA Fluid Dynamics Award. He was a
Fellow of the Royal Society, and a Foreign Associate of both the
U.S. National Academy of Engineering and the U.S. National
Academy of Sciences. In India, he was a Fellow of all the Nation-
al Academies of Science and Engineering, and an Honorary
Fellow of the Aeronautical Society of India.
AIAA Fellow Martin Died in November 2022
Richard “Dick” Martin died on 20 Novem-
ber 2022. He was 94.
Martin graduated in 1951 with the high-
est honors from the University of Illinois
Urbana-Champaign with an M.S. in Aero-
nautical Engineering. He was recruited by
Convair/General Dynamics San Diego and
became the fi rst structural dynamicist on
the Atlas project. He worked on all versions
of Atlas, from the MX-1593 of 1953 through
the Atlas IIAS of 1993; in his career, he rose from a junior engineer
to manager of a Dynamics Group in his 44-year career with Gen-
eral Dynamics.
He retired in 1994, but continued as a consultant, doing crit-
ical analytical work on using the Russian RD-180 engine with the
Atlas. Th is proved the viability of what became the Atlas III and
Atlas V space launch vehicles.
A 73-year member of AIAA, Martin received the 1994 AIAA
Faculty Advisor Award, was elected a Fellow of AIAA, and served
as a Distinguished Lecturer. On the section level he was recognized
for Outstanding Contributions to Aerospace Engineering in 1989,
Outstanding Contributions to AIAA at the national level in 1998,
and the section’s highest award – the Lifetime Achievement Award
in 2009.
AIAA Associate Fellow Aldrich Died in April 2023
Eleanor Aldrich died on 7 April 2023, at
the age of 85.
She earned a B.S. from the University
of Massachusetts, and held positions as
an educator and a realtor before holding
leadership roles at the Houston Chamber
of Commerce and the Houston Economic
Development Council. In 1990, Aldrich
began a career at AIAA. During her first
decade with AIAA she and her team orga-
nized and executed over 200 aerospace technology conferences
worldwide. Later she led business development and helped lay
the groundwork for AIAA’s expansion into commercial space
opportunities. Upon leaving AIA A she formed a consulting
company through which she continued her support of aerospace
industr y events through AIA A, the International Aerospace
Federation, and other technical organizations. Aldrich was a
recipient of the 2009 WIA Aerospace Awareness Award.
AIAA Educator Associate Telles Died
in May 2023
Col. John Telles Jr. (Ret.), AIAA San Diego
Section K-12 STEM officer, died on 25 May
2023, at the age of 84.
A retired Marine pilot who f lew the
Marine One presidential helicopter during
the Nixon and Ford administrations, Telles
became a tireless advocate for careers in
aerospace, believing that “Kids and aviation
just go together.” As the co-founder of
AeroED Group AeroSpace STEM in El Cajon,
CA, he served as the senior partner and operations director. He
was an inspiring speaker and addressed students of all ages and
coordinated aerospace education activities with many organiza-
tions. He served as coordinator for Teacher and Youth airplane
fl ight projects with EAA Young Eagles and Eagle Flight, and volun-
teered on various aviation education programs with Air Group
ONE, Commemorative Air Force (CAF), for at least five years where
he was their operations and events coordinator, and STEM Youth
Education Director. He also volunteered as an educator at St. Joseph
Academy, San Marcos, CA for seven years
For the past decade, Telles served on the K-12 STEM Committee
of the AIAA San Diego Section Council, and chaired the committee
the last few years. He was named Veteran of the Year by the Vista
Chamber of Commerce in 2021. As the keynote speaker for the 14th
Annual Veterans Day celebration at Cal State Fullerton, Telles aimed
his presentation at the students in the audience, telling them to
pursue their dreams with “integrity, determination, persistence,
and tenacity. You must not be deterred,” he said. “You must not let
anyone talk you out of doing anything you fi nd valuable.”
The San Diego Section and the youth of our community whom
he inspired will greatly miss him.
AIAA Fellow Naderi Died in June 2023
Firouz M. Naderi died on June 9. He was 77.
Naderi left Iran in 1964 to attend Iowa State University,
where he received a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering.
After earning a doctorate in digital image processing at the
University of Southern California, he returned to Iran in 1976.
He worked for the Iranian government as director of the
Iranian Remote Sensing Agency, which used satellite data from
the American Landsat program to monitor Iran’s natural re-
sources, until the Islamic revolution toppled the monarchy in
1979. Naderi went to Los Angeles, where he was hired by the
Jet Propulsion Laboratory as a telecommunications engineer
and he developed an interest in space science.
He worked in various technical jobs and then executive positions,
UHODWHG¿UVWWRVDWHOOLWHSURJUDPVDQGWKHQWRVSDFHH[SORUDWLRQ
Naderi was appointed to manage NASA’s Mars program in 2000.
He is credited with retooling it after a couple of previous failures.
He supervised the Mars Odyssey, a spacecraft launched in
2001 that is still orbiting the planet, collecting data to find out
what Mars is made of and to detect water and ice. In 2004, he
oversaw the landings of the robots Spirit and Opportunity,
which explored the planet’s surface. In 2006, he oversaw the
launch of the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which is also
looking for evidence of water. And he ran the Mars Sample
Return program, which is scheduled to launch in two phases
in 2027 and 2028 with the goal of returning samples collected
by an earlier rover to Earth.
After leaving the Mars program Naderi became an associ-
ate director at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, overseeing new
project strategies. He was later the laboratory’s director of
solar system exploration, overseeing missions to Saturn, Ju-
piter and Europa, which included laying the groundwork for
NASA’s plan to launch an orbiter to circle Europa, one of Jupi-
ter’s moons, to search for extraterrestrial life.
Naderi retired from NASA in 2016. He was recognized with
NASA’s highest award, the Distinguished Service Medal, and an
Ellis Island Medal of Honor for distinguished contributions to
American society. The International Astronomical Union named
an asteroid, 5515 Naderi, after him at NASA’s request.
AIAA Fellow Altman Died in July 2023
David Altman, age 103, died on 10 July.
Altman earned two chemistry degrees:
a B.S. from Cornell University and a Ph.D.
from the University of California, Berkeley
During World War II, Altman worked
with Robert Oppenheimer on the Manhattan
Project and first believed the project was
about nuclear energy. He was known for his
pioneering work in the development of sol-
id fuel to propel rockets into orbit. Altman
PHOTO: KARL MONDON/BAY
AREA NEWS GROUP was a chief chemist at the Jet Propulsion Lab-
oratory for a decade, starting in the mid-1940s,
where he published many scientific studies focused on rocket pro-
pulsion. In 1958, he teamed up with Barney Adelman and United
Aircraft Corporation to start a small rocket propulsion company,
and Adelman and Altman created a novel way to build large solid
rocket motors using segmentation. Altman eventually became vice
president of a new division of then United Technologies, called
Chemical Systems Division, or CSD, in 1959. His work at CSD helped
earn him the Apollo Achievement Award in 1969 for his contributions
toward the moon landing.
After helping to investigate the cause of the Challenger Shut-
tle explosion, he and two associates formed a company called
the Space Propulsion Group, which specialized in hybrid fuels.
Early on, Altman became a member of the American Rocket
Society (ARS), a predecessor organization of AIAA, and became
an ARS Fellow in 1961. He was very instrumental in the early
development of AIAA when it was created. Altman was recognized
for his work with many honors including the 1963 AIAA Wyld
Propulsion Award. In 2020, he was inducted into the Los Ange-
les Air Force Base Schriever Wall of Honor, which recognizes
early innovators who made tremendous contributions to the
U.S. space program.
aerospaceamerica.aiaa.org | SEPTEM BER 2023 | 59
CAREER OPPORTUNITIES

