JOBY’S PREVOT ON FLYING IN 2024 10 BETTER WEATHER FORECASTING 16 WHERE THEY’RE FLYING 30

SPECIAL FOCUS: ADVANCED AIR MOBILITY

INSIDE THE QUIET PROPULSION REVOLUTION

PAGE 24

CASE STUDY

How NASA
decided Webb
was ready
PAGE 34

FEBRUARY 2022 | A publication of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics | aerospaceamerica.aiaa.org
Y O U R PA R T N E R I N S I M U L AT I O N A N D VA L I D AT I O N

Find your control.

The aerospace industry has the highest standard when it comes to aircraft – no errors.
(YHQLQWKHWRXJKHVWPRVWH[WUHPHȵLJKWVLWXDWLRQVUHOLDELOLW\LVHVVHQWLDO:LWKDG63$&(
KLJKSHUIRUPDQFHGHYHORSPHQWHQYLURQPHQW\RXFDQȴQG\RXUFRQWUROG63$&(V\VWHPV
JLYHHQJLQHHUVWKHWRROVWKH\QHHGWRULVHWRWKHFKDOOHQJHLQPHHWLQJGHYHORSPHQWDFWLYLWLHV
IRUHOHFWURQLFDLUFUDIWFRPSRQHQWVDQGV\VWHPV7DNHFRQWURORI\RXUDSSOLFDWLRQVdspace.com
 FEATURES | FEBRUARY 2022 MORE AT aerospaceamerica.aiaa.org

Joby Aviation of California says it flew its electric

vertical takeoff and landing prototype at a true
airspeed of 205 mph (330 kph) in January.

10 16
24
The quiet flight revolution
Preparing for
passenger flights
Weather woes
Solutions for providing the
Joby Aviation’s air taxi emerging advanced air
We take you inside the high-stakes, low-noise competition mobility market with the
product lead discusses the
brewing among electric aircraft designers and propulsion company’s race to begin detailed weather forecasting
companies to reduce the sound profile of the coming class service in 2024. it needs.
of electric vertical takeoff and landing vehicles.
By Cat Hofacker By Keith Button
By Paul Marks

ON THE COVER: A computational fluid dynamics image of Joby’s four-passenger

air taxi design in transition between hover and high-speed cruise flight.

aerospaceamerica.aiaa.org | FEBRUARY 2022 | 1

SPRING COURSE OFFERINGS

BUILD NEW SKILLS WITH

AIAA ONLINE COURSES
AIAA online short 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. AIAA is offering over 20 courses this spring featuring a variety of technical areas
including UAV aircraft design, space launch vehicle design, and space systems engineering.

Design of Experiments: Improved Experimental Methods in Aerospace Testing

Starts 18 February

UAV Aircraft Design by Dan Raymer

Starts 23 February

Fundamentals of Python Programming with Libraries for Aerospace Engineers

Starts 28 February

Trusted Artificial Intelligence

Starts 8 March

Understanding Space: An Introduction to Astronautics and Space Systems Engineering

Starts 8 March

Aircraft and Rotorcraft System Identification Engineering Methods for Manned and
UAV Applications using CIFER®
Starts 14 March

Systems Thinking for Modern Aerospace Complexity

Starts 14 March

Fundamentals of Thermal Vacuum Testing Science

Starts 22 March

Technical Writing Essentials for Engineers

Starts 29 March

Fundamentals of Data and Information Fusion for Aerospace Systems

Starts 5 April

Design of Space Launch Vehicles

Starts 11 April

Application of Thermal Vacuum Testing

Starts 12 April

Applied Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE)

Starts 26 April

Browse the course catalog to learn more

about these courses and discover additional
courses starting in May and June.

learning.aiaa.org
 IN THIS ISSUE

FE BR UA RY 2022,
VOL. 60, NO. 2
Keith Button
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
Keith has written for C4ISR Journal and Hedge Fund Alert, where he broke
Ben Iannotta news of the 2007 Bear Stearns scandal that kicked off the global credit crisis.
beni@aiaa.org
PAGES 9, 16
ASSOCIATE EDITOR
Cat Hofacker
catherineh@aiaa.org

EDITOR, AIAA BULLETIN Moriba Jah

Christine Williams Before becoming an associate professor at the University of Texas at
christinew@aiaa.org
Austin, Moriba helped navigate the Mars Odyssey spacecraft and the
Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab and worked
CONTRIBUTING WRITERS on space situational awareness issues with the U.S. Air Force Research
Keith Button, Moriba Jah, Laboratory.
Robert van der Linden, PAGE 64
Paul Marks, Frank H. Winter

Basil Hassan AIAA PRESIDENT

Daniel L. Dumbacher PUBLISHER
Paul Marks
Rodger Williams DEPUTY PUBLISHER Paul is an award-winning journalist focused on technology, cybersecurity,
aviation and spaceflight. A regular contributor to the BBC, New Scientist
and The Economist, his current interests include eVTOL aircraft, new space
ADVERTISING
and the history of notable inventors — especially the Wright brothers.
advertising@aiaa.org
PAGE 24

ART DIRECTION AND DESIGN

THOR Design Studio | thor.design

MANUFACTURING AND DISTRIBUTION

Association Vision | associationvision.com DEPARTMENTS

LETTERS
letters@aerospaceamerica.org 4 Editor’s Notebook
4 8
CORRESPONDENCE 5 Letters Editor’s Notebook AeroPuzzler
Ben Iannotta, beni@aiaa.org A special focus on advanced Inverted helicopter flight
7 Flight Path air mobility
8 AeroPuzzler
9 R&D 9 10
Aerospace America (ISSN 0740-722X) is published monthly 10 Q&A R&D Q&A
except in August by the American Institute of Aeronautics
Building better robotic arms Tom Prevot, air taxi product
and Astronautics Inc., at 12700 Sunrise Valley Drive, Suite 45 AIAA Bulletin for satellite servicing lead at Joby Aviation
200 Reston, VA 20191-5807 [703-264-7500]. Subscription
rate is 50% of dues for AIAA members (and is not deduct- 59 Career Opportunities
ible therefrom). Nonmember subscription price: U.S., $200;
foreign, $220. Single copies $20 each. Postmaster: Send
62 Looking Back
address changes and subscription orders to Aerospace
America, American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics,
64 Jahniverse
62 64
at 12700 Sunrise Valley Drive, Reston, VA, 20191-5807,
Attn: A.I.A.A. Customer Service. Periodical postage Looking Back Jahniverse
paid at Reston, Virginia, and at additional mailing Submarine-launched missile, Solving the “Don’t Look Up”
offices. Copyright 2022 by the American Institute of Europa flyby and celebrating phenomenon
Aeronautics and Astronautics Inc., all rights reserved. the 10th anniversary of
The name Aerospace America is registered by the AIAA in Friendship 7
the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

aerospaceamerica.aiaa.org | FEBRUARY 2022 | 3

 EDITOR’S NOTEBOOK ADVANCED AIR MOBILIT Y

Advanced air mobility

for regular people
O
ur special focus on advanced air mobility in this issue exemplifies how we plan to take readers along with us to the cutting edge
of understanding of this topic. We’ll continue to cover the technology associated with the airframes and propulsion, as we do in
our cover story about quiet fl ight (p. 24), but we’ll also look beyond such traditional technical topics for a very good reason.
A host of problems beyond the airframe must be solved if the leaders in this field are to revolutionize local transportation for regular
people, rather than for a clique of wealthy people, as is the case for now with space transportation. I don’t know about you, but I’m tired
of hearing that the rich must inevitably lead the way, for what will seem like an eternity, in any consumer innovation.
My theory is that the faster lots of these aircraft get airborne safely, the faster prices will come down to something regular people can afford.
One issue blocking the way at the moment is inadequate weather forecasting. These electric aircraft must fly at relatively low altitudes,
and for that reason their operators are going to need uniquely granular real-time weather data and forecasts so they’re not surprised by
conditions along the routes. The feature “Weather woes” (p. 16) tells you about that problem and the possible solutions.
Our Q&A with Joby Aviation’s Tom Prevot (p. 10) demonstrates that the California company is thinking big about how to serve lots of cus-
tomers, and soon. Prevot’s job is to lead the company through the fine points of rolling out its service in 2024, right down to how the consum-
er app will work and the basic pricing. We often hear that the “business case” can’t be closed until autonomous flight or remote piloting of
multiple aircraft is achieved, but here comes Joby looking to make a go of it in 2024 beginning with its piloted, four-passenger aircraft.
Of course, along the way in this revolution you’re going to need specific information presented in an interesting way. So we created a
map graphic (p. 30) that shows you which among the leading companies is flying prototypes and where.
We have more ideas brewing ahead for this beat, which is among the most important for this magazine.

Ben Iannotta, editor-in-chief, beni@aiaa.org

4 | FEBRUARY 2022 | aerospaceamerica.org

 LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

Banishing fear from

NASA’s vocabulary
A
s the launch of the James Webb Telescope nears, the November 2021
issue you devoted to the mission shows how much has changed in the
years since Apollo. We began the adventure into space with the vision
of President John Kennedy who urged us on with a drive to do things “not
because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve
to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that chal-
lenge is one that we are willing to accept ... ” These are not words of caution and
timidity. Yet your excellent graphic of the Webb mission has “A fortnight of
fear...” as its headline. If the mission team is gripped by fear over this mission,
how will they react when we send humans back to the moon and beyond? Should
the team be alert, a bit nervous and intently watching to ensure mission success
— sure! But fear has no place in this venture — or at least it should not. Let’s
restore the NASA culture of preparation, agile thinking and resolve and banish
fear from the mix.

Let us Send letters of about 250 words to

hear letters@aerospaceamerica.org. Letters
may be edited for length and clarity
Gary O’Neill
Editor's note: Our headline was not meant to be
from you and may be published in any medium.
AIAA senior member
a judgment about any specific group's mindset.
Marietta, Georgia
goneill5@mac.com

UAV AIRCRAFT DESIGN

NEW ONLINE SHORT COURSE
WITH DANIEL RAYMER
Learn from the person who literally wrote the book
on aircraft design! This new course, instructed by
Daniel Raymer, author of the best-selling AIAA
textbook Aircraft Design: A Conceptual Approach,
will review the conceptual design, development, and
operation of unmanned/uninhabited air vehicles.

DETAILS
i 22–24 February and 1–3 March 2022
i 1200–1600 hrs Eastern Time USA
i 6 Classes, 24 Total Hours
i Classes will not be recorded
i Cost: $1,495 USD Members
$995 USD Student Members
$1,795 USD Nonmembers

ENROLL NOW

aiaa.org/onlinelearning

aerospaceamerica.aiaa.org | FEBRUARY 2022 | 5

 19
19
9–2
– 1 AP
PR
RIL
IL 2002
22 | LAU
AURE
AURE
EL,
L MD
Se
S ecrret/N
/ OOF
FOOR
RN

ACCELERATING
MODERNIZATION
FOR OPERATIONAL
RELEVANCE
The AIAA DEFENSE Forum is focused on aerospace
technologies and their applications in national
security. The 2022 forum will explore how the
science and technology community can advance
research and development to rapidly provide
operationally relevant capabilities to the warfighter.

SPONSORS AND SUPPORTERS REGISTER TODAY

FOUNDING SPONSOR
aiaa.org/defense
 FLIGHT PATH
2022: Celebrating and
Anticipating the New Year
Happy New Year!
I
was thrilled to ring in the new year in a familiar fashion—at the
2022 AIAA SciTech Forum in San Diego in January. It’s been
two long years since so many of us have come together in person.
It was worth the wait to feel the energy exchanged among col-
leagues and friends during fi ve days of programming, both in
person and online.
AIAA SciTech Forum is said to set the tone for the year. Based
on my experience, I’d say this year’s tone is energized and optimis-
tic! The forum theme was about sustainability, and I believe our
community is certainly sustaining itself—and by the nature of our
work, we also are stretching ourselves and expanding our industry
beyond the status quo. We are enabling sustainable systems for use
in air and space. We are fostering a sustainable workforce. We are
advancing an environmentally sustainable aerospace future. The
work of our community fuels the collective human drive to explore,
create, and be a part of something bigger than ourselves—and that
was on display in San Diego.
During the forum, a huge amount of research, innovation, and
progress was shared. By the numbers, AIAA hosted over 5,000 at-
tendees: >3,000 people in person in San Diego and >2,000 people
virtually. The number of students topped 1,900—a new record, in-
cluding more than 600 on-site! Thousands of papers were presented
on a myriad of technical topics. As I opened the forum, I claimed
that the aerospace industry is not letting the hybrid world slow down
our innovation, connection, and technical exchange. The five-day
forum program proved me right! AIAA members showed the aero-
space community how we can move forward this year at the pace
technology advancement demands.
We are all concerned about large in-person gatherings during
the challenging and changing conditions of the global pandemic.
Many members were unable to travel for a variety of reasons, which
is totally understandable. What I witnessed during the week was
incredible attention to the health and safety of everyone involved.
AIAA has built on last year’s in-person experiences to use the best
practices we’ve learned at the 2021 AIAA DEFENSE Forum and 2021
ASCEND. I believe we must continue striving to hold in-person
events safely so we can make the most of networking, mentoring,
and robust dialogue. These connections are vital to our social fabric.
Meanwhile, AIAA is pushing the use of technology to deliver com-
pelling events online. This hybrid approach benefits all attendees
and helps AIAA reach even more people in our community. We are
able to equalize access to technical information across geographies,
helping the best ideas to flourish.
The outlook on innovation for the year includes progress in the
three AIAA Domains. A big thanks to our new Domain leads—Ming
Chang for Aeronautics, Scott Fouse for Aerospace R&D, Julie Van
Kleeck for Space—who shared their vision last month in this column.
I strongly believe the Domain approach will open new doors for AIAA
to pursue at this time, propelling the Institute to do what it does
best—convening, publishing, educating, advocating, and connect-
ing the content from the technical disciplines within each Domain.
Student engagement is vital to AIAA all year long. It was one of
the highlights of the forum for me. I especially enjoyed the Inter-
national Student Conference, which showcased the first-place
winners from each of the 2021 AIAA Regional Student Conferences.
These students presented their winning papers in front of a panel
of AIAA member judges. If you missed it, you can read their papers
in the forum proceedings.
After meeting the AIAA Diversity Scholars and attending the
Rising Leaders in Aerospace special programming at the forum, I
am even more encouraged by the next generation of aerospace
professionals. We must continue to involve them and challenge
them on their career journeys. One of the immediate steps we can
take is serving as a mentor through the AIAA Mentor Match program.
I have been personally enriched through my experience as a men-
tor and I challenge each of you to fi nd a way to participate. If you
have any questions about becoming a mentor, I would love to talk
to you about it.
AIAA is dedicated to recognizing and celebrating aerospace
ingenuity, collaboration, and diversity as we began this year by
inducting the Class of 2022 AIAA Associate Fellows. These 133 AIAA
members have distinguished themselves through important con-
tributions to aerospace engineering and science. Congratulations
to those recognized as true leaders in our profession. Their induction
ceremony during the forum is further evidence our community
continues to inspire innovation and drive technological progress.
As we anticipate the rest of 2022, please join me in celebrating
where we are now and participate in activities all year long that
enrich your AIAA membership. I hope to see many of you in person
or online soon.
Basil Hassan
AIAA President
aerospaceamerica.aiaa.org | FEBRUARY 2022 | 7
 Do you have a puzzler to suggest? Email us at aeropuzzler@aiaa.org.
How long can
a helicopter
fly inverted?
Q: You’re editing a screenplay, and your job
is to make sure the film isn’t bashed by
technical experts. Would you make any
changes to the following and why? “The
rescue helicopter suddenly lurches to an
inverted position, causing the U.S. president
and assembled brass in the Situation Room
to gasp in fear that it might not reach the
stranded SEAL team, but luckily, it is a coaxial
design that easily keeps flying upside down
while the code gurus in mission control iron
out the autonomous control snafu. Everyone
sighs in relief a few minutes later when the
aircraft is righted.”
Your challenge is to answer the above in
a maximum of 250 words that someone
in any field could understand. Email
your response by noon Eastern Feb. 15
to aeropuzzler@aiaa.org for a chance
to have it published in the next issue.
For a head start ... find the AeroPuzzler online on the first of each month at
https://aerospaceamerica.aiaa.org/ and on Twitter @AeroAmMag.
8 | FEBRUARY 2022 | aerospaceamerica.org
FROM THE JANUARY ISSUE
TAKING OFF ON A TREADMILL: We
asked you if a flying car could take off
on a treadmill.
WINNER: The answer is “Yes” if the
treadmill is long enough. The airplane’s
wings only care about airspeed relative to
the wings. The airplane will move down the
treadmill until its airspeed is high enough to achieve lift greater than or equal
to its weight and then it takes off. Because it is a windless day, the airplane’s
speed relative to the ground under the treadmill’s base will determine the
airspeed. The wheels will be turning at a much greater rate than they would
on a stationary runway because the treadmill belt is going the other way, but
the required airspeed will be reached. The driver should be wondering not
whether the propellers have the “extra speed required” but instead, whether
the propellers are generating the amount of thrust required to overcome air
resistance and rolling resistance. It is true that the rolling resistance will be
marginally higher given the higher rotational rate of the wheels, but this is a
negligible increase over the air resistance plus the rolling resistance normally
encountered on a stationary runway. The underlying assumption is that this
particular flying car could successfully take off from a stationary runway with
some margin of excess thrust.
Douglas Dobbin, AIAA senior member
El Paso, Texas
douglas.dobbin@gmail.com
Dobbin performs trajectory and risk analyses at White Sands Missile Range,
New Mexico, and is a graduate student studying fi xed-wing airplane design in
the Aerospace Systems Design Laboratory at Georgia Tech.
 R&D ON - ORBIT SERVICING
Mission: Humanlike
dexterity in space
KEITH BUTTON | buttonkeith@gmail.com
S
atellite servicing is a hot topic in the space industry, but as
far as the public record shows, no one yet has mastered the
science of robotically fi xing or refueling multi million-dol-
lar spacecraft. One piece of unsettled business is the need to
compare the diffi culty of grappling a satellite to the option of
coasting alongside and touching only the component that needs
fi xing or refueling.
Testing the non-grapple method requires creating a robotic
arm with incredible dexterity. That’s one of the challenges that a
university and industry team led by Carnegie Mellon University
in Pittsburgh will take up starting in March under a fi ve-year, $5
million grant from the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory.
Howie Choset, the Carnegie Mellon robotics professor leading
the team, has set a big goal for the technology: refueling the James
Webb Space Telescope should NASA decide to do so. Choset thinks
the technology could be ready in 10 years, but NASA now estimates
that Webb will have a propellant life of twice that following a
highly accurate Ariane 5 orbital insertion and two midcourse
correction maneuvers.
First, though, Choset and his team will examine two scenar-
ios: Catching up to a satellite to grab it versus fl ying alongside and
having a robot arm reach out and work on it. One of their goals is
figuring out which scenario is more difficult.
Both are tricky. Flying alongside might work best for simpler
tasks, such as inserting a new navigation system into a defunct
satellite, a maneuver akin in terms of precision to a person in-
serting a key into a lock. We humans sometimes take our dexter-
ity for granted, but that’s an act of “insane” precision involving
our senses and muscles, Choset says. Now, imagine the task with
a tumbling or spinning satellite as your target. That’s even trick-
ier.
Grabbing the satellite might be necessary for more compli-
cated repairs, but then there’s the concern that the robot might
damage an exterior surface or just miss the mark and push the
satellite out of orbit, losing it forever.
So, researchers plan to try versions of the “key in the lock”
repair scenario in labs at Carnegie Mellon, Northrop Grumman
in Virginia, and — potentially — the University of New Mexico.
Each will mount a simulated satellite face to a robotic arm pro-
grammed to simulate the weightlessness of space by offering only
slight resistance when pushed, for instance. Versions of robot
arms will then try to repair the satellite faces. Meanwhile, Texas
A&M researchers will work on the satellite-grabbing scenario.
Northrop Grumman has shown great interest in satellite ser-
vicing. A spacecraft it’s developing, the Mission Robotic Vehicle,
targeted for launch in 2024, will be equipped with robotic arms
from the U.S. Naval Research Lab and DARPA. MRV will be similar
to the company’s existing Mission Extension Vehicle-1 and 2 space-
craft, currently attached to two geosynchronous satellites for
propulsion and pointing control, Northrop Grumman says. The
difference will be that the MRVs will have arms instead of the
docking mechanisms on the MEVs that attach to each spacecraft’s
liquid apogee engine.
On the AFRL project, Northrop Grumman and the other par-
ticipants ultimately want to design arms with the dexterity to
build structures in space. Components could be packed into
smaller launch vehicles, and elaborate folding and unfolding
wouldn’t be necessary, Choset says.
aerospaceamerica.aiaa.org | FEBRUARY 2022 | 9
 Q&A TOM PREVOT, AIR TA XI PRODUCT LEAD AT JOBY AVIATION

Credit: David Becker

TO M P R EVOT
Positions: Since January
2021, air taxi product
lead at Joby, in charge of
developing Joby’s planned
air taxi service, including
the smartphone app
through which passengers
would book rides. Director
of airspace systems at
Uber Elevate, 2017-2021,
where he led development
of the cloud services and
simulation tools for Uber’s
planned air taxi service,
sold to Joby in late 2020.
Held a variety of positions
at NASA's Ames Research
Center in California 1996-
2017, including head of the
Airspace Operations Lab
that evaluates how future
mobility concepts, including
drones and air taxis, would
fit into the national airspace.
Technical officer in the
German Air Force, 1985-
1995.

Notable: Came to the U.S.

in 1996 after receiving
a postdoctoral research
scholarship from the
National Research Council.
At NASA Ames, invented
the MACS (Multi-Aircraft
Control System) software
that simulates air traffic
situations, including
inclement weather and

Q&A
simultaneous remote piloting
of multiple drones. Recipient
of two NASA Software
of the Year awards: the
first in 2017 for the TSAS
(Terminal Sequencing and
Spacing) software for air
traffic control; the second
in 2019 for the UAS Traffic
Management Services

Air taxi trailblazer

software.

Age: 56

Resides: San Jose, California

I
n one way or another, Tom Prevot has been preparing for the emerging advanced air mobility
market his entire career. After nearly 20 years at NASA simulating how the U.S. airspace could
Education: Diploma
accommodate new aircraft designs, plus four years at Uber’s AAM division Elevate, the dual (equivalent to a combined
German-U.S. citizen is now helping bring electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft, eVTOLs, bachelor's and master's
to market as air taxi product lead at Joby Aviation. The California company that purchased Uber degree) and Ph.D., both
Elevate in 2020 wants to be the first to ferry passengers around U.S. cities, starting in 2024. Along with in aeronautical and
astronautical engineering,
earning FAA certification, Joby’s ambitious goal requires developing flight routes and building an in-
from Munich University of
tuitive smartphone app through which passengers would book rides. I led an Aerospace America and the German Armed Forces, in
audience Q&A with Prevot at AIAA’s SciTech Forum in January. We met in “the HUB,” an event area of 1990 and 1995.
the exhibit hall at each forum. I’ve condensed and edited the discussion for print. — Cat Hofacker

10 | FEBRUARY 2022 | aerospaceamerica.org

Hofacker: Just this morning before our interview, Joby anounced FAA ap-
proval to begin test flights with a second S4 prototype. What does this mean
for the 2024 target?
A: What it means is we can fly more, we can produce more data, we can support
our certification efforts more than we used to with just one aircraft. We’re all about
executing.

Hofacker: There’s certainly high hopes for the advanced air mobility market,
with projections of billions of dollars by 2030. How big do you think this
market has the potential to be?
A: I’m not going to make any number projections or anything; I don’t have my crys-
“In order to serve
tal ball with me to do it. But other people have done that. Just like you said, there
are different models out there. People are talking about billions of dollars in the as many people as
mid-2030s. I think there’s a huge demand for people to relieve some of the con-
gestion in cities, to get towards much more sustainable means of transportation
than what we have today, and so we think there’s a huge opportunity to meet that
possible and meet
demand with aircraft that are quieter, that are zero emissions while we operate
them.
their needs, we
Hofacker: In investor materials, Joby has described 300 aircraft flying about feel like it’s much
20 routes a day in Los Angeles alone, so that gives us a sense of the scale.
A: The Joby vision of saving a billion people an hour a day will require lots of aircraft
and lots of operations, and we do believe that the demand is there. Obviously,
better to have a
that’s not where we’re going to start. We’re going to start with a few flights, oper-
ate them in the current environment so that people can really experience the
flexible service,
difference between aircraft like ours and what you would use today to do these
flights, like a helicopter, how much quieter it is. It also gives the communities just on-demand
the first sense of what these aircraft are, and then we do believe that’s going to
even increase the demand for it from the models that we’ve seen. There was a lot
of demand modeling done, including back at Uber, that is promising.
service than a
Hofacker: I’ve noticed that among AAM companies there tend to be two scheduled service
buckets: those that want to be first to market, like Joby, and those that want
to wait for the market to mature. Why does Joby think the first category is that runs the
the right strategy?
A: I believe there’s not going to be a second category without the first one. It’s an
opportunity for us also to kind of be the pathfinder, to make sure this market is
same every day.”
going to happen at all and then to get the aircraft out there. If nobody took the
step of leading the way into the market, we probably wouldn’t get anywhere. Think
about where would be the electric car market without Tesla. Where would
ride-sharing be without Uber? We want to make this market real; somebody has
to lead the way, and I feel like we are in the best position to do that because our
aircraft is getting ready.

Hofacker: Uber has such great brand awareness that people say, “I’m going
to Uber.” Is that what Joby wants — for us to one day say, “I’m going to
Joby?”
A: Well, I wouldn’t mind. Sounds pretty good.

Hofacker: I can imagine a scenario where I’m late for my air taxi ride because
I have to take an elevator up to a rooftop vertiport. How are you thinking
about those logistic challenges?
A: That’s a very good question and that’s a key component that we’re right now
digging into. We do have a specific product manager for our passengers and
riders, and some of us bring the experience from Uber with us. At Uber, we ran a
very similar pilot in New York City, where we had cars pick people up in downtown
Manhattan, we pooled several people together to a heliport, flew them over to

aerospaceamerica.aiaa.org | FEBRUARY 2022 | 11

 Joby Aviation of California estimates it will need
to build 300 of its four-passenger electric vertical
takeoff and landing aircraft to ferry customers
around Los Angeles for its on-demand air taxi
service. LA is one of a handful of U.S. cities
where Joby plans to begin air taxi flights in 2024.

Joby Aviation

12 | FEBRUARY 2022 | aerospaceamerica.org

 JFK International Airport, and then had other cars pick
them up on the other end too. And some of the first
things that you learn are that you’ve got to deal with
all the things that can go wrong. Predicting arrival times
in downtown Manhattan is difficult with cars, so you
got to build in the right buffers, the right trade-offs
between not waiting long for your helicopter, but just
long enough so that you can have a little bit of extra
buffer in there. Then the wayfinding along the way is
also something that’s extremely important, so you’ve
got to design the app right, that at the right time you
get the right context — “Go here, go there, go there,
go to this location” — so that you can find your next
leg of the trip. This part of the passenger experience
is a very critical element that we see and are working
on today to try to get right.

Hofacker: Give us a general sense of the app — is

it going to be similar to Uber’s, I plug in my location
and push a button to book my ride?
A: It will be similar. You will be able to book the entire
trip through either the Uber app or the Joby app. But
you can imagine the Joby app is a little more avia-
tion-focused and a little more leaning into the aircraft
and that experience, given that people are probably
more coming from that direction. Both will give you
the options to book the entire flight. That’s at least
how we lay it out. And both of them should be, the Joby
app as well, simple to navigate. And we do a lot of
product testing along the way. We don’t have to wait
for our aircraft to be certified to do this. We can work
with traditional aircraft today and kind of get into this
passenger and rider experience and build out the
product flow. And we do have an initial app that we
use internally.

Hofacker: Why did Joby decide to go with on-demand

services versus scheduled flights?
A: Looking at the Uber trip data initially and how
people travel around the cities, it basically tells you
that there are certain patterns, but there’s also many
different elements that come into play that help
people decide what they want to do at any given time
and when. If there’s a big football game somewhere,
people have a different travel pattern than if there’s
a vacation timeline. So in order to serve as many
people as possible and meet their needs, we feel like
it’s much better to have a flexible service, on-demand
service than a scheduled service that runs the same
every day. We want to utilize our aircraft in the most
efficient way. That way we can have as many people
on board to keep the prices at a reasonable level. So
it feels like the on-demand model is a lot akin to what
people do in the city urban air taxi use cases. I mean,
who orders a taxi every day at the same time?

aerospaceamerica.aiaa.org | FEBRUARY 2022 | 13

 Hofacker: How do you think that calculus might
change as you move out into rural areas or longer
trips rather than just short inner-city hops?
A: One of the first things is you’re going to be able to
connect more areas into the cities, right? I think that
there’s been some statistics done way back that show
traditionally, people live about 30 minutes from where
they work and that is independent of the means of
transportation. So when all you had was to walk, you
would live much, much closer to the city than if you
could drive or if you had some other form of transit.
So perhaps with having an aircraft that allows you to
get there even faster, people might be able to spread
out even more and then you might be able to connect
those communities that are sort of underserved today
with these aircraft into the larger picture as well.
Hofacker: Since the covid pandemic, we all feel a
little differently now about being in close quarters.
Is Joby still confident in the ride-sharing model?
A: We can try and keep things very, very safe, and we
will keep things very safe. We control who gets on the
aircraft. We can screen folks. It’s still a small aircraft;
there’s a maximum of four passengers, so it’s a much
more controlled environment, I would say, than if you
go into a larger airliner in some sense. But still, we
can take the appropriate safety measures so that
people feel comfortable boarding the aircraft. It looks
like ride-sharing also is coming back. We will have to
establish the trust that we need from our passengers,
but I think that we will, and I feel like it’s a pretty
decent model still for people to travel around. I’m
hopeful it’ll stay that way.
Hofacker: That gets to this larger idea of public
acceptance. How is Joby thinking about introduc-
ing the public to this?
A: One of the things that’s important is experiencing
the aircraft, and we’ve already published a few ele-
ments where you can see the aircraft fly, you can hear
the aircraft noise compared to other aircraft in flyovers.
None of this is a real replacement of actually seeing
it and I’m sure, in the very near future, we will also be
flying where it might be a little more accessible to the
public. And then over time, we want to really have
people understand that this is different from what you
typically see. It’s not very noisy; even during takeoff
and landing, you’ll barely hear it when it’s above you.
It’s got to be friendly. This idea didn’t get much trac-
tion in the company, but I always felt like maybe you
could have some communities design their own aircraft;
take some ownership, get it really nicely integrated
into your daily life, essentially.
Hofacker: You mention noise, but I’ve noticed that
Joby and other AAM companies are pretty secre-
tive on how that quiet flight is achieved. Is that
14 | FEBRUARY 2022 | aerospaceamerica.org
because you expect noise is a make-or-break
element for AAM?
A: I do think so. The Joby aircraft has been designed
from the very beginning, literally, with noise in mind.
The advantage of distributed electric propulsion that
you have is you can control multiple props on the aircraft
at very different speeds. You don’t have these high tip
speeds that you have with helicopters, for example. So
it’s very much designed around this noise profile, and
the measurements that we’re taking are proving that
is working out. But I feel like that’s probably one of the
biggest make or breaks. I mean, when I’m at home and
I hear certain aircraft at night, it’s disturbing.
Hofacker: I’ve always wondered how likely it is
that people on the ground would hear the aircraft
overhead, especially in the middle of a busy city
where there are buses and cars passing by.
A: It’s very unlikely. Noise profile is going to fit in and
the sound level is probably less than the cars you hear.
Turn to p. 24 for more on the quests of Joby and other
advanced air mobility operators to achieve near-silent
flight
Audience member 1: What would you see as the
potential obstacles in terms of getting the certi-
fication with the FAA?
A: We have the certification basis that we’ve
agreed upon with the FAA through the G-1. There’s
definitely a lot of additional steps on the matters of
compliance that have to be taken, but I feel like it
is at the execution level right now, where we know
what we have to do. It’s going to be a lot of work,
but that’s one of our main priorities to do that. I
can’t really point to any single main obstacle that I
would see right now.
Audience member 2: For me and for a lot of my
friends who are also women, personal safety is a
big issue when it comes to taking a taxi or an Uber.
With air taxis, you won’t have the option to say,
“Pull over, let me out here.” So what steps are you
going to take?
A: The first thing is that we are only going to be using
commercial pilots, highly trained pilots. They will have
undergone vast safety checks, background checks
and everything you need to do there. So I would say,
not quite the same amount of people who could be in
charge of your vehicle compared to an Uber. We’re
also going to do a reasonable amount of safety checks
on the passengers. I don’t know exactly what the
details are going to be, but we’re going to figure out
what the right level of checks is. Certainly things like
checking against the No Fly List, other things are on
the table. It’s questionable if you want to go to a