FACULTY POSITION

The Department of Aerospace Engineering at the University of Maryland (www.aero.umd.edu) invites applications for one
or more full-time, tenure-track assistant professor position(s) in space exploration. Candidates from groups traditionally
underrepresented in this field are strongly encouraged to apply. Priority (for one of the positions) will be given to applicants
who will utilize the unique experimental capabilities afforded by UMD’s Neutral Buoyancy Research Facility and have
expertise in one or more of the following areas (in no specific order): (1) space robotics; (2) space human factors, life
support, and bioastronautics; (3) space systems, including flight hardware development (including CubeSats) and systems
analysis; and (4) spacecraft instrumentation and computing. Individuals who can connect to these areas or who are working
at the boundaries of these areas are also encouraged to apply. Applicants will be expected to develop a strong research
program related to space exploration and complementary to existing research capabilities. Additionally, successful
applicants will be expected to contribute to the graduate and undergraduate course offerings in this area.

Applicants should possess a Ph.D. degree in aerospace engineering or a closely-related field by the start date of employment.
Successful candidates should be effective communicators and have an ability and interest in working with diverse student
populations having a variety of backgrounds, learning styles, and skill levels.

For best consideration, applications should be received by November 17th, 2023, but the position will remain open until
filled. Based upon our commitment to achieving excellence through diversity and inclusion, those who have experience
engaging with a range of faculty, staff, and students and contributing to a climate of inclusivity are encouraged to discuss
their perspectives on these subjects in their application materials. The review of applications will begin as they are received
and continue until the positions are filled.

FOR COMPLETE DETAILS & TO APPLY, VISIT: ejobs.umd.edu/postings/110884

LEARN MORE ABOUT AEROSPACE ENGINEERING AT MARYLAND | WWW.AERO.UMD.EDU

Assistant or Associate Professor

Aerospace Engineering Department
The Aerospace Engineering Department in the College of Engineering at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University – Daytona Beach invites applications for
several tenure-track and non-tenure positions at the Assistant or Associate Professor level. Candidates must hold a terminal degree in engineering, with
preference given to those candidates who hold a Ph.D. in Aerospace Engineering. For non-tenure track positions, a PhD degree could be replaced by an
MS and substantial industry experience. Preferred areas of expertise include: astronautics and space applications, aerodynamics, and propulsion. However,
applicants in all areas of Aerospace Engineering will be considered. The department seeks candidates who can expand its research expertise in aerospace
engineering, as well as deliver student-centered teaching and provide mentoring to undergraduate and graduate students.
The Aerospace Engineering Department is the largest in the nation with an enrollment of about 2,300 full-time students. The department offers Bachelors,
Masters, and Ph.D. degrees, including approximately 65 students in the Ph.D. program. The undergraduate program is currently ranked #8 by U.S. News
and World ReportZKLOHWKHJUDGXDWHSURJUDPLVUDQNHGDQGRXUUHVHDUFKH[SHQGLWXUHVPRUHWKDQWULSOHGRYHUWKHODVWÀYH\HDUV7RDFKLHYHQDWLRQDO
prominence, the Department has launched an ambitious agenda focused on expanding the graduate programs, facilities, recruiting talented faculty, and
building research infrastructure and capabilities. In support of this agenda, the University has invested in a new 50,000 square foot engineering building, the
John Mica Engineering and Aerospace Innovation Complex (MicaPlex), housing several research laboratories (https://erau.edu/research-park/micaplex/
labs) a state-of-the-art subsonic wind tunnel, and a new Flight Research Center facility, all as part of a Research Park with incubator space and growing
number of industry creating an ecosystem to support innovation and entrepreneurship.
Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University is the world’s largest, fully-accredited university specializing in aviation and aerospace, with more than 70
Bachelors, Masters, and Ph.D. programs in Arts and Sciences, Aviation, Business, and Engineering. The Daytona Beach Campus serves a diverse student
body of approximately 8,200 students. The research focus areas at Embry-Riddle are strategic but continue to incrementally evolve as technology and the
world around us changes. Some of our engineering focus areas include: Modeling and Simulations of Complex Multiphysics Systems, Aircraft Design,
Flight Test Engineering, Advanced Flight Control Systems, Autonomous Systems, Robotic Systems, Sense, and Avoid Technology, Hybrid Propulsion
Systems, Cybersecurity, High-Assurance Software and Systems, and others. To further support aviation and aerospace convergence research, the University
has established Centers of Excellence such as the Boeing Center for Aviation and Aerospace Safety and the Center for Aerospace Resilience. Candidates
whose research expertise aligns with or has the potential to contribute to one or more of the Centers of Excellence are encouraged to apply.
For more information about the positions and to apply, please visit https://careers.erau.eduFOLFNRQWKH&DUHHU6HDUFKWDEDQGVHDUFKWRÀQGUHTXLVLWLRQ
5$SSOLFDQWVPXVWVXEPLWRQHVLQJOH3')ÀOHWKDWLQFOXGHVWKHIROORZLQJGRFXPHQWVFRYHUOHWWHUFXUULFXOXPYLWDH7HDFKLQJLQWHUHVWVDQG
philosophy, research plan, and the names and contact information for at least three professional references.
Applicants should share the department’s commitment to an inclusive, inviting and collaborative community. We strongly encourage individuals from
populations who are traditionally underrepresented and underserved in STEM – women, Black, Latinx, Native Americans, persons with disabilities and
SHUVRQVRIDOOJHQGHULGHQWLWLHVDQGRUVH[XDORULHQWDWLRQ²WRDSSO\(PEU\5LGGOH$HURQDXWLFDO8QLYHUVLW\LVDQDIÀUPDWLYHDFWLRQHTXDORSSRUWXQLW\
employer and does not discriminate on the basis on race, color, religion, gender, age, national origin, handicap, veteran status, or sexual orientation.
For full consideration, candidates are encouraged to apply before September 15th, 2023. Positions can start as early as January 2024. Screening of the
DSSOLFDWLRQVZLOOVWDUWXSRQUHFHLSWDQGZLOOFRQWLQXHXQWLOWKHSRVLWLRQVDUHÀOOHG4XHVWLRQVDERXWWKHVHSRVLWLRQVPD\EHGLUHFWHGWR'U7DVRV/\ULQW]LV
Department Chair, via email at lyrintzi@erau.edu.