TSA-level check there, but we’ll do whatever we can
to keep people safe.
Audience member 3: Do you have any estimates
on how much weather will affect your ability to
operate?
A: Initially, more than we hope than at later stages.
When we’re going to start operating, we’re going to
be primarily operating in visual conditions and nicer
weather. It is a new aircraft, so you kind of have to feel
your way into it a little more. It’s also a question then
of, again, acceptability. For people who’ve flown the
smaller aircraft in really bad weather, that’s not very
comfortable initially. We will follow up our initial cer-
tification with an IFR [instrument flight rules] as well,
so that if we get into a situation, we could continue to
fly where weather gets bad. But we’re probably going
to be very conservative, initially, to stay out of difficult
weather situations and then build up that capability
over time.
Read more about weather solutions for this new breed of
aircraft on p. 16
Audience member 4: What are the biggest obsta-
cles and even the biggest opportunities in moving
from piloted aircraft to autonomous flying?
A: There’s a number of elements. The main thing is
having the pilot on board, the pilot can do the see-
and-avoid tasks. One of the primary tasks of the
pilot is they look out for the aircraft, they look out
during takeoff and landing, depending on what the
minima are. We kind of know what the regulations
are if you do that for the larger airspace and larger
UASs, and it requires a lot of additional equipment,
The audience at the
AIAA SciTech Forum in San
Diego had a lot of questions
for Joby Aviation’s Tom
Prevot during his Q&A with
Aerospace America’s Cat
Hofacker.
David Becker
radars, and detect-and-avoid equipment. It will also
then require the large separation standards that
you need between aircraft, and so there has to be
some more work to be done in really figuring out
how can we take out the pilots safely and maintain
a higher throughput and what’s going to replace the
pilot’s decision making and eyeballs in the aircraft.
Maybe some of the small UASs can lead the way
with some of the technologies that are being de-
veloped there. We definitely want to get to auton-
omous flights eventually, but it would be a pretty
high risk to try to do that from the get-go.
Audience member 5: Two questions: The first one
is on the cost model, and the second is about the
safety of the aircraft itself. For example, FAA
certified the 737 MAX, but you had these crashes.
Can you talk about the safety measures taken?
A: The goal is to start operating about at a similar price
point as you would pay for an Uber Black and then
get it down over time to an Uber X-type price for the
aircraft. According to our models, that’s seems fea-
sible and economical. On the safety, there’s a number
of different things that we do. First of all, there’s a lot
of redundancy on the aircraft. There are independent
battery packs. Each one of the rotors is being driven
by two independent batteries so if one of the rotors
go out, one on the opposite side would be turned off
and we can still continue to fly, we can still continue
to go vertical. There’s a lot of redundancy that’s built
in. So those are the two main concerns with safety
and noise on the vehicle. There’s more information
on the details also on our website. You can look at
some of the diagrams of the aircraft, how that is being
built in. We are trying to get to a similar level of
safety as air carriers.
aerospaceamerica.aiaa.org | FEBRUARY 2022 | 15
16 | FEBRUARY 2022 | aerospaceamerica.org
Safely moving cargo and
passengers among buildings and
just over treetops will require
unique weather information.
Keith Button looks at ideas for
collecting and delivering the
required forecasts and real-ttime
knowledg ge of conditions.
KEITH BUTTON | buttonkeith@gmail.com

he helicopter crash that killed basketball great Kobe Bryant

and eight others was a tragic example of the dangers of flying
at low altitudes, which is exactly the regime where legions of
electric rotorcraft might one day carry us to work or to the
airport or to an evening out under the coming advanced air
mobility revolution. In the Bryant case, the pilot of the Sikorsky
S-76B pressed on rather than turning around when he en-
countered fog, became disoriented and flew into a hill.
Today’s helicopter pilots make such life-and-death decisions, in-
cluding whether to take off in the fi rst place, based largely on their own
observations. That decision-making process won’t be possible in a future
with hundreds or thousands of remotely piloted or autonomous AAM
passenger and cargo aircraft sharing tight fl ight corridors.
NASA’s Nancy Mendonca, the agency’s deputy for its AAM research
efforts, flew H-46 helicopters for the U.S. Navy from 1989 to 2000. The
meteorology reports she received were very broad — typically covering
an area as large as half the Atlantic Ocean. “You’re really limited to the
weather you can see out the window.”
TruWeather Solutions CEO Don Berchoff describes the situation in
even franker terms: “If you look at the helicopter industry, they’re the
bastard child. They’ve never been given the type of weather tools or
sensing that they need. And that’s why there’s such a high accident rate.”
The scarcity of granular weather data and forecasts for low-altitude
fl ights is no accident. Flights of fi xed-wing airliners have historically
far outnumbered flights of helicopters and other low-altitude passenger
aircraft, and those jets cruise altitudes at tens of thousands of feet,
which puts them above the worst weather. Their greatest risk of encoun-
tering dangerous weather is closer to the ground, during ascent and
descent, and for that reason the bulk of the aviation weather sensors in
the United States are focused on monitoring and predicting the weath-
er around airports.

aerospaceamerica.aiaa.org | FEBRUARY 2022 | 17


Troubling for the AAM community is that the
vast areas between airports up to an altitude of
5,000 feet amount to a weather “data desert,” says
Berchoff . For those who cruise in those places,
the thinking has always been: “There’s a pilot
[aboard] and they’ll get out of it,” he adds.
That status quo won’t do for the emerging $115
billion AAM rotorcraft market. These aircraft must
take off from vertiports built on city rooftops, vacant
lots or undeveloped parcels, then fl y among tall
buildings or hills and over treetops and roads.
Along these routes, winds can vary greatly in
strength; precipitation can be rain in one area, and
then later turn to sleet, freezing rain or even snow.
In these challenging weather scenarios, flights will
need to be regularly scheduled and conducted at
a rapid tempo and, eventually, if all goes as planned,
autonomously without a pilot aboard. Otherwise,
the business case might not close. Weather delays
and cancellations must be held to a minimum, and
in the case of scheduled flights, customers will
likely expect several hours notice so that they can
make alternate travel arrangements.
On top of that, each aircraft will need to be
18 | FEBRUARY 2022 | aerospaceamerica.org
The January 2020 crash
able to reach a contingency landing site, and of the S-76B helicopter
carrying basketball great
anticipating the wind speed and conditions will
Kobe Bryant and eight others
be vital to ensuring the aircraft has adequate
occurred in part because
range. Most of the AAM concepts call for lithium of the pilot’s decision to
batteries that will drain faster when it’s cold and continue flying amid bad
winds are gusty, says James Jones, an air trans- weather, the U.S. National
Transporation Safety Board
portation operations researcher at MIT Lincoln
concluded. Operators
Laboratory.
of advanced air mobility
Simply put, an AAM operator with access to aircraft will need more
detailed weather information will be able to weather information than has
confidently push out more fl ights, while an oper- been available to pilots of
conventional helicopters.
ator who lacks that information could become
overly conservative, cautions Brenda Philips, a NTSB
research professor at the University of Massachu-
setts Amherst. The best-prepared operators will
have analyzed how many flights they can complete
in bad weather, taking into account the vehicle
type and its mission, she adds.
In this view, business success and the growth
of the AAM market will require achieving the
same quality of weather awareness and forecast-
ing available to operators of large commercial
aircraft. Here are four ideas, none of them mutu-
ally exclusive, for meeting the challenge.
 “IF YOU THINK ABOUT HOW
RAPIDLY THE WEATHER CAN
CHANGE, THAT’S A REAL
PAUCITY OF INFORMATION
YOU’RE GETTING.”
— Jamey Jacob, professor of aerospace engineering,
Oklahoma State University
1) Specialized radars and lidars
Aviation weather reporting in the United States
currently relies heavily on a network of 160 NEXRAD
(Next-Generation Radar) Doppler radars and 45
shorter-range Terminal Doppler Weather Radars,
operated by the FAA at major airports, which op-
erate at a shorter wavelength and offer higher
resolution than the NEXRADs. But not much of the
zone up to 1,500 feet can be covered by these radars.
That’s because the straight-line beam of a radar
becomes higher and higher off the ground as the
Earth curves away, so the radars see less of the
lower atmosphere the farther out they reach. NEX-
R ADs, for example, take measurements of t he
1,500-feet-and-below region for only 40 kilometers.
Unless an AAM route happened to pass near an
airport or other radar location, the pilot or auto-
mated f light computer could not receive a radar
picture of any precipitation ahead.
For better weather radar coverage for AAM, re-
searchers are studying how smaller, shorter-range
radars installed on rooftops and cell towers could fi ll
in the low-altitude gaps.
Among them are researchers at the Massachu-
setts-based Center for Collaborative Adaptive Sens-
ing of the Atmosphere, which originally set out to
create a network for community emergency weather
warnings. CASA operates a demonstration network
of seven X-band radars with overlapping coverage in
the Dallas-Fort Worth area, each with a range of 40
to 100 kilometers. CASA feeds data from each radar
to the National Weather Service, which sends forecasts
and weather warnings back to users of a free CASA
phone app. The app displays customized weather
information, such as f lash f lood warnings in the
Dallas-Fort Worth area.
The data and resulting forecasts are very localized,
down to a nearly street-intersection level, says the
Amherst professor Philips, who is CASA’s co-director.
The technology that the researchers developed to
deliver the customized weather information to a
moving object — a person’s cell phone — could be
applied to a moving AAM aircraft as well, sending it
data based on predetermined preferences for that
individual vehicle.
A somewhat similar weather service at some
airports, namely the Automated Weather Observing
System, might also inspire an innovation for AAM.
This FAA-operated equipment transmits airport
weather reports every minute from sensors at the
airport to pilots and weather forecasters, including
the cloud ceiling height, visibility, the presence of fog
aerospaceamerica.aiaa.org | FEBRUARY 2022 | 19
 or precipitation, and icing conditions out to 8 kilome-
ters of the airport. In theory, vertiports could be
equipped with similar sensors and transmitting
equipment to cover the nearby airspace.
Of course, each AAM aircraft also will be suscep-
tible to wind, depending on its design, not just to
precipitation and the risk of icing. Radars can’t detect
wind speed and direction when there is no precipita-
tion in the air to reflect their signals. A solution could
be Doppler wind lidars, which don’t have the same
problem because they need only aerosols to reflect
their signals, and aerosols are usually present at low
altitudes, especially in urban areas. Lidars can mea-
sure winds at high resolution, for every 20 meters in
a 5- or 6-kilometer radius. And when two lidar fields
overlap, they can discern wind direction.
None of these sources would come cheaply. Each
CASA radar cost $400,000. As for lidars, even a mid-
dle-of-the-road version costs $250,000 to $500,000,
and to cover a city with sufficient resolution would
require 10 to 20 of them, says Timothy Bonin, a me-
teorologist at MIT Lincoln Laboratory. That leads us
to the next idea.
2) Crowdsourcing
Internet-connected cameras and other sensors could
provide inexpensive access to a host of weather data.
Berchoff of TruWeather leads a committee of the U.S.-
based standards group ASTM charged with recom-
mending weather data standards for drones. He would
like to change the emphasis of the standards away
from certifying weather instruments, as is done with
those at airport weather stations, one factor that drives
up costs. For example, a certified weather station at
an airport can cost $120,000 to $250,000.
Instead, he would like the FAA to set standards for
weather information that will guide drone flights based
on data reliability, which he says would “open the
spigot” for operators to access many types of low-cost,
internet-connected weather sensors. More people
would invest in building and deploying weather sen-
sors, because they could then sell the sensor data. The
cost of the data for the AAM operators would be driv-
en down as they fly more and more fl ights.
Micronets of 40 or 50 weather sensors spread across
a city — each consisting of a thermometer, a hygrom-
eter measuring humidity and an anemometer mea-
suring wind speed and direction, all mounted on a
pole — could help fi ll in a gap in weather radar cov-
erage for the coming new class of aircraft, says Lincoln
Lab meteorologist Bonin.
For reporting on flying visibility, existing video
camera networks could be paired with artificial intel-
ligence, Bonin says. If a camera were aimed at a distant
object, and if the distance to the object were known,
then software could report when the object disappeared
due to fog or precipitation, and this visibility figure
20 | FEBRUARY 2022 | aerospaceamerica.org
could be shared with operators. Meanwhile, cameras
aimed at roads could help report when snow is falling
via software that interprets when surfaces turn white.
Cameras with artificial intelligence could also be cheap
to deploy, piggybacking on traffic cameras or security
cameras that are already in place.
Another cheap option would be to tap into weath-
er hobbyists who, like Bonin, have their own backyard
weather stations and post their weather data — tem-
perature, humidity, wind speed and direction, and
rain or snow accumulation — to websites like Wun-
derground.com, which claims a network of more than
250,000 contributors worldwide who automatically
post their data every few seconds.
3) Weather drones
Today’s large commercial aircraft are required to
carry weather sensors that contribute to the World
Meteorological Association’s Aircraft Meteorological
Data Relay, AMDAR, observing system, which provides
real-time in-flight readings to government and private
forecasting services. The downside of AMDAR is that
most of the time the sensor-carrying planes are flying
at 35,000 to 40,000 feet — altitudes where there are
few weather features.
“All of the interesting stuff is when they’re on climb
or descent,” says Jamey Jacob, an aerospace engineer-
ing professor at Oklahoma State University.
But the general idea could be adapted to aircraft
that fly at low altitudes. Among the advocates of this
approach is Matthias Steiner, who directs research
into weather impacts on aviation for the National
Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado. Steiner
wants even small drones to be required to carry weath-
er sensors, not only to improve weather forecasting for
aviation but for society as a whole. He argues that the
requirement would be a small ask, considering that a
miniature temperature, pressure and humidity sensor
is smaller than a quarter, weighs one-fi fth as much as
the coin and costs less than $20.
Jacob is testing that concept. He leads a NASA-spon-
sored team of aerospace engineers, meteorologists and
atmospheric scientists on a project dubbed Weather
Intelligent Navigation Data and Models for Aviation
Planning, WINDMAP. They are studying how AAM
aircraft could improve weather observations and fore-
casting by carrying weather sensors and sharing the data.
Aircraft would collect data as they go about deliv-
ering passengers and cargo, or some might fly with the
sole mission of collecting weather data. AAM operators
would benefit by receiving more and better information
about conditions that could disrupt their flights, such
as fog, icing and winds. Weather forecasters could feed
more data on temperature, humidity, atmospheric
pressure, wind speed and wind direction, including
vertical winds, into their models to improve their
forecasts, particularly for severe weather. And AAM
operators could receive higher-resolution forecasts
— at the kilometer level instead of the current 30-ki-
lometer-plus level of most forecast models.
Starting in March, WINDMAP plans to collect
weather sensor data with swarms of drones flying from
FAA test sites at the Choctaw Nation in Oklahoma and
at the Virginia Tech campus, and then in June from
an Oklahoma City urban test site. The project team
will then compare the accuracy of sensor data to
readings from National Weather System ground tow-
ers, weather balloons and lidars. Researchers will try
replicate real-world conditions by putting sensors on
a variety of aircraft: small drones, large cargo-carrying
drones and drones built to simulate passenger-carry-
ing AAM vehicles, complete with dummy passengers.
Jacob grew up in Oklahoma, where he says every
resident has an innate interest in weather, and a healthy
respect for it because of the state’s severe storms,
including tornadoes. WINDMAP chose Oklahoma for
its testing in part because it has more than 100 ground
stations continuously sending readings to the Nation-
al Weather Service.
But for weather readings from the air, a lot of the
data in Oklahoma still comes from weather balloons
launched by the National Weather Service from a
single site, usually twice a day, or three or four times
per day when severe weather is expected.
“If you think about how rapidly the weather can
change, that’s a real paucity of information you’re
getting,” Jacob says.
Already, the WINDMAP team has demonstrated In this 2019 model
that flying a weather drone multiple times per day to created by FastEddy
software, researchers from
the FAA-mandated 400-foot limit at each National
the National Center for
Weather Service ground station would greatly improve
Atmospheric Research in
its forecasting, Jacob says. Even drones as small as a Colorado simulated the
1-kilogram DJI Phantom quadcopter could provide change in wind speed and
useful sensor data. direction as a cold front
passed over Dallas. In the
image at left, the wind is
4) Modeling and simulation coming from the southwest.
Current weather forecasting computer models don’t The image at right shows
take into account the winds created by the funneling that two hours later, the wind
and channeling effects of tall buildings, or the turbulence shifted 90 degrees to come
from the north, and the deep
eddies and vacuums created on the down-wind side of
red indicates increased wind
a building, says Berchoff of TruWeather. Flying through
speeds.
these urban canyons will be particularly daunting for
NCAR Research Applications Laboratory
AAMs. Forecasters will have to build computational
fluid dynamics models to predict those types of winds,
plus algorithms that can determine how changes in the
weather will change the building-related winds.
To safely land at vertiports, and even to plan where
vertiports should be built, AAM operators will need
to know where the winds are blowing from, the strength
of the winds and the influence of neighboring build-
ings, says Steiner of NCAR. To capture the fi ne-scale
flow features of winds in urban environments, re-
searchers need models that could produce predictions
every few minutes at a few meters resolution.
Researchers who are developing weather models
that could be applied to AAM fl ight environments
also need more actual weather data from local
aerospaceamerica.aiaa.org | FEBRUARY 2022 | 21
 One way to provide
advanced air mobility aircraft
with more sophisticated
weather data would be
to add more sensors to
weather stations, like
this Automated Weather
Observation System at the
Ezeiza Airport in Argentina.