60 | SEPTEMBER 2023 | aerospaceamerica.org

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 64
applied helper — and perhaps a required one — for large-scale
projects or tasks that must be undertaken frequently.
In terms of predictive analyses, AI is, in part, an attempt to
accelerate the achievement of net-zero surprisal. However, an
important caveat to all this is that at best, AI assumes that tomor-
row will resemble today, drawing conclusions based on patterns
and correlations observed in the past. This is referred to as training
data, where the AI is taught what “truth” is and how it manifests.
AI assumes the training data is complete, which in this context
means that the data encompasses all the necessary information to
describe what we’re interested in predicting. This training data is
flawed when the model of today is limited, biased and incomplete,
because it fails to sufficiently capture the full complexity and di-
versity of reality.
To consistently and confidently predict accurately and precise-
ly, AI software needs a robust and diverse set of training data.
Multiple models of possible todays are required to form a
comprehensive understanding of what we wish to predict. Without
a broad range of data that represents the possibility space of what
we’re interested in, the predictions about tomorrow will be skewed
and incomplete, unable to capture the nuances and complexities
of the real world.
As a result of our incomplete understanding of the interdepen-
dencies and causal relationships within reality, the training data
available for AI today is almost always incomplete. Th is incom-
pleteness leads to inaccurate predictions, prescriptions or decisions,
as the AI model lacks vital information required to capture the true
essence of what we want to predict.
These limitations should serve as a reminder that this technol-
ogy is a tool, not an omniscient entity. AI is only as good as the data
it receives and the assumptions made. Garbage in, garbage out, as
they say. It is essential to approach implementation of AI with a
critical mindset and to understand the inherent biases and limita-
tions that can influence its predictions.
aerospaceamerica.aiaa.org | SEPTEM BER 2023 | 61
100, 75, 50, 25 YEARS AGO IN SEPTEMBER
LOOKING BACK
COMPILED BY FRANK H. WINTER and ROBERT VAN DER LINDEN
1923
Sept. 4 The U.S. Navy airship ZR-1
makes its first trial flight, traveling the
nearly 160 kilometers from Lakehurst
Naval Air Station in New Jersey
to New York City. Later renamed
Shenandoah, it is the first rigid airship
designed and built in the U.S., as well
as the first to use inert helium as its
lifting gas rather than combustible
hydrogen. The ZR-1 circles over
New York escorted by a squadron of
aircraft, with thousands of spectators
watching. Flight, Sept. 13, 1923, p.
544; Aviation, Sept. 10, 1923, p. 301,
311.
Sept. 5 U.S. Army Air Service
1 mainstay of Swedish Air Force fighter,
Martin NBS-1 bombers sink
the decommissioned USS Virginia
and the USS New Jersey battleships
off Cape Hatteras, North Carolina,
in a large-scale aerial bombing
exercise. Observed by Army Gen.
John Pershing and other Army
and Navy officers, the planes drop
multiple bombs weighing up to 900
kilograms, the largest the Martin
twin-engine design can carry. NASA,
Aeronautics and Astronautics, 1915-
1960, p. 17; Aviation, Sept. 10, 1923,
pp. 330-334.
Sept. 8 After repeated attempts to
recapture the world altitude record
from the U.S., French aviator Joseph
Sadi-Lecointe establishes a new
mark at Villacoublay, near Paris.
Lecointe’s altitude record of 35,178
feet is set in the same aircraft used
for previous attempts: a special
Nieuport biplane equipped with a
Hispano-Suiza engine and Lamblin
radiators. The previous world’s
altitude record was set in 1921 by
U.S. Air Service Lt. John Macready,
who reached an altitude of 34,509
feet at McCook Field in Dayton, Ohio.
Aviation, Sept. 24, 1923, p. 364.
Sept. 28 U.S. Navy pilots take first and
second places in the Schneider Cup
international seaplane races at Cowes,
England, establishing a new world
record for seaplanes with a speed of
169.89 mph for 200 km. Flying Curtiss
CR-3 biplanes powered by Curtiss D-12
engines, first-place winner Lt. David
62 | SEPTEMBER 2023
Rittenhouse averages 285.47 kph
(177.38 mph), and Lt. Rutledge Irvine
places second with 279.16 kph (173.46
mph). This is the first time the U.S.
participates in a Schneider Cup race.
NASA, Aeronautics and Astronautics,
1915-1960, p. 17; Aviation, Oct. 8, 1923,
p. 436.
1948
Sept. 1 Saab chief test pilot Robert
Moore completes the inaugural flight
of the SAAB-29 fighter prototype at
Linkoping, Sweden. The aircraft is
powered by a single De Havilland
Ghost turbojet during the 30-minute
flight. The design later becomes the
attack and reconnaissance units. Bo
Widfeldt, The SAAB J-29, p. 6; The
Aeroplane, Sept. 17, 1948, p. 372.
Sept. 5 A four-engine Martin
JRM-2 seaplane transport, the
Caroline Mars, flies from the Naval
Air Test Center in Patuxent River,
Maryland, to the National Air Show
in Cleveland. The aircraft carries
30,972 kilograms (68,282 pounds) of
cargo, the heaviest payload carried
by an aircraft to date. U.S. Naval
Aviation 1910-1970, p. 167; NASA,
Aeronautics and Astronautics, 1915-
1960, p. 60.
Sept. 6 A De Havilland DH108
2 Swallow research aircraft
becomes the first British-designed
aircraft to exceed the speed of sound
while in a dive from 40,000 feet to
25,000 feet over the Farnborough-
Windsor area. De Havilland test pilot
John Derry later receives the Royal
Aeronautical Club’s Gold Medal for
the flight. The Aeroplane, Sept. 17,
1948, p. 344.
Sept. 6 The Avro Tudor Mk. 8, the
first civil transport designed to fly
with four jet engines, completes
its first test flight from Woodford,
England, to Boscombe Down. Each
wing has a single engine nacelle
containing two Rolls-Royce Nene
turbojets with individual tailpipes,
similar to the configuration on the
North American B-45 Tornado
bomber. The Aeroplane, Sept. 10,
| aerospaceamerica.aiaa.org
1948, p. 342.
Sept. 15 Maj. Richard Johnson
of the U.S. Air Force Air Materiel
Command Flight Test Division sets a
world speed record of 1,079.839 kph
(670.981 mph) in a North American
F-86A Sabre over Muroc Dry Lake,
California. Johnson makes four
passes between 75 and 125 feet in
altitude. Aviation Week, Sept. 27,
1948, p. 15.
Sept. 18 Convair test pilot Ellis
3 Week, Sept. 17, 1973, p. 23.
“Sam” Shannon completes the
first flight of the turbojet-propelled
Convair XF-92A research plane, an
experimental delta-wing design that
leads to the future Convair F-102,
F-106, B-58 and F2Y aircraft. The
18-minute flight takes place at Muroc
Dry Lake, California. Convair report
ZM-7002-006; Convair press release
No. 67.
Sept. 29 Chance Vought chief test
pilot Robert Baker completes the
first test flight of a XF7U-1 Cutlass
fighter prototype at the Naval Air Test
Center in Patuxent, Maryland. The
tailless aircraft is propelled by two
Westinghouse J34-WE-32 engines,
and its wings sweep back at 38
degrees. Gordon Swanborough and
Peter Bowers, U.S. Navy Aircraft
Since 1911, p. 385; Aviation Week,
Sept. 27, 1948, p. 11.
1973
Sept. 6 NASA announces the 18
experiments chosen for the July
1975 joint U.S.-Soviet Union Apollo-
Soyuz Test Project. The experiments
are selected from 145 proposals
by scientists in and outside the
United States. Four astronomy and
space physics experiments are
to search for sources of extreme
ultraviolet radiation in the night sky,
map celestial X-ray emissions, and
measure intensity and distribution of
helium-florescent radiation. Six space
application processing experiments
are to study properties and
processes in microgravity via a small
multiple-purpose electric furnace.
Two experiments are to study
electrophoresis and the structure of
Earth’s gravity field. Five life science
experiments are to investigate the
effects of weightlessness on human
cells important in protecting against
infections. NASA Release 73-178.
Sept. 12 A prototype of the U.S.
4 Navy’s F-14B Tomcat swing-
wing supersonic aircraft makes its
first flight test from the Grumman
Aircraft Corp. plant in Calverton, New
York. The aircraft reaches Mach 0.8
during the 67-minute flight. Aviation
Sept. 13 The NASA 427, an
instrumented Douglas C-54
Skymaster, is flown to the German Air
Force base in Leck, West Germany,
to participate in the Joint North Sea
Wave Project. This is the second
in a series of studies conducted
by the West German Hydrographic
Institute of Hamburg. Daily research
flights are conducted Sept. 17-30 to
study surface waves and prevailing
wind relationships. The C-54 carries
an S-band radiometer and laser
profilometer from NASA’s Langley
Research Center in Virginia, among
other equipment. NASA, Wallops