Eric Phelps

weather sensors, which they could then compare to
the data produced by their models and fi ne-tune the
models. The resolution of the models — how much
detail they show — is also an issue for localized AAM
weather prediction in general. NOAA’s High Resolution
Rapid Refresh weather prediction model reports on
the predicted weather in the contguous U.S. states
within every 3-kilometer-wide cell in a grid covering
the entire country. But the model’s actual resolution,
the scale at which it can predict a change in conditions
from a neighboring area, is closer to every 12 or 15
kilometers, Bonin says.
NCAR has been developing a model, called FastEd-
dy, that employs GPU-based computing power to
create simulations of urban environments, including
wind eddies around buildings, down to a 1-meter
resolution, Steiner says.
Machine learning could apply the modeling and
data that are now available to help identify where the
hazardous conditions are for AAM operators, says
Lincoln Lab’s Bonin. For example, machine learning
could be applied for an area of a city where weather
data is sparse and help fi ll in the gaps in a low-reso-
lution weather model of that area.

22 | FEBRUARY 2022 | aerospaceamerica.org

Engage the
silent drive

24 | FEBRUARY 2022 | aerospaceamerica.org

(almost)
First-generation electric delivery drones
and passenger air taxis could be too noisy
for many communities, so researchers are
attempting to engineer electric thrusters
of unprecedented quietness. Paul Marks
delves into their chances of success.
BY PAUL MARKS | PaulMarksNews@protonmail.com

aerospaceamerica.aiaa.org | FEBRUARY 2022 | 25


Joby Aviation announced
in early January it had
received FAA approval
to begin test flights with
a second prototype of its
five-seat electric rotorcraft
design, pictured here at
Joby’s Marina, California,
facility.
Joby Aviation
26 | FEBRUARY 2022
O
n the shores of Lake Holiday in Cross-
ville, Tennessee, a former watersports
resort has found an unlikely new role
— as an electric aviation innovation
lab. On any given day at the startup
Whisper Aero, one might find a bunch
of aerospace engineers hunched over 3D laser scanners,
rapid prototyping software and computational fluid
dynamics simulations, I'm told by an executive. It’s
all part of an endeavor to solve one of the most press-
ing problems facing the advanced air mobility revo-
lution: Flying almost silently.
Specifically, the Whisper team has developed an
ultra-quiet type of electric thruster that it says can be
scaled for use on electric aircraft of different sizes,
whether they are small delivery drones, urban air
| aerospaceamerica.org
taxis or all-electric light aircraft fl ying city-to-city
routes. Th is, they believe, will be key to earning pub-
lic acceptance for the emerging market NASA dubs
advanced air mobility, AAM, typically consisting of
eVTOLs, electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft.
Will the device be a souped-up propeller that’s
digitally shaped, sized and spun at a speed to disturb
as little air as possible — perhaps in a special, hushed
kind of ducted fan — or will it be something entirely
new and exotic? Here is all Whisper CEO Mark Moore
would tell me: “It’s a unique propulsion technology,
one that lets us drive the noise down to such an ul-
tra-low level that it will blend into the background
noise of where drones or eVTOLs are flying.”
Whatever form these mysterious ultra-quiet thrust-
ers take, Whisper’s aim is to sell them to the makers
 “From where I was
standing, you could barely
hear a faint whirring; it
was reminiscent of a
quiet ceiling fan.”
— Nikhil Goel, Whisper Aero investor

of delivery drones and eVTOL passenger air taxis, as
well as to install the thrusters on an electric conven-
tional takeoff and landing light aircraft that Whisper
is designing. These planes that would fl y fast, quiet
city-to-city hops are called Whisper Jets, though the
company hasn’t said quite what it means by “jet.”
Whisper’s aims are not unique. A handful of eVTOL
makers have their own proprietary technologies for
quelling noise, including Archer Aviation and Joby
Aviation in the U.S., Lilium and Volocopter in Germa-
ny and Vertical Aerospace in Britain. In parallel, re-
search institutes elsewhere in the U.S. and in Europe
are also attempting to craft a new generation of quiet
thruster designs.
It’s a dynamic that’s setting up a high-stakes, low-
noise propulsion competition in the much-vaunted AAM
market, which in the U.S. alone is predicted by market
researcher Deloitte of London to be worth $115 billion
per annum by 2035 — creating, it says, 280,000 jobs.
To hear one observer tell it, this quest for quietness
is not a pipe dream; Whisper is succeeding in its aims.
“I was one of the first to see a live demo of Whisper’s
tech,” says Nikhil Goel, a New York technology inves-
tor and one of the company’s earliest financial backers.
“And I have never heard anything quite like it. From
where I was standing, you could barely hear a faint
whirring; it was reminiscent of a quiet ceiling fan.”
He adds: “Having seen the plans for the Whisper
Jet, I am confident it will change the way cities inter-
act with airplanes forever.”
Goel and half a dozen other venture capitalists,
including “Iron Man” actor Robert Downey Jr.’s venture

aerospaceamerica.aiaa.org | FEBRUARY 2022 | 27

 fund FootPrint Coalition Ventures, have invested a
total of $7.5 million to fund initial development of
Whisper’s technology. The company has also bene-
fited from U.S. Air Force Research Lab funding for
some of its early quiet thruster research.
Progress has been quick: “We’ve already developed
our design tool suite and built our fi rst propulsor and
tested it. And we’re very excited by the results,” says
Moore, who is well known in AAM circles because he
pioneered the very concept of distributed electric
propulsion during his 30-year career at NASA. And
after he left the agency, he developed a number of
AAM business models at Uber’s short-lived but influ-
ential aerial ride-sharing division, Uber Elevate, ac-
quired in late 2020 by Joby Aviation of California.
Now, Moore believes his team’s experience and
Whisper’s innovative design are a winning combi-
nation for creating “the next generation of distrib-
uted electric propulsion technology, with a focus on
achieving ultra-low noise, quieter per pound of
thrust than any other company has ever achieved,
while still having very high efficiency, low weight,
and high reliability.”
Those are bold aims, for sure, and there’s no short-
age of competition. Take Harmony Aeronautics, for
instance. Th is spinout from the aerospace research
department at Texas A&M University in the U.S. is
attempting to engineer quiet-running coaxial propul-
sors for drones and eVTOLs. Like Whisper, it has done
so in part with $150,000 in Small Business Technology
Transfer research funding from the U.S. Air Force
Research Lab, which on the STTR website described
Harmony’s coaxial rotor technology as “revolutionary.”
And in the U.K., the government-backed Aerospace
Technology Institute is funding a $3.8 million research
program called Inception, in which the University of
Cambridge’s Whittle Lab and the University of Salford’s
acoustics department are working with five aerospace
fi rms, including Dowty Propellers, to develop “quiet
and safe zero-carbon electric jet engines” — in other
words, ducted-fan vectored thrust propulsors, like
those spread along the wings of some eVTOL designs,
including the Lilium Jet.
However, those involved in this quest for quiet
electric propulsors are under no illusions that they
will be able to achieve anything approaching silent
fl ight. Electric motors, rotors, propellers and ducted
fans have to drive air forcefully to provide thrust, “so
there will always be noise associated with that” says
Antonio Torija-Martinez, acoustics lead at the Uni-
versity of Salford on the U.K. Inception project.
Harmony Aeronautics founder Moble Benedict
agrees: “There is no shortcut to quieting a rotor that’s
moving through the air at speed.”
So why take on such a tough challenge? Fear,
basically: What’s driving this new battle against de-
livery drone and eVTOL noise is a concern that unless
28 | FEBRUARY 2022 | aerospaceamerica.org
the sector’s potential to create irritating community
noise can be reduced to socially acceptable levels by
the time some operators plan to start passenger flights
in 2024 and 2025, AAM services could be stillborn.
“Without a better understanding of electric avia-
tion noise, its characteristics and why it is different
from traditional aviation, the easy answer from the
wider public will be to reject it,” says Darrell Swanson,
a U.K. consultant specializing in electric aviation
issues and strategic adviser to NASA on eVTOL oper-
ations. “And without public support for electric avia-
tion, we will not get planning permission for landing
infrastructure and the industry will never take off.”
Cutting the noise would result in a virtuous circle,
Swanson believes: “In a nutshell, lower noise leads to
a higher degree of social acceptance, reducing resis-
tance to the building of AAM infrastructure. More
infrastructure leads to more demand, leading to in-
creased competition and lower fares for passengers,
increasing the social utility of AAM.”
However, anyone watching the online postings of
the early runners and riders in the eVTOL arena could
be forgiven for thinking that the sector’s noise issues
are already a solved problem.
On YouTube, for instance, Joby has posted videos
of its S4 tiltrotor prototype variously taking off, hov-
ering and flying over a series of calibrated microphones,
showing what seemed a quiet performance. On its
website, Joby claims what was quiet in the hover would
be “near silent” in the cruise, thanks to the way the
six tilting propellers located along the wing and tail
operate. Th is distributed electric propulsion allows
eVTOLs like the S4 to have multiple large-diameter
propellers rotating at slow tip speeds, producing
low-frequency pressure waves. This would create more
of a hum than the well-known “wop-wop” sounds
from helicopters, which have an even larger diameter
rotor with higher tip speeds.
The question is: How loud will that hum be in an
urban setting, and with a great many eVTOLs plying
the airways as our future taxis?
On LinkedIn, Lilium of Germany showed a flight
demo of its eVTOL prototype taking off and flying a
number of brief fl ight maneuvers so viewers can ex-
perience the inoffensive “sound profile” of its ducted-fan
vectored engines. However, Joby’s flights were in rural
locations and Lilium’s at an empty airport, rather than
the built-up urban areas that AAM companies are
targeting for early passenger service. There, buildings
could create concrete canyons where resonating
electric rotor noise from multiple eVTOLs might annoy
people living near vertiports. But until eVTOLs are
safety certified, the operators won’t be able to proper-
ly assess their noise in the urban environments they
are destined to fly in, says consultant Swanson.
Some eVTOL designers, buoyed by encouraging lab
and ground tests, say they are confident their aircraft
will fly quietly — before they have flown. Vertical Aero-
space of the U.K., for instance says in an online video
that it hopes to achieve “near-silent flight” with its
in-development VX4 tiltrotor, aided by a novel rotor
design that lets Vertical “tune” noise levels, making it
some 30 times quieter than a helicopter. In a January
blog post, Archer Aviation of California says its Maker
eVTOL prototype flying at 2,000 feet in altitude should
be “1,000 times quieter than a helicopter” to a person
on the ground. As of press time, Archer had only con-
ducted a low-altitude hover test with the Maker design.
The problem for people trying to make sense of all
these comparisons, says the University of Salford
professor Torija-Martinez, is that in this nascent AAM
market, companies rarely compare like with like.
“I would be very careful with [comparing] noise
figures because there is a problem with nomenclature,”
he says. “What do they mean by 30 times quieter? In
terms of acoustic energy? In terms of decibels? Or what?”
On top of that, with companies jockeying for
early market dominance, commercial secrecy is very
much the watchword. None, says Benedict of Harmo-
ny Aeronautics, are going into much detail about how
their thruster quietening technology works.
But it’s not only the AAM airframe makers who
are keeping schtum; would-be quiet propulsor mak-
er Whisper Aero, too, is saying absolutely nothing
about how its quiet electric thrusters work. This pre-production
“Our first drone product won’t be operational version of Joby Aviation's
four-passenger electric
until 2023, so we don’t see any benefit in letting others
vertical takeoff and landing
know how the unique technology we’re developing design has made dozens of
works until we need to,” Moore told me. “It’s natural flight tests since 2019 at the
that when others see what we’re doing, they will want company’s Electric Flight
to do similarly.” Base near Big Sur, California.
Th is secrecy even applies to the five patent appli- Joby Aviation
cations Whisper has already filed on its thruster-hush-
ing technology. “None of our patents will be made
public for several years, with many more patents
actively being fi led as we scout out this new frontier
of electric propulsion,” says Moore.
While a patent application is normally published
18 months after fi ling, a U.S. patent applicant can fi le
a “request for nonpublication,” which if granted will
keep the invention secret until the inventor deems it
commercially safe to publish the patent specification.
So how might it be possible for an electrically
driven rotor or vectored-thrust ducted fan to be hushed?
What design features could be modified to make a
difference? Thankfully for the curious, Harmony
Aeronautics and the Inception team were willing to
share at least some details with me.
Harmony Aeronautics was spun out in 2018 when
Benedict and his colleague David Coleman, a PhD
student who was then developing a robotic
aerospaceamerica.aiaa.org | FEBRUARY 2022 | 29
 Joby Aviation
HQ: SANTA CRUZ, CALIF.
AIRCRAFT: S4, flown at Big Sur, Calif.;
flights with a second prototype in Marina,
Wisk
Calif., were scheduled for late January
HQ: MOUNTAIN VIEW, CALIF.
FIRST FLIGHT: 2019
AIRCRAFT: Cora, flown in
California and New Zealand
Archer Aviation FIRST FLIGHT: 2018

While noise reduction HQ: PALO ALTO, CALIF.

AIRCRAFT: Maker demonstrator, Beta Technologies
research continues, flown at Salinas, Calif.
FIRST FLIGHT: December 2021 HQ: BURLINGTON, VT.

developers are starting to AIRCRAFT: ALIA 250, flown at

Kitty Hawk Plattsburgh, N.Y., and Burlington, Vt.

fly their aircraft on multiple HQ: PALO ALTO, CALIF.

FIRST FLIGHT: 2020

continents. Here are the AIRCRAFT: Heaviside, flown at

undisclosed California location

eight companies out of FIRST FLIGHT: 2018

23 on SMG Consulting’s
AAM Reality Index that
have flown prototypes. EHANG

VOLOCOPTER

WHERE
VOLOCOPTER
EHANG

THEY'RE FLYING
ARCHER AVIATION KITTY HAWK

BETA TECHNOLOGIES JOBY AVIATION

30 | FEBRUARY 2022 | aerospaceamerica.org

 Lilium
HQ: MUNICH, GERMANY
AIRCRAFT: 5th Generation Technology
Demonstrator, flown at Munich; in late
January, planning was underway for
another round of flight tests in Spain
FIRST FLIGHT: May 2019
EHang
Volocopter HQ: GUANGZHOU, CHINA
AIRCRAFT: EHang 216, flown in Austria,
HQ: BRUCHSAL, GERMANY China, Estonia, Indonesia, Japan, the
Netherlands, Qatar, Québec, South Korea,
AIRCRAFT: 2X, flown at Bruchsal, United Arab Emirates and United States
Germany; Las Vegas; Dubai; Helsinki;
Stuttgart, Germany; Singapore; Seoul, FIRST FLIGHT: 2017
South Korea; Oshkosh, Wisconsin; Paris SECONDARY FLIGHT LOCATION > EHANG

FIRST FLIGHT: January 2018

SECONDARY FLIGHT LOCATION > VOLOCOPTER

VOLOCOPTER

EHANG

EHANG

VOLOCOPTER EHANG EHANG

VOLOCOPTER

EHANG
EHANG

VOLOCOPTER

EHANG

EHANG

WISK
SEE ALSO
CALIFORNIA

Graphic by THOR Design, reporting by Cat Hofacker

Sources: SMG Consulting, Aerospace America research

WISK VOLOCOPTER

LILIUM EHANG

aerospaceamerica.aiaa.org | FEBRUARY 2022 | 31

 Startup Whisper Aero,
located on the shores of
Lake Holiday, Tennessee,
wants to provide its quiet
propulsor technology to
other aircraft developers,
in addition to flying it on its
own Whisper Jets, an electric
vertical takeoff and landing
design. Whisper Jets would
conduct passenger flights
from local airports like the
Crossville Memorial Airport
(back left) that’s adjacent to
Whisper’s 20-acre campus.
Whisper Aero
32 | FEBRUARY 2022
hummingbird-like UAV, decided to enter Boeing’s
GoFly X-Prize challenge. The goal: To build a sin-
gle-person vertical takeoff and landing aircraft,
measuring no more than 8.5 feet (2.6 meters) in any
dimension, which can carry a 200-pound (91-kilogram
person) a distance of 20 miles (32 kilometers).
And there was a further proviso. The sound pres-
sure level of the aircraft’s noise had to be less than 87
dBA, a special version of decibels weighted for the
human ear’s frequency response, at a range of 50 feet
(15.2 meters) from the aircraft. “That means the noise
from the aircraft would only be like that from a truck
or a lawnmower at that distance,” says Benedict.
There were two issues with noise they had to deal
with: Its magnitude, as measured by its sound pressure
level in dBA, and its frequency range — which is a
strong measure of how psychologically annoying a
noise tone is to the human ear. “Our objective was to
make it not only reduce the magnitude of the noise,
but also to reduce the frequency so humans would
perceive the noise as quieter.”
The Harmony team settled on an electric rotorcraft
design powered by a pair of contrarotating coaxial
four-blade rotors and set about achieving that de-
manding specification. Knowing that on any rotorcraft
| aerospaceamerica.org
the noise sound pressure level is proportional to the
fourth (or higher) power of rotor tip speed, Coleman
and Benedict eschewed the small rotors popular on
many drone and eVTOL designs, which would have
had to spin very fast, creating quite a din.
“Instead, we went with a big rotor with more blade
area so we could move the blades at a much lower
speed and produce the same thrust,” says Benedict.
They also innovated with the blade shape to reduce
the noise caused when contrarotating blades pass
over each other (that is, as a clockwise-moving one
crosses a counterclockwise-moving one). “During
that blade crossover, a sudden, impulsive noise is
produced because of interactions between the blades,”
says Benedict. With regular, straight-edged rotor
blades, the entire upper and lower blade will overlap
at the same instant, producing a strong impulse noise.
Their answer was to bend the blade into a dog-leg
shape, sweeping half of it backward so the entire blade
span never overlaps simultaneously. “This means that
at any instant, only two points on the blade are actu-
ally overlapping, so we’re basically smearing out that
interaction over a longer period of time — simply by
the virtue of the shape,” says Benedict.
They have patented this noise-quashing idea,
he adds.
Next, they addressed the annoying frequency
issue, knowing, says Coleman, the range to avoid is
between 1 kHz and 5 kHz. On a piano keyboard, that’s
approximately the top two octaves. Imagine music
only being played at that end of the keyboard, and it’s
easy to see how annoying it would be.
“In a nutshell, lower noise
“That is the reason we are irritated by the sound
of a drone or a chainsaw or a baby crying,” says Ben- leads to a higher degree of
edict. “All these noises, or all these pressure fluctua-
tions, happen in this frequency range.”
To avoid such audible angst, they designed their social acceptance, reducing
coaxial rotors to run at speeds creating sound in the
hundreds of hertz range, cruising at just 200 Hz. And
in tests of Aria, their remotely-piloted 250-kg helicop-
resistance to the building of
ter, the sound pressure level at 15.2 meters measured
a mere 73 dBA, a feat Benedict describes as “phenom- AAM infrastructure. More
enal” given the 87 dBA GoFly requirement.
Unfortunately, a systems failure caused Aria to
roll over and crash while taxiing in a slow hover, so it infrastructure leads to more
was not entered in the GoFly competition.
“That was one of the saddest days,” says Benedict.
However, he says Boeing, undaunted by that crash, is
demand, leading to increased
still interested in researching U.S. Defense Department
applications for the startup’s innovative coaxial rotor competition and lower fares
blade, while Harmony explores AAM applications.
Blade architectures are front and center for mem-
bers of the U.K. Inception project, too, as its members for passengers, increasing
study electric ducted fans — initially single rotor
modules, and perhaps dual-rotor contrarotating units
in a follow-up project — to see how best to design them
the social utility of AAM."
for noise abatement.
And in a sign that alleviating AAM community
— Darrell Swanson, U.K. aviation consultant
noise is starting to matter big time, the Inception
researchers, like Harmony Aeronautics, are “assessing
sound quality metrics, too” — the so-called psycho-
acoustics, says Torija-Martinez.
The kind of design parameters that could be mod-
ified to improve the noise performance of a ducted-fan propulsor technology on its U.S. Air Force STTR award
electric jet include rotor tip speed, the number of webpage, the company says the analysis of its tech-
rotor blades and how those rotors interact with features nology “indicates an acoustic signature below all
within the duct’s roughly cylindrical architecture. current eVTOL development efforts, with the potential
“We are optimizing the tip speed of the blades, the to blend into ambient urban soundscapes.”
spacing between those blades, and the other structures It’s clear that Moore and his colleagues at their
within the fan, such as the [air] inlet guide vanes and lakeside innovation campus in deepest Tennessee are
outlet guide vanes,” says Torija-Martinez. certain that beating noise is the key to unlocking AAM.
But not everything comes down to the aircraft “I’m convinced the future is electric, that sustainabil-
itself: The acoustic environment a drone or eVTOL ity matters, and that in the modern world, we’re all
operates in, known as its soundscape, could also be closer and closer to each other,” he says. “So the win-
used to mask noise. For instance, says Torija-Martinez, ner is going to be whoever’s the quietest and has the
operators might be able to fly delivery drones along greenest set of technologies. And I think that’ll be us.”
busy roads so that traffic noise is hiding the sound Harmony Aeronautics and the seven-strong In-
produced by the UAVs. Similar thinking, he says, could ception consortium may beg to differ, however. And
inform those seeking sites for vertiports — using in any case, Harmony’s Benedict has some words of
traffic routes to help defi ne fl ight corridors. caution about the limitations of the aerodynamic
Whisper Aero appears to have just such masking noise-reducing tricks they all crave:
plans in mind. In a statement about its quiet “You can’t beat physics,” he warns.

aerospaceamerica.aiaa.org | FEBRUARY 2022 | 33

34 | FEBRUARY 2022 | aerospaceamerica.org
HOW NASA
DECIDED
WEBB WAS
READY
INSIDE THE RISK ASSESSMENT
aerospaceamerica.aiaa.org | FEBRUARY 2022 | 35
 Every do-it-yourselfer knows how hard it can be
to declare a project complete. Will another turn
of the bolt or brushstroke make things better
or worse? That was roughly the choice NASA
faced a year before the Dec. 25 launch of the
James Webb Space Telescope. Would more
testing close more technical risks in the nearly
$10 billion project or create new ones? In the
end, NASA decided against more testing. NASA’s
Jesse Leitner and Tupper Hyde describe the
assessment they performed that helped NASA
reach that decision.
BY JESSE LEITNER AND TUPPER HYDE

T
he James Webb Space Telescope’s core science goal of gathering light from the early universe pre-
sented the project team at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center with a tremendous launch vehicle
packaging problem during the conceptual design work in the late 1990s. At that time, the largest
available launch vehicle fairing measured just 4.6 meters of usable interior diameter, but detecting
infrared light from the early universe would require a primary mirror much larger than that. NASA
eventually settled on a 6.5-meter diameter primary aperture and a tennis court-sized sunshade to
keep the cold, optical side of the telescope operating at less than 50 Kelvin (minus 223 degrees
Celsius, minus 388 degrees Fahrenheit). The primary mirror of 18 segments would need to be arranged inside
the launch vehicle in three sections that would be unfolded and brought together in space with nanometer
precision to act as a unitary mirror. The five-layer sunshield, each layer consisting of what looked like plas-
tic wrap coated with thin aluminum foil, would need to be compressed and then expanded in space by
tugging on cables, something like a sailboat crew raising a sail.
Risk assessment involves predicting the likelihood that failures or other types of problems will occur.
After risks are assessed, project leaders and stakeholders determine whether risks are acceptable, so that
engineers can fi nd solutions to those that are not acceptable. For the Next Generation Space Telescope,
which we now know as JWST, the historical record provided no operational space telescopes of similar
designs to provide a basis for historical risks for such a system. Also, ground testing, which is the prima-
ry means for mitigating risks, came with great limitations in this case due to the telescope’s size, deploy-
ment plan, and Earth’s gravity. The spacecraft including its sunshield and telescope assembly were too
large to be deployed to its full configuration in a vacuum chamber. The telescope assembly would need to
be tested separately from the sunshield and spacecraft bus consisting of equipment for communications,
propulsion and other basic spacecraft functions. Perhaps most fundamentally, in space the sunshield and
optics would be deployed in zero g, but there was no way to precisely mimic such conditions at the required
scale on the ground.
The project team at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, the field center chosen to lead the
project, developed a voluminous portfolio of technical risks over the years to assess and address. The reality
was that many of them could not be mitigated (reduced or eliminated) in any substantive way, largely due to
the 1-g, zero-g differential.

36 | FEBRUARY 2022 | aerospaceamerica.org

Decision time approaches
Such was the context in December 2020, when we 5
were assigned by Goddard Director Dennis Andrucyk
to perform an aggregate risk assessment, meaning
one that would examine individual risks and look for
linkages among them to reach a judgement about the 4
overall likelihood of mission success or failure. The

LIKELIHOOD
result of this assessment was a formal memorandum
to the center director and an accompanying briefi ng
to the JWST project office, to Goddard management, 3
and to various others involved in assessing the project’s
readiness to move forward. While we knew the proj-
ect well, neither of us were members of the project
team, so this would be an independent assessment. 2
When we began our work, the project schedule
demanded a decision shortly about whether JWST
was ready to be shipped to the launch site in French
Guiana. The sunshield assembly had been tested
1
multiple times at Northrop Grumman’s Space Park
facility in California, while the telescope with its in-
struments had been tested in a vacuum chamber in
1 2 3 4 5
a multiweek campaign at NASA’s Johnson Space
SEVERITY OF CONSEQUENCE
Center in Houston. At Space Park, workers then joined
the two segments together, and the complete obser-
vatory was fully integrated.
The project’s risk register — a database of open,
closed, and accepted risks — was large, but one par-
ticular topic was on top of everyone’s mind: the sun-
shield. No single deployment test had produced en-
tirely satisfactory results. One question the risk ments for its space missions. Prior to 2002, those NASA’s risk assessment
assessment would get at was whether to try one last working on JWST employed informal risk management, experts use this matrix to
numerically express the
deployment test of the sunshield to shoot for success without formal risk statements or a risk database. This
relationship between the
and a dose of confidence. At that time, the project did meant that risks were indistinguishable from risk likelihood of a bad event
not plan to do so because of the enormous efforts, factors, concerns, and worries or watch items. Under and the severity of its
resources, and risk involved with each deployment. this old approach, risk determinations were often consequences. For example,
Conducting such a test would require weeks of prepa- emotionally driven (often by gut feel, rather than de- an LxC 1x5 is an unlikely
event that would have
ration and then work to recompress the shield for tailed analysis) or speculative in nature, as was char-
severe consequences.
launch. But thinking hard about that decision was acterized by the format of the less structured (namely,
NASA
reasonable. Once in space, if the shield were damaged lacking a driving context) risk statements of the day:
or did not deploy fully, the needed cryogenic tempera-
tures likely would not be met, and JWST would not If <event occurs>
deliver the required infrared sensitivity. Of course, Then < consequence occurs>
with JWST now in space, we were as relieved as anyone
last month when a message to the mission operations The problem with this approach was that an if/
center in Baltimore confi rmed that all five layers of then statement does not describe the context indicat-
the sunshield were fully deployed, helping to set the ing the likelihood of something going wrong. Without
stage for months of commissioning ahead. In Decem- such context, a likelihood determination would be
ber 2020, we could not know how things would come arbitrary.
out for the sunshield, and at this writing we do not By the time of our assessment, Goddard had
know how commissioning ahead will go. We are en- shifted to contextually driven (three-part) risk state-
couraged by the confidence derived from performing ments as the standard process:
the assessment and the positive results to date.
Given: <existing condition or scenario>
A modern approach It is possible that <undesired event occurs>
Our assessment work lasted approximately three Resulting in <consequence to the project>
months and benefited from a decision NASA Goddard
made in 2002 to initiate creation of formal risk state-

aerospaceamerica.aiaa.org | FEBRUARY 2022 | 37

 At Goddard, just as elsewhere at NASA, the likelihood
of a result is now expressed as a percentage on a risk
scale, and that likelihood is now matched to the sever-
ity of the potential consequence by referring to a five-lev-
el, color-coded matrix (see graphic). Risks can now be
discussed in a numeric rather than emotional manner
based on this likelihood-consequence, or LxC, matrix.
So, a risk with an LxC of 1x5 has a low likelihood of
happening, but if it happens, the consequence is severe.
An LxC of 5x1 means there is a high likelihood of the
risk happening, but the consequences aren’t very scary.
In our aggregate assessment, we applied this
modern approach, which began with a review of all
of the risks in the risk register and subsequently ag-
gregated those that were in related categories.
Reviewing the database
We quickly saw that the JWST risk register provided a
holistic and complete understanding of the broad
concern and risk profi le for the mission, including a
well-thought-out assessment of the potential perfor-
mance shortfalls for the mission. But many of the closed
risks in the register dated back many years to the if/then
form of risk statement and came with the caveats we
mentioned earlier. Without context, they just represent-
ed past worries as opposed to formal, credible risks.
At the time of GSFC’s transition to the contextu-
ally driven risk structure, the project’s risk board
brought the unresolved risks that had clear context
into the modern risk structure. Most of the open risks
38 | FEBRUARY 2022 | aerospaceamerica.org
at the time of our assessment could not be closed The James Webb
until processing at the launch site, or on-orbit. For Space Telescope was
photographed from the
example, some risks that involved a possible deploy-
Ariane 5 rocket’s upper
ment problem could not be closed until the deployment stage shortly after separating
occurred on-orbit. Other risks were related to the in what NASA called
functioning of the instruments and optics in the real “humanity's final look” at
thermal and gravitational environment and thus could the $10 billion telescope.
The black bar at the bottom
not be closed until commissioning was completed.
left is Webb's solar array,
In addition to consulting the register, we had to which deployed shortly
review recent events to ensure that no new risks had after separation to begin
emerged that were unaccounted for. providing power to the
On this front, since late 2019, new anomalies had spacecraft.
accumulated in various levels of testing. Many of these Arianespace, ESA, NASA, CSA, CNES
occurred after the last full observatory-level tests had
been completed. Since many involved changes or
“use-as-is” dispositions without the ability to verify
the corrective actions or “leave alone” determinations
at the full observatory level, it was essential to under-
stand, characterize, and communicate any related risk
impacts on the mission as part of this overall assessment.
For the most part, these late anomalies came in four
sometimes interrelated categories:
■ Tears in blanketing, such as in the thermal protective
material over the electronics and other sensitive
components, and in the sensitive sunshield mem-
branes
■ Issues with cable tension and guiding sleeves for the
sunshield deployment mechanisms
■ Issues associated with the accumulation (or “stack-
up”) of a range of tolerances throughout the obser-