Flight Facility Release 73-10.
Sept. 13-Oct. 17 NASA’s Ames
Research Center in California
conducts a five-week experiment
to determine the effects of
weightlessness and return to Earth
gravity on women. A dozen U.S. Air
Force nurses volunteer to participate
in the study, which consists of
simulating the weightlessness and
g-forces encountered during space
shuttle flights. This is a follow-on
to 1972 experiments conducted
with men. Ames Research Center
Release 73-107.
Sept. 14 University of Texas
physicists A.A. Jackson IV and
Michael Ryan Jr. propose in a Nature
article that a meteorite impact was
not responsible for leveling forests
across a wide region of Siberia
in 1908. Instead, the 12-magaton
explosion, often referred to as the
Tunguska event, was the result
of a black hole plunging into the
earth. This theory is later disproven.
Nature, Sept. 14, 1973, pp. 88-89.
Sept. 14-23 The Brazilian Ministry
 1
4 5
of Aeronautics sponsors the first
major international aerospace
exhibit in Latin America. Held in Saõ
Paulo, the exhibit comprises various
products made by 250 companies
from 11 nations. Aircraft on display
include the British Hawker Siddeley
Harrier vertical/short takeoff and
landing fighter, the Fokker F28
twin-jet transport, the Israeli Aircraft
Industries Arava cargo transport, an
Airbus A300B and a Canadair CL-215
amphibian, among others. Aviation
Week, Sept. 17, 1973, p. 954.
Sept. 21 A Concorde departs
Venezuela with 32 aviation officials
and journalists and lands at Dallas/
Fort Worth Regional Airport in Texas,
the first time a supersonic transport
visits the United States. As part of
the festivities, U.S. President Richard
Nixon on Sept. 20 presented the
Harmon International Aviation
Trophy to Concorde chief test pilots
Brian Trubshaw and André Turcat.
New York Times, Sept. 21, 1973, pp.
1, 73.
Sept. 25 The crew of Skylab 3,
5 the second group of astronauts to
visit the first U.S. space station, splashes
down in their command module 370
kilometers southwest of San Diego.
During their 59 days aboard Skylab,
commander Alan Bean, pilot Jack
Lousma and science pilot Owen Garriott
continued the comprehensive medical
research program begun during the
Skylab 2 mission. Skylab 3’s biological
experiments also addressed the effects
of microgravity on mice, fruit flies, single
cells and cell culture media. Additional
experiments crafted by U.S. high school
students focused on astronomy, physics
and fundamental biology, including
one that studied spider web formation
in microgravity via two female spiders,
Arabella and Anita. New York Times,
July 28-Sept. 26, 1973.
Sept. 27 Cosmonauts Vasily Lazarev
and Oleg Makarov are launched on
the two-day Soyuz 12 test flight to
verify the updated spacecraft design
and obtain spectrographs of natural
formations of Earth’s surface. This is
the first Soviet crewed spaceflight
since the 1971 Soyuz 11 mission, in
which the capsule depressurized
during landing and the three
cosmonauts were found dead upon
their return to Earth. On Sept. 29,
the Soyuz 12 capsule makes a soft
landing 400 kilometers southwest of
Karaganda in the Kazakkstan Steppe,
and the crew is recovered. New York
Times, Sept. 30, 1973, p. 1.
Also in September Hawker
Siddeley begins development of
the first major new British aircraft
in a decade, a short-haul and
regional airliner named the Hawker
Siddeley 146. The project is soon
delayed, in part because of a work
stoppage prompted by the 1973
oil crisis. Production of the 70-seat
design begins in 1983, and the
aerospaceamerica.aiaa.org
last aircraft is built in 2001. Armed
Forces Journal, September 1973,
p. 24; “World Airliners,” Flight
International, Aug. 28, 2001.
1998
Sept. 8 Five Iridium satellites are
launched from Vandenburg Air Force
Base in California by a Boeing Delta
II to replace malfunctioning satellites
in the Iridium telecommunications
network. NASA, Astronautics and
Aeronautics: a Chronology, 1996-
2000, p. 163.
Sept. 24 The Russian Beriev Be-200
twin-turbofan amphibian makes its first
flight from the Irkutsk Aviation Production
Association airfield in Irkutsk, Siberia.
The Be-200 is designed for a variety of
purposes, including firefighting, search
and rescue, air ambulance missions and
passenger service. Flight International,
Oct. 7-13, 1998, pp. 25, 28.
| SEPTEM BER 2023 | 63
Why I don’t fear
the AI revolution
BY MORIBA JAH

Moriba Jah
S
ome people are genuinely scared that artificial intelligence will take over the world. Oth- is an
ers believe AI is like magic and will solve all our problems. While the revolution does need astrodynamicist, space
to be managed through sound governance, what AI really amounts to is an emerging tool environmentalist and
associate professor of
for augmenting our human capabilities. aerospace engineering and
Doing that effectively in the world of aerospace or anywhere else will require understanding engineering mechanics at
the assumptions and limitations that underlie this technology. the University of Texas at
Let’s begin with why we’d want to get help from machines in the fi rst place, even if not nec- Austin. An AIAA fellow and
essarily AI. In general, we humans are interested in predicting the future, whether it’s the MacArthur fellow, he’s also
chief scientist of startup
weather, stock values, shopping trends or developments in a host of other topics. In my line of Privateer.
work as a data scientist, I need to predict where two objects in orbit will be in the future. In order
to know something, we must measure the attributes and behaviors of its constituent parts. Those
measurements constitute data that might at fi rst appear to be haphazard, but as more data is
gathered, a skilled data scientist can fi nd an emergent pattern or structure within the informa-
tion. From that pattern, the scientist can develop a model that can be used to forecast what the
next incoming data should look like.
The process to this point has always been labor intensive, involving algorithms but not AI.
The difference between what we predicted and what we actually observe constitutes statistical
surprisal. If we predicted exactly what we now observe, there is zero surprisal and thus nothing
new to learn. Learning opportunities exist in the presence of surprisal, as we attempt to pro-
gressively minimize it. I fi rst put this learning process into practice at the NASA-funded Jet
Propulsion Laboratory to help me navigate a host of spacecraft to Mars, including the Mars
Reconnaissance Orbiter. More recently, I’ve applied this process in my work to track anthropo-
genic space objects around Earth.
By now, at least some of us have tried the AI-driven Tesla autopilot and are aware that the
Starlink satellites use AI to autonomously maneuver and avert potential collisions. While AI is
far from ubiquitous, these examples illustrate the potential for AI to become a more widely