vatory (tolerance in this case represents a generally
small variability that can contribute to changing some
expected dimensions when the observatory is de-
ployed); these stack-up errors could result in either
a deployment problem or an improperly aligned
telescope that could be uncorrectable
■ Issues associated with effects of gravity during testing
and the inability to entirely offload gravity (e.g., using
rails with pulleys or cables); such devices could only
provide localized or discrete simulation of gravity
removal but obviously cannot eliminate the effects
of gravity entirely
The anomalies were all resolved with root causes
corrected, but we nevertheless reviewed each to see
that the resolution was vetted against the fi nal con-
figuration of the observatory, not just against the
configuration that existed at the time of the anomaly/
failure resolution. We examined in detail the resulting
systemic cross-effects from the multitude of config-
uration changes required to address each anomaly,
since there was to be no additional full deployment
of the complete system after some of these changes,
barring a decision after our assessment to do otherwise.
On the topic of tears, there was no indication of a
systemic concern or risk associated with them. Our
analysis determined them to be a natural consequence
of the extreme sensitivity of the blankets and sunshield
membranes combined with the regular handling of
the large observatory. Th is was determined to be best
addressed by a comprehensive examination of all
such surfaces, including those that had been repaired,
at the last reasonable opportunity before preparing
the observatory for launch, which was incorporated
into the launch processing procedures. To some extent,
the other bullets all combined to characterize an
inherent risk for such a large observatory as follows:
“Given: the large and complex observatory designed
for zero-g operation, with extensive mechanical in-
terconnections and the need for meticulous handling
within the observatory
There is a possibility that: the 1-g testing environ-
ment with limited ability to off-load gravity will give
rise to a stacking and cabling discrepancy on-orbit
that affects a key deployment,
With the result that: some observatory functions
will be degraded.”
In other words, the conclusions drawn from inte-
grating and testing a massive, flexible zero-g obser-
vatory under the effects of gravity might not be fully
relevant to the operation in space, and thus one or
more of the deployments might not get an instrument
into its ideal performance configuration. The design
team mitigated this risk by incorporating margins
into the design to accommodate stray light, image
quality issues, and cryogenic temperature offsets.
In our assessment, we recommended an LxC of
1x4 for this subaggregate risk. The 1x4 risk level rep-
resents a likelihood between 0.1% and 2%, with a
consequence being a major impact to full mission
success criteria.
Key risk areas
The risk posture at the time of this assessment was
largely characterized by accepted and open risks, but
this posture had the potential to be influenced by on-
going issues at the time that had not yet been fully re-
solved, such as anomalous behavior with the primary
and redundant communication transponders (these
issues traced to combined workmanship and materials
concerns on the electronic assemblies). At the fi nest
level of detail, the key risk areas were as follows:
■ Extensive use of nonexplosive actuator devices that
have minimal fault tolerance, that are critical to the
deployments, and that could not be fully tested
without “resetting.” Resetting was not only costly and
time-consuming, but in some cases risky because it
involved more configuration breaks and handling.
■ The use of the new three-quarter inch (2 centimeter)
diameter nonexplosive actuator devices in critical
applications without past history. This risk area was
mitigated by an extensive (multiyear) development
program and a full qualification program.
■ The incorporation of nonexplosive actuators into
Membrane Release Devices (MRDs), which were
aerospaceamerica.aiaa.org | FEBRUARY 2022 | 39
 “The project knew it had literally done everything
possible to make the mission a success, but
communicating why was a major challenge.”
higher levels of assembly that held the sunshield
stowed, that brought about an addition of application
risk. This risk area was mitigated by a full qualification
program at the MRD level.
■ The limited ability to test the enormous observatory
based on both practical constraints and necessary
response to issues identified late in development that
preclude a complete test in flight configuration.
Aggregate risk assessment
All risks were reviewed for aggregation. While there
were a pair of items related to one of the JWST prima-
ry instruments, the Near-Infrared Camera, or NIRCAM
for short, the facts indicated risks to be well below
credible likelihoods (meaning less than 0.1%). The
primary candidates for aggregation involved the de-
ployments, most notably the sunshield. There were
several such risks, most of which overlapped in some
way. These related to the fact that the observatory could
not be fully tested in fi nal flight configuration. Doing
so would require deploying a tennis-court-sized sun-
shade without gravity, under extreme range and dis-
tribution of thermal conditions. Regarding the separate
testing of the sunshield and telescope assembly, there
40 | FEBRUARY 2022 | aerospaceamerica.org
was no prior heritage to put to rest any interactions This rendering shows how
that might not have been observed when each was Webb now looks in space in
its fully deployed form. NASA
tested individually. We ultimately captured two large,
must still align and tune the
aggregated risks, the first of which was as follows: telescope’s mirror segments,
a process that will take
“Given: the massive size, complexity, development several months.
constraints, and one-of-a-kind nature (with no his- NASA
torical reliability) of the JWST observatory that prevent
complete test as you fly verification and/or validation
of complex models,
There is a possibility that: a key interaction that
impacts system performance is not identified,
With the result that: mission performance will be
moderately degraded.
Recommended LxC: 2x3.”
This assessment reflected the fact that without the
ability to test the full system in its ultimate configu-
ration and environment, a key detail related to the
thermal environment and lack of gravity may have
been missed on the ground. For example, gravity may
have benefited an aspect of alignment of the telescope
and one or more instruments without the team’s
knowledge, and the actuator range might not be
sufficient to make up for this benefit.
This risk assumed that the deployment was suf-
ficiently successful, but that there may have been
some other related effects to degrade instrument
performance.
For the second aggregate risk, we also defi ned a
catastrophic variant of the preceding risk based on
the same context that includes the threat of a failed
deployment:
“Given: the massive size, complexity, development
constraints, and one-of-a-kind nature (with no his-
torical reliability) of the JWST observatory that prevent
complete test as you fly verification and/or validation
of complex models,
There is a possibility that: a key system interaction
that is not accounted for or modeled with sufficient
fidelity in the 1-g testing environment combined with
limited ability to off-load gravity will give rise to a
stacking and cabling discrepancy on-orbit that affects
a key deployment,
With the result that: mission will fail to meet min-
imum success criteria
Recommended LxC: 1x5.”
This risk subsumed the 1x4 sub-aggregate risk
mentioned above, which is not independent.
Without the ability to test the full system in its
ultimate configuration and environment, a key detail
related to the thermal environment and lack of grav-
ity may have been missed on the ground. For example,
on the ground, gravity can provide a tension in a cable
that may otherwise be slack, and that tension may be
needed to obtain the full range of deployment.
The two aforementioned aggregate risks were
brought to the project risk board, debated, and ulti-
mately captured within the project’s risk register as
some of the key risks that would be carried through
to launch. With JWST in orbit, the 2x3 risk will not be
retired until commissioning is complete some months
from now, while the second risk could be retired after
the deployments are completed, and thus at the time
of this publication, is indeed retired.
The test-more or proceed-to-launch
dilemma
The typical space mission, no matter how large, affords
the luxury if funds and time are available to step through
challenging operations as many times as necessary to
ensure that they can be performed repeatedly without
any failures, anomalies, or unexpected events until the
operations are assured to be flawless. For years, the
same expectation was on the minds of many that the
same could be said for JWST. Some even said we would
especially need multiple sequential and repeated suc-
cesses for JWST. However, the fact was that each sub-
sequent deployment involved some type of unexpected
response that required (or at least prompted a strong
desire for) a corrective action or improvement. There
was a point at which the project had exhausted its allo-
cation for further testing of the sunshield without
threatening damage to the flight hardware due to
handling and causing further launch delay. It had been
demonstrated that the sunshield material breaks down
after repeated folding and handling.
Given the project team’s confidence that it fully
understood the most recent anomalies in deployment
testing in late 2019, the project planned to proceed ed
without another full-scale deployment. Our assessment nt
helped make it apparent that this was, in fact, the besst
decision for a more fundamental reason. Our review of o
the late anomalies holistically revealed that there were
re
paths crossing that weren’t apparent from the review w
of the individual anomalous events as they occurred. d.
To characterize what was really happening required a
review of the sequence of anomalies combined with a
fundamental understanding of the unique aspects o of
JWST — the design of a massive flexible structure that at
naturally sags into an out-of-spec condition in 1-g -g
without the ability to realistically emulate zero-g foror Jesse Leitner is the chief
testing. In other words, there was no reasonable way to engineer for safety and
offload gravity as if it weren’t actually there, notwith- mission assurance at NASA’s
standing the thermal conditions present. Also, our Goddard Space Flight Center
holistic review of the full collection of anomalies (dom- in Maryland. He holds a Ph.D.
inated by those related to the sunshield deployments in aerospace engineering from
over the past year) showed that the anomalies were a Georgia Tech.
growing combination of the artifacts of the discrepan-
cy with actual wear and stresses exacerbated by human
factor pressures resulting from repeated deployments.
Successive deployments had surpassed the point off
diminishing returns and further deployments would d
almost certainly have the effect of increasing, ratherr
than reducing the risk of an on-orbit problem, or even n
notably damaging the system on the ground.
Our assessment rolled up the most significant el--
ement of the JWST risk picture into two key risks: thee
potential for a noncatastrophic problem in commis--
sioning the instruments after a largely successfull
deployment, and the potential for a mission failuree
due to failed critical deployment. It also removed somee TTupperr H
Hyde
de iis the
he cch
chief
ief
e
lingering questions many had about whether more engineer at Goddard. He holds
deployment testing should be performed. The aggre- a Ph.D. in aeronautical and
gate risks were in some sense the perspective that astronautical engineering
needed to be communicated to stakeholders outside from MIT.
the project. The project knew it had literally done ev-
erything possible to make the mission a success, but
communicating why was a major challenge.
A well-timed, independent, aggregate risk as-
sessment went a long way to providing a common-
ly understood statement of the remaining risk for
stakeholders. With this, they could be confident that
everything that could be done had been done so
that they could be comfortable with the decision to
ship for launch.
aerospaceamerica.aiaa.org | FEBRUARY 2022 | 41
Postcard
from Kourou
Aerospace America couldn’t get to the Webb telescope
launch, and maybe you couldn't make it to French Guiana
either. But Adam Lawrence did. His big brother, Jon, is
NASA’s lead mechanical systems engineer for the James
Webb Space Telescope. Due to covid cancellations at the
last minute, Arianespace told Jon there was an opening for
Adam in the VIP area to view the launch. Adam, who has been
hearing about the mission from his brother since 1997, was
happy to take some time away from his efficiency consulting
business to attend. “I did get to witness history and live in my
brother's moment, so that was fun,” he says. Here is Adam’s
account of his journey in his own pictures and words.

1
 This is me with my older brother, Jon (right),
1
who took this selfie in front of the full-scale
Ariane 5 model at the entrance of the Guiana Space
2 3 Center near the town of Kourou. Do I look tired? It
took four flights spanning nine hours to get there
from New York. I arrived on Dec. 19, five days before
NASA’s then target of a Dec. 24 launch.

This photo of me in front of the Ariane 5 model

2
gives you a sense of the size rocket that it took
to launch JWST. Just to the right (out of the photo),
is the Jupiter 2 Mission Control Center, which is
where Jon was in his role as NASA’s liaison to the
Arianespace launch team and acting as assistant
to NASA project manager Bill Ochs for the launch
countdown.

This is the gallery where about a hundred of

3
us watched the control room and listened to
briefings. That’s Luce Fabreguettes of the European
Space Agency’s Space Transportation Directorate
talking to us before the launch. The doors to the
outside were opened about two minutes before
liftoff, and we all stepped out to watch. I came to
French Guiana to live in my brother’s moment, but
for those few minutes, I had to go outside and see
it go!

Here I am in the VIP gallery. The glass was

4
thick enough that we could talk without
disturbing the controllers. My Hawaiian shirt capped
a long-running joke with Jon. After all the delays,
one day I told him, “If this thing ever launches, I’m
4 going to be on the beach in the lounge chair with a
coconut drink in a Hawaiian shirt, and I'm going to
see it happen.” Well, I didn't get to be on the beach
in my lounge chair, but I did have my Hawaiian shirt.
5 6
This view into the control room shows Jon
5
(white shirt) at work, with Bill Ochs to his
left (Northrop Grumman project manager Scott
Willoughby was on Jon’s right, just out of view). Back
at NASA Goddard in Maryland, Jon was responsible
for ensuring Webb's structures and mechanisms
throughout the observatory were qualified for
launch. He left a few hours after the launch for the
JWST Mission Operations Center at the Space
Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, where he
monitored Webb's two-week deployment into its
basic operational shape.

This is the control room after the Ariane 5

6
payload fairing separated from the rocket,
revealing the folded up telescope. This photo
doesn’t capture it, but there was lots of clapping and
high-fiving when that happened, and I’m told even
more when JWST separated from the upper stage. I
had to leave before that to avoid missing my return
flight. I drove really fast through Amazon rainforest
roads past carts and scooters and bicycles and cars
and God knows what else. If you wonder, I made it.

FEBRUARY 2022 | 43
 AIAA AWARDS GALA
Celebrating Our Stars

27 April 2022 | 1800 hrs ET USA

Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center, Washington, DC

Join AIAA as we recognize individuals who have made

tremendous accomplishments in their careers and
continue to advance the aerospace industry.

Congratulations
to our 2022 Premier Award Winners!
2022 AIAA Public Service Award LORI B. GARVER, Earthrise Alliance

2022 AIAA Goddard Astronautics Award KYLE T. ALFRIEND, Texas A&M University

2022 AIAA Reed Aeronautics Award PERETZ P. FRIEDMANN, University of Michigan

2022 AIAA Distinguished Service Award DAVID A. THROCKMORTON, National Institute of Aerospace

2022 AIAA International Cooperation Award DOMINIQUE COLLIN, Safran Group (retired)

2022 AIAA Engineer of the Year Award PAUL R. GRADL, NASA Marshall Space Flight Center

2022 AIAA Lawrence Sperry Award MICHAEL P. SNYDER, Redwire Space

Individual Tickets and Packages are available

PURCHASE TODAY!

AIAA.ORG/GALA
FEBRUARY 2022 | 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.

Addresses for Technical Committees and Section Chairs can be found on the AIAA website at
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 / Michele Dominiak, ext. 7531 • 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 /

Michele Dominiak, ext. 7531 • K–12 Programs / Sha’Niece Simmons, ext. 7590 • Media Relations / Rebecca Gray, 804.397.5270 • Engage Online Community / Luci Blodgett, ext.

7537 • Public Policy / Steve Sidorek, 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.

45 | OCTOBER 2021 | aerospaceamerica.org aerospaceamerica.aiaa.org | FEBRUARY 2022 | 45

AIA A BULLETIN | AIA A NEWS AND EVENTS

Calendar
ABSTRACT
DATE MEETING LOCATION DEADLINE

2022

3–4 Feb Region I Mid-Atlantic Section Young Professionals, Students, and Educators (YPSE) Conference ONLINE (www.aiaaypse.com)

16 Feb Professional Virtual Career Fair ONLINE (Register at aiaa.org/events-learning)

18 Feb–8 Apr Design of Experiments: Improved Experimental Methods in Aerospace Testing Course ONLINE (learning.aiaa.org)

23–25 Feb, 1–3 Mar UAV Aircraft Design Course by Dan Raymer ONLINE (learning.aiaa.org)

28 Feb–11 Mar Fundamentals of Python Programming with Libraries for Aerospace Engineers Course ONLINE (learning.aiaa.org)

5–12 Mar* 2022 IEEE Aerospace Conference Big Sky, MT (aeroconf.org)

8, 9, 10 Mar Understanding Space: An Introduction to Astronautics and Space Systems Engineering Course ONLINE (learning.aiaa.org)

8–17 Mar Trusted Artificial Intelligence Course ONLINE (learning.aiaa.org)

14 Mar–6 Apr Systems Thinking for Modern Aerospace Complexity Course ONLINE (learning.aiaa.org)

22–31 Mar Fundamentals of Thermal Vacuum Testing Science Course ONLINE (learning.aiaa.org)

25–26 Mar AIAA Region III Student Conference West Lafayette, IN, & Online 27 Jan 22

25–27 Mar AIAA Region I Student Conference Blacksburg, VA, & Online 24 Jan 22

29 Mar–7 Apr Technical Writing Essentials for Engineers Course ONLINE (learning.aiaa.org)

1–2 Apr AIAA Region IV Student Conference San Antonio, TX, & Online 31 Jan 22

1–3 Apr AIAA Region VI Student Conference Merced, CA 5 Feb 22

4–5 Apr AIAA Region II Student Conference Atlanta, GA 4 Feb 22

4–6 Apr* 3rd IAA Conference on Space Situational Awareness (ICSSA) Madrid (http://reg.conferences.dce.ufl.edu/ICSSA)

4–14 Apr Fundamentals of Data and Information Fusion for Aerospace Systems Course ONLINE (learning.aiaa.org)

8–9 Apr AIAA Region V Student Conference Colorado Springs, CO, & Online 13 Feb 22

11 Apr–18 May Design of Space Launch Vehicles Course ONLINE (learning.aiaa.org)

12–21 Apr Application of Thermal Vacuum Testing Course ONLINE (learning.aiaa.org)

19–21 Apr AIAA DEFENSE Forum Laurel, MD 19 Oct 21

21–24 Apr AIAA Design/Build/Fly Wichita, KS

26 Apr AIAA Fellows Induction Ceremony and Dinner Arlington, VA

46 | FEBRUARY 2022 | aerospaceamerica.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

2022

26–29 Apr Applied Model-Based Systems Engineering Course ONLINE (learning.aiaa.org)

27 Apr AIAA Awards Gala Washington, DC

27–28 Apr ASCENDxTexas: Accelerating the Business of Space Exploration Moving Beyond the Now Houston, TX (ascend.events/ascendx)

2–5 May Applied Space Systems Engineering Course ONLINE (learning.aiaa.org)

3–4 May OpenFOAM CFD Foundations Course ONLINE (learning.aiaa.org)

3–5 May* 6th CEAS Conference on Guidance, Navigation and Control (EuroGNC) Berlin, Germany (eurognc2022.dglr.de) 31 Oct 21

Electrochemical Energy Systems for Electrified Aircraft Propulsion: Batteries and Fuel Cell
4–27 May ONLINE (learning.aiaa.org)
Systems Course

12–13 May* AIAA SOSTC Improving Space Operations Workshop 2022 Virtual Event (https://isow.space.swri.edu)

16–19 May* 26th Aerodynamic Decelerator Systems Technology Conference and Seminar (ADSTCS) Toulouse, France (https://earthlydynamics.com/adst-2022)

17–26 May Digital Engineering Fundamentals Course ONLINE (learning.aiaa.org)

24–25 May OpenFOAM External Aerodynamics Course ONLINE (learning.aiaa.org)

30 May–1 Jun* 29th Saint Petersburg International Conference on Integrated Navigation Systems Saint Petersburg, Russia (http://www.elektropribor.spb.ru)

6–9 Jun Designing Space Missions Course ONLINE (learning.aiaa.org)

7 Jun OpenFOAM CFD Aeroacoustics Course ONLINE (learning.aiaa.org)

8 Jun OpenFOAM CFD Dynamic Mesh Modeling Course ONLINE (learning.aiaa.org)

14–17 Jun* 28th AIAA/CEAS Aeroacoustics Conference Southampton, UK (aeroacoustics2022.org) 12 Jan 22

21–24 Jun* ICNPAA 2021: Mathematical Problems in Engineering, Aerospace and Sciences Prague, Czech Republic (icnpaa.com)

27 Jun–1 Jul AIAA AVIATION Forum Chicago, IL 10 Nov 21

16–24 Jul* 44th Scientific Assembly of the Committee on Space Research and Associate Events (COSPAR) Athens, Greece (cospar-assembly.org) 11 Feb 22

7–10 Aug* AAS/AIAA Astrodynamics Specialist Conference Charlotte, NC 1 Apr 22

4–9 Sep* 33rd Congress of the International Council of the Aeronautical Sciences (ICAS 2022) Stockholm, Sweden (icas2022.com) 10 Feb 22

18–22 Sep* 73rd International Astronautical Congress Paris, France (iac2022.org)

24–26 Oct ASCEND Powered by AIAA Las Vegas, NV

*Meetings cosponsored by AIAA. Cosponsorship forms can be found at

aiaa.org/events-learning/exhibit-sponsorship/co-sponsorship-opportunities. AIAA Continuing Education offerings

aerospaceamerica.aiaa.org | FEBRUARY 2022 | 47

AIA A BULLETIN | AIA A NEWS AND EVENTS

M ore than 5,000 attendees—made up of over 3,000 people in San Diego and more than 2,000 people
virtually—gathered for the 2022 AIAA SciTech Forum, 3–7 January. Experts from industry, govern-
ment, and academia, as well as over 1,900 undergraduate and graduate students, shared research, inno-
vation, and progress. The forum featured thousands of presentations covering ground-breaking aerospace
technical and scientific research.

48 | FEBRUARY 2022 | aerospaceamerica.org

aerospaceamerica.aiaa.org | FEBRUARY 2022 | 49
AIA A BULLETIN | AIA A NEWS AND EVENTS
2022 International Student
Conference Winners Announced
T he AIAA International Student Confer-
ence took place on 3 January in conjunc-
tion with the AIAA SciTech Forum. Students
who won fi rst place at one of the 2021 AIAA
Regional Student Conferences presented their
papers at this professional technical confer-
ence, which offers students a chance to
showcase their original research at an event
where they can also network with potential
employers and colleagues. The winners were
announced at an awards breakfast on 4
January, where Lockheed Martin Fellow Mike
Buonanno provided the keynote address to the
student attendees.
The winners are:
Undergraduate Category
“Novel Optical Diagnostics for the Study of Shock
Separation in Rocket Nozzles,” by Meaghan
Munro, Monash University (Melbourne, VIC,
Australia)
Master’s Category
“Preliminary Adaptation of Speech Source Lo-
calization Algorithm for Reduced Bandwidth of
Interest in Tonadic Infrasound Signals,” by Bran-
don White and Ujjval Patel, Oklahoma State
University (Stillwater, OK)
Team Category
“Design of a Modular Orientable Electrodynam-
ic Shield for Lunar Dust Mitigation,” by Luis Pabon
Madrid, Polina Verkhovodova, Malcom Tisdale,
Isabella Dula, Kaila Coimbra, Tanmay Gupta,
Leah Soldner, Rithvik Musuku, and Soon-Jo
Chung, California Institute of Technology (Pas-
adena, CA)
Dates for the 2022 Regional Student Confer-
ences can be found on pages 46–47. Information
about the student conferences can be found at
aiaa.org/get-involved/students-educators/stu-
dent-conferences, or by contacting Lindsay Mitch-
ell at lindsaym@aiaa.org. Thank you to Lockheed
Martin for sponsoring the event.
50 | FEBRUARY 2022 | aerospaceamerica.org
Diversity Scholars at
AIAA SciTech Forum
F ourteen AIAA Diversity
Scholars attended AIAA
SciTech Forum, 3–7 January 2022,
in San Diego. The scholars
attended the plenary and Forum
360 sessions, the student awards
breakfast, and Rising Leaders in
Aerospace events, as well as other
special sessions targeted specifi-
cally at the scholars.
The AIAA Diversity Scholarship was created to provide networking and engage-
ment opportunities at forums to students from backgrounds that are traditionally
underrepresented in the industry. These students receive round-trip airfare, a
complimentary hotel stay, forum registration, and additional targeted programming
that may help them succeed in the aerospace industry. This program is a collabo-
ration of the AIAA Foundation and The Boeing Company.
Diversity scholarships will be offered at the 2022 AIAA AVIATION Forum and
2022 ASCEND event. We encourage applications from students in all disciplines
with an interest in aerospace, including but not limited to STEM fields, commu-
nications, law, industrial design, journalism, and political science. Please visit
aiaa.org/get-involved/committees-groups/Diversity-and-Inclusion/Diversi-
ty-Scholars-Program for more information.
Call for Papers for F. Landis Markley
Memorial Virtual Collection
On 5 December, the guidance, navigation, and control community
lost one of its most influential and well-regarded figures. The clear
and rigorous body of work that AIAA Fellow Dr. F. Landis Markley
contributed to our field has been foundational to the development of
the theory and practice of attitude determination, as well as many other
areas of spacecraft dynamics and control. The Journal of Guidance,
Control, and Dynamics (JGCD) will dedicate a Virtual Collection in
his honor. The focus is specifically targeted to aspects of aerospace
estimation, dynamics, and control applications to which Dr. Markley
contributed, with a particular focus on spacecraft attitude applications.
For questions on the suitability of a manuscript and other questions related to the
Virtual Collection, please contact the Editors for this Virtual Collection, Dr. John L.
Crassidis (johnc@buffalo.edu) and Dr. Russell Carpenter (Russell.Carpenter@nasa.
gov). For general questions regarding JGCD, contact Prof. Ping Lu, Editor-in-Chief
(plu@iastate.edu). If you already have a manuscript under review by JGCD and would
like to have it considered for the Virtual Collection, please contact Prof. Lu with a copy
of the request sent to Dr. Crassidis and Dr. Carpenter.
To ensure consideration for inclusion, please submit papers no later than 31
October 2022 at https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/aiaa-jgcd. Authors must select
the Virtual Collection “F. Landis Markley Memorial” during submission. Both Full-
Length Papers and Engineering Notes are welcome. If a manuscript is deemed not
in scope for the Virtual Collection, the author will be notified and the manuscript
will be considered by JGCD as a regular submission. The full call for papers can be
found at: arc.aiaa.org/sda/1180/Markley_JGCD.pdf.
AIAA Announces Its Class of 2022
Honorary Fellows and Fellows
AIAA has selected its newly elected Class of 2022 Honorary Fellows and Fellows. 

Honorary Fellow is the highest distinction conferred by AIAA and
recognizes preeminent individuals who have had long and highly
contributory careers in aerospace and who embody the highest
possible standards in aeronautics and astronautics. In 1933, Orville
Wright became the fi rst AIAA Honorary Fellow. Today, AIAA Hon-
orary Fellows and AIAA Fellows are the most respected names in
the aerospace industry.  Naveed Hussain, The Boeing Company
The 2022 Honorary Fellows are:
Roger A. Krone, Leidos
Salvatore “Tory” Bruno, United Launch Alliance
Wesley L. Harris, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
AIAA confers the distinction of Fellow upon individuals in recog-
nition of their notable and valuable contributions to the arts, sci-
ences or technology of aeronautics and astronautics. Nominees are
AIAA Associate Fellows.
The 2022 AIAA Fellows are:
Maruthi Akella, University of Texas at Austin
Erian A. Armanios, University of Texas at Arlington
Erik P. Blasch, Air Force Office of Scientific Research
Terry J. Burress, Lockheed Martin Corporation
J. Russell Carpenter, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
Louis N. Cattafesta III, Florida A&M University –
Florida State University
William J. Devenport, Virginia Polytechnic Institute
and State University
John J. Dong, The Boeing Company
Thomas L. Frey Jr., Lockheed Martin Aeronautics
James W. Gregory, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University
Yanping Guo, Johns Hopkins University Applied
Physics Laboratory
Marillyn A. Hewson, Lockheed Martin Corporation
Felix R. Hoots, The Aerospace Corporation
James K. Kuchar, MIT Lincoln Laboratory
Robert M. Lightfoot Jr., Lockheed Martin Space
Gen. Lester L. Lyles, U.S. Air Force (retired)
Anastasios S. Lyrintzis, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University
Sergey O. Macheret, Purdue University
Sandra H. Magnus, Georgia Institute of Technology
Dimitri J. Mavriplis, University of Wyoming
Lawrence M. Robertson III, U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory
Mary M. Roybal, Raytheon Missiles & Defense
Walter H. Rutledge, CENTRA Technology, Inc., A PAE Company
Amanda R. Simpson, Airbus Americas
Mark N. Sirangelo, University of Colorado Boulder
Grant H. Stokes, MIT Lincoln Laboratory
Afzal Suleman, University of Victoria
For more information on the AIAA Honors Program,
contact Patricia A. Carr at patriciac@aiaa.org.

The Class of 2022 AIAA Associate Fellows were inducted at the AIAA Associate Fellows Dinner and Induction
Ceremony on 3 January at the Manchester Grand Hyatt San Diego in conjunction with AIAA SciTech Forum.
AIA A BULLETIN | AIA A NEWS AND EVENTS
AIAA K-12 Activities
Have a Big Impact at
2022 AIAA SciTech Forum
AIAA Members Bring Hands-On Activities
to High Tech High School
By Craig Merrett
O n 5 January, 18 AIAA members from the Aerodynamics,
Structures, and Structural Dynamics Technical Committees
(TCs) and the local AIAA San Diego Section visited grade 9 stu-
dents at High Tech High School during the 2022 AIAA SciTech
Forum in San Diego. Also visiting were members from the AIAA
STEM K-12 Outreach Committee and the AIAA Diversity and
Inclusion Working Group. Over 100 students tried hands-on
demonstrations to learn some of the basic principles behind
aerospace engineering. The Aerodynamic TC’s small wind tun-
Girls Take Flight: Drone Program Returns
to AIAA SciTech for HUB Session
irls Take Flight is an innovative program for 10th and 11th grade
G high school girls that provides hands-on experience building
and flying drones and explores their real-world uses. Students be-
come FAA-certified drone pilots. Under the leadership of Jim Stone
52 | FEBRUARY 2022 | aerospaceamerica.org
nel with smoke visualization illustrated how air flows over an
airplane, and students created the Coanda effect using straws
and a ping-pong ball. The Structures TC’s wooden models of a
wing revealed the effects of stiffness and geometry on the bend-
ing and twisting of wings.
The Structural Dynamics TC marked their 10th year of visiting
schools as part of AIAA SciTech Forum with exciting experiments,
including a Ruben’s tube visualizing acoustic waves created by
music. Students also used tuning forks to experiment with reso-
nance, and Chladni plates to show mode shapes using sand. The
students were given the opportunity to chat one-on-one with the
engineers about their careers and the exciting technologies they
work on. We thank High Tech High physics teacher Amilio Aviles
for coordinating this visit.
and Vanesa Dominguez, three students, Fatima Laugo, Shyanne
Smith, and Trinity Watkins, presented a HUB session on the drone
program and demonstrated their knowledge of Python to program
a Tello drone. The program is run by nonprofit Elementary Institute
of Science (EIS) in San Diego.
After the HUB presentation the students met with exhibitors
and were provided with the opportunity to tour a Gulfstream G500.
 Go For Launch! Student Program
Update at AIAA SciTech Forum

L ong-time AIAA advocate and educational partner

Higher Orbits inspires the next generation of STEMists
and Explorers with its Go For Launch! Program. In a HUB
session, three program alumni, Abby Maltese, Sophie
Crowder, and Claire Pickerel, described their Go For
Launch! experience, their STEM pursuits, and student
science in space.
Abby Maltese was part of the winning team in the Go
For Launch! Cygnus Series. Her team’s experiment focus-
es on the evaluation of self-healing materials in micro-
gravity. Th is experiment launched aboard the NG-10 fl ight
on 17 November 2018, and the students are still analyzing
the data.

For more information about how to get involved with AIAA and make an impact please visit
aiaa.org/foundation or contact Alex D’Imperio, alexandrad@aiaa.org.

Nominate Your Peers and Colleagues!

Do you know someone who has made notable contributions to aerospace arts, sciences, or technology?
Bolster the reputation and respect of an outstanding peer throughout the industry.
Nominate them now!

Candidates for Candidates for Candidates for Candidates for

SENIOR MEMBER ASSOCIATE FELLOW FELLOW HONORARY FELLOW
i Accepting online i Acceptance period begins i Acceptance period begins i Acceptance period begins
nominations monthly 1 February 2022 1 April 2022 1 February 2022
i Nomination forms are due i Nomination forms are due i Nomination forms are due
15 April 2022 15 June 2022 15 June 2022
i Reference forms are due i Reference forms are due i Reference forms are due
15 May 2022 15 July 2022 15 July 2022

Criteria for nomination and additional details can be found at

aiaa.org/Honors

aerospaceamerica.aiaa.org | FEBRUARY 2022 | 53

AIA A BULLETIN | AIA A NEWS AND EVENTS

2022 AIAA Key Issues And Recommendations

Aerospace is Technology. Aerospace is Innovation. Aerospace is Jobs.