CONTINUED ON PAGE 61

64 | SEPTEMBER 2023 | aerospaceamerica.aiaa.org

LEARN FROM THE
INDUSTRY’S LEADING
EXPERTS
UPCOMING ONLINE COURSES

AIAA online courses help you stay sharp while strengthening your knowledge base.
We’re committed to assisting in your professional development and maximizing
your success year-round. Member and student member pricing available.

Fundamentals of Space Domain Awareness

Starts 12 September

Spacecraft Design, Development, and Operations

Starts 18 September

Aircraft Reliability & Reliability Centered Maintenance

Starts 19 September

Fundamentals of High Speed Air-Breathing and Space Propulsion

Starts 19 September

A Practical Approach to Flight Dynamics and Control of Aircraft,

Missiles, and Hypersonic Vehicles
Starts 26 September

Overview of Python for Engineering Programming

Starts 2 October

Metal Additive Manufacturing for Aerospace Applications

Starts 10 October

Wind Tunnel Testing for Aircraft Development

Starts 17 October

Can’t attend the live online lectures? Most courses are available on demand.

BROWSE THE COURSE CATALOG

learning.aiaa.org
 BACK TO SCHOOL

SALE Save 30% or more

off list price of select books
for the new semester.

Sale prices are valid through

22 September 2023.

SHOP NOW
arc.aiaa.org/backtoschool2023

AEROSPACE RESEARCH CENTRAL