T he U.S. aerospace and defense (A&D) industry – which comprises Aeronautics, Space, and associated Research and Development
(R&D) activities – is a multi-trillion-dollar enterprise. It supports millions of jobs domestically and produces out of this world tech-
nology innovations built upon our world-class, but aging infrastructure. The A&D industry is critical to our nation’s well-being, provid-
ing major contributions to education, economic prosperity, quality of life, national defense, and homeland security. In this new decade,
and as the COVID-19 pandemic persists, it is critical that substantial action be taken to address the needs of the industry and the complex
global economic, technological, and military competitions that are poised to affect the United States’ future as an international leader
and technological and economic powerhouse.

The A&D industry, consisting of the private sector, government
agencies, and academia, currently is, and will continue to be, pivot-
al in addressing the needs of our nation. Mitigating climate change
through developing technologies that reduce carbon emissions and
ensuring responsible use of outer space for a sustainable future both
on and off the planet are critical to our future. The A&D industry
provides opportunities for individuals from all races, nationalities,
and socioeconomic statuses. Together we tackle the complex chal-
lenges associated with improving our society and defending our way
of life, driving our innate desire to explore and be curious, working
toward a greener future, and keeping outer space accessible to all.
AIAA – the world’s largest aerospace professional society – urg-
es decision makers to enact and support policies that will provide
for sustainment and growth of all elements of the A&D industry.
The industry continues to be critical to the security and prosperity
of the United States, and the actions taken (or missed) are pivotal
to maintaining a robust, world-leading A&D sector and will affect
the nation and our community for many years to come.
AIAA seeks support from policymakers to address the following
key issues:
• Accelerate the establishment of policies that facilitate the
commercialization of space for U.S. technological compet-
itiveness, economic growth, and national security benefits
• Support the growth, evolution, and diversification of the
21st-century workforce to fi ll the job needs in the industry
• Support long-term, robust investments in research and
technologies that drive innovation and sustainability across
the A&D industry
• Support initiatives with associated funding for the recovery
and advancement of the A&D industry – including work-
force, infrastructure, and technology advancements
THE COMMERCIALIZATION OF SPACE:
ECONOMIC GROWTH AND NATIONAL SECURITY
The commercialization of space is critical for U.S. economic growth
and national security. The space economy was estimated at over $350
billion in 2019, and in 2020 over $7.6 billion was invested in space
startup companies1. With these investments at an all-time high, the
pace of innovation and technology development is literally skyrock-
eting. Necessary to enabling this economy, which is fueled by private
industry and advances U.S. technological leadership and competi-
tiveness, is defined government needs and priorities, a skilled
workforce, and research and development funding to transition
technologies for national security missions. However, with multiple
nations and companies seeking to operate in space, challenges exist
for establishing norms of behavior – for space traffic management,
responsible use of the communication spectrum, and enabling Earth
orbit operations through orbital debris mitigation. The United States
must act quickly and decisively to demonstrate leadership in all these
areas – taking the initiative to act fi rst and set global precedents for
norms of behavior for the responsible use of outer space.
• Recommendation: Provide guidance and direction to this
nascent space industry to incentivize and sustain economic
growth and promote U.S. leadership and national security.
GROWING, EVOLVING, AND DIVERSIFYING
THE 21st-CENTURY WORKFORCE
The future of the A&D industry relies on a properly skilled, qualified,
and fully staffed workforce. This workforce, which is over 2 million strong
with salaries 41% higher than the national average2, forms the A&D
industrial base backbone. There is currently fierce competition among
employers for qualified technical talent, exacerbated by large numbers
of currently unfilled jobs. Despite numerous efforts over the past decade
to make significant advancements to diversify the workforce, the nee-
dle has only moved a small amount 2. A diverse and fully inclusive
pipeline – including K-12 through trade schools and colleges and uni-
versities, as well as accommodating international students – must
produce qualified workers in sufficient numbers to fill the range of skills
necessary for our industry, including advanced manufacturing. Tech-
nology is advancing at an exponential rate; therefore, company leaders
and policymakers must afford the workforce with continuous learning
and growth opportunities to meet the current and forecasted hiring
demand in a field that literally has no ceilings. Challenges remain for
employers at all levels of government, industry, and academic institutions
and failing to educate, attract, and retain top talent is likely the greatest
threat to maintaining U.S. leadership and global competitiveness.
• Recommendation: Support development of a diverse aerospace
workforce for all skill types and stages of career to advance
learning commensurate with technology and product advance-
ment, such as incentives for K-12 STEM teachers, H-1B visa
reform, and legislation that enhances the pipeline of STEM-com-
petent workers.

1 https://brycetech.com/ 2 https://www.aia-aerospace.org/research-center/statistics/industry-data/workforce/

54 | FEBRUARY 2022 | aerospaceamerica.org

RESEARCH AND TECHNOLOGIES THAT DRIVE
INNOVATION AND SUSTAINABILITY
The United States must continue to make research and develop-
ment (R&D) investments that will result in future innovative and
sustainable aviation and space products and processes. Th is in-
vestment is required to sustain and grow the significant positive
economic impact that the A&D industry has across all segments
of the economy, while ensuring national security and defense
readiness. Keys enablers are development and sustainment of
state-of-the-art facilities – including experimental and compu-
tational R&D capabilities – combined with predictable and stable
funding to address current and emerging threats and technologies
such as hypersonics and climate change. Aviation connects the
world – ultimately increasing national and global productivity,
economic opportunity, and quality of life. Space inspires us, fuels
curiosity and learning, and benefits life on Earth – exploration of
the solar system, understanding our universe, and providing
critical infrastructure for telecommunications, navigation, and
surveillance. A robust pipeline of research, technology maturation,
and product/process development – enabled by a key funding
and foundational infrastructure – is critical to the future quality
and growth of the aviation and space economies.
• Recommendation: Support robust, long-term funding for
federal research and technology initiatives in aeronautics and
space, including necessary infrastructure, to ensure U.S.
leadership in critical areas such as artificial intelligence, ad-
vanced air mobility, cybersecurity, hypersonics, and robotics.
RECOVERY AND ADVANCEMENT FROM
COVID-19 PANDEMIC EFFECTS
The A&D industry was vital to the nation during the fi rst year of the
COVID-19 pandemic, e.g., ventilator and PPE production and vac-
cine distribution. Nearly two years later, the A&D industry contin-
ues to be severely impacted – including the workforce, infrastructure,
and technology advancements. During calendar year 2020 and the
fi rst half of 2021, it was reported that more than half of the A&D
workforce was working remotely3. Complexities still exist for work-
ers who can perform their duties virtually versus essential workers
who are required to be on-site. Despite government and defense
spending remaining stable during the pandemic, the aerospace
sector – specifically jobs and technology advancement – has been
negatively impacted by the pandemic’s economic fallout. It is im-
perative that the government continue to provide stable and pre-
dictable funding for government programs and organizations as
we rebuild our aging infrastructure (including virtual collaboration
tools), support and grow our workforce while ensuring COVID-19
safety measures, and develop technologies that advance the state
of the art and fuel economic growth such as achieving net-zero
carbon emissions by 2050.
• Recommendation: Create initiatives and provide funding for
the recovery and advancement of the A&D industry – including
workforce, infrastructure, and technology advancements.
3 2021 A&D Workforce Study White Paper

Take Part in the 24th AIAA

Congressional Visits Day
Registration is now open for any United States-based AIAA member who would
like to participate in the Institute’s 24th annual Congressional Visits Day (CVD)
program, to be held the week of 14 March. Given the health and travel concerns
related to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, along with the strict protocols to
access the Capitol Complex, this year’s event will once again be entirely virtual. 

Your contributions to this upcoming event will be invaluable as the aerospace and defense (A&D)
industry and its supply chain continue to be impacted by the prolonged pandemic. We will call
on lawmakers to address the ongoing needs of the industry, including the following key issues:

• Ensuring technological competitiveness, commercialization, and behavioral norms in the

space economy
• Growing, evolving, and diversifying the 21st-century workforce
• Investing in research and technologies that drive innovation and sustainability across the
A&D industry
• Providing initiatives for recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic to ensure that the United
States retains global aerospace leadership

Find out more information and register at: aiaa.org/advocacy/congressional-visits-day

aerospaceamerica.aiaa.org | FEBRUARY 2022 | 55

AIA A BULLETIN | AIA A NEWS AND EVENTS

Students Commemorate Wright Brothers’ First

Flight with Imaginative Drawings
By Robin Osborne, Pre-College Outreach Officer, AIAA Greater Huntsville Section

T hree very talented students were recently recognized by the

AIAA Greater Huntsville Section (GHS) for their stellar draw-
ings commemorating the 118 th anniversary of the Wright Broth-
ers’ historic fi rst fl ight. Annalie Kastning was the 1st place winner
out of the 19 entries from Monrovia Elementary. Kennedy Craft
and Cody Daniel were the 1st- and 2 nd-place winners, respective-
ly, out of 42 entries from Horizon Elementary School. These
drawings were among a record-breaking 61 entries for this year’s
annual AIAA GHS drawing contest honoring the Wright Brothers.
The students were surprised with personalized trophies at
their schools on the morning of 17 December by AIA A GHS
members Robin Osborne and Len Naugher, who served as the
lead judge for the contest. The Monrovia students were sponsored
by AIAA Educator Associate Sherrie Frady, 2021 AIAA GHS Kon-
rad Dannenberg Educator of the Year, and the Horizon students
were sponsored by AIAA Educator Associate Elizabeth Bero,
recipient of the 2020 AIAA Foundation Educator Achievement
Award.
Congratulations to the students on their inspiring drawings,
as well their teachers, for their outstanding service to education
and promotion of math and science in the Huntsville and Mad-
ison communities.

Sherrie Frady and Annalie

Kastning of Monrovia
Elementary School. Annalie’s
1st-place drawing.

Kennedy Craft, Elizabeth Bero, and Cody Daniel (left to right) of Horizon Elementary School. Kennedy’s
1st-place drawing; Cody’s 2nd-place drawing.

56 | FEBRUARY 2022 | aerospaceamerica.org

Obituaries
AIAA Fellow Vanderplaats
Died in November
Dr. Garret N. (Gary) Van-
derplaats died 17 Novem-
ber 2021. He was 77.
Dr. Vanderplaats re-
Gary ceived an M.S. in Civil En-
Vanderplaats
CREDIT: COLLEAGUES
gineering from Arizona
AT OMNIQUEST
State University in 1968,
and his Ph.D. in Structural Mechanics from
Case Western Reserve University in 1971. He
worked as a research scientist for eight years
at NASA Ames Research Center where he
managed the conceptual aircraft design
MDO program, ACSYNT.  He taught for five
years at the Naval Postgraduate School, and
in 1984 joined the faculty at University of
California, Santa Barbara as professor of
Mechanical Engineering, where he twice
received the outstanding professor award
in Mechanical Engineering.
He founded Engineering Design Opti-
mization, Inc. (later renamed Vanderplaats
Research & Development and then Om-
niQuest) in the mid 1980s and served as CEO
until 2020 and chairman until his passing.
The company provides a suite of structural
and multidisciplinary design optimization
software products.   and directed the development of tools to
An AIAA Fellow, Dr. Vanderplaats was
involved with the AIAA Multidisciplinary
Design Optimization Technical Committee
(1990–1994) and was the recipient of the 2002
AIAA Multidisciplinary Design Optimization
Award.
Dr. Vanderplaats was known as one of
the founding fathers of practical structural
and multidisciplinary design optimization
in the United States. He pioneered many
techniques in optimization. While at NASA,
he developed the Modified Method of Fea-
sible Directions optimization algorithm,
implemented in his widely used CONMIN
and ADS software. He introduced second
order approximation methods that drasti-
cally improved the convergence of structur-
al optimization, including the most notable
example, the force approximation. He de-
veloped many optimizers in his career, in-
cluding DOT, BIGDOT, and DSCDOT. His
optimizers have been embedded in countless
programs around the world. He developed
make optimization applications user friend-
ly: COPES, DOC, VisualDOC (now Iliad).
A pioneer of commercial fi nite-element
structural optimization software, Dr. Van-
derplaats guided the development of SOL
200 for MSC Nastran, as well as his own fi-
nite-element structural optimization soft-
ware, GENESIS.
Over the years, Dr. Vanderplaats published
numerous papers on optimization, MDO and
Structural Optimization. He authored two
books, Numerical Optimization Techniques
for Engineering Design: With Applications
and Multidisciplinary Design Optimization,
that have served to teach optimization to
many generations of students.

NOMINATIONS NOW BEING ACCEPTED

Walter J. and Angeline H. Crichlow Trust Prize

Established in 1994, this award is presented every four years

to an individual or team for excellence in aerospace materials,
structural design, structural analysis, or structural dynamics
and for a specific achievement or body of work that became
significant during the immediate past 15 years.

Winners will receive $100,000

and will be recognized at the
AIAA SciTech Forum in January 2023!

Nomination package is due

15 March 2022.

For more information about this award and to submit a nomination, please visit

aiaa.org/crichlowtrustprize

aerospaceamerica.aiaa.org | FEBRUARY 2022 | 57

AIA A BULLETIN | AIA A NEWS AND EVENTS
AIAA Fellow Markley Died in
December
F. Landis Markley died 5 December.
He was 82 years old.
Dr. Markley was educated at Cornell
University and the University of California
at Berkeley, receiving his Ph.D. in
elementary particle physics in 1967. After
a year as a National Science Foundation
postdoctoral fellow in the Department of
Physics and Astronomy at the University of
Maryland, College Park, he accepted a
position as Assistant Professor of Physics
at Williams College from 1968 to 1974.
He then served on the technical staff of
Computer Sciences Corporation (1974–
1978), and in the Space Systems Division of
the Naval Research Laboratory (1978–
1985). He spent 25 years at NASA Goddard
Space Flight Center, until he retired in
2010. At Goddard, Dr. Markley contributed
to control systems for more than 20
missions, including the Hubble Space
Telescope, the Wilkinson Microwave
Anisotropy Probe, several of the Geosta-
tionary Environmental Satellite missions,
and the James Webb Space Telescope.
Dr. Markley was particularly prominent
in the development of innovative exten-
sions, analytical tools, and operational
software for the application of Kalman
filtering, batch techniques, and covariance
analysis to attitude estimation. He
authored many classic papers in spacecraft
attitude estimation, dynamics, and control.
Dr. Markley was one of the principal
contributors to the book Spacecraft Attitude
Determination and Control (1978), which is
a vital resource for practicing engineers to
this day. In 2014, he was first author of the
book Fundamentals of Spacecraft Attitude
Determination and Control, which has
become essential to the education of many
astronautical engineers.
Elected a Fellow of AIAA and the
American Astronautical Society, Dr. Mark-
ley also was recognized with numerous
awards, including the Moe Schneebaum
Award, two NASA Exceptional Service
Medals, the 1998 AIAA Mechanics and
Control of Flight Award, the 2005 AAS Dirk
Brouwer Award, and the 2008 AIAA
Guidance, Navigation, and Control Award.
The author of numerous publications,
he was also an Associate Editor of the AIAA
Journal of Guidance, Control, and
Dynamics (JGCD) from 1992 to 1994. In
58 | FEBRUARY 2022 | aerospaceamerica.org
memory of Dr. Markley, JGCD will dedicate
a Virtual Collection in his honor; to learn
how to submit a paper to this collection,
please see the information on page 50.
AIAA Honorary Fellow Mark
Died in December 2021
Aerospace engineer Hans
Mark died on 18 December.
Mark was 92. 
Born in Mannheim,
Germany, Dr. Mark escaped
from Austria with his fam-
ily in 1940. After settling in
the United States, Dr. Mark received his
bachelor’s degree in physics from the Uni-
versity of California, Berkeley in 1951. He
earned his Ph.D. in physics from MIT in 1954.
He held a number of research and teach-
ing jobs at Boston University, MIT, Stanford
University, and the University of California.
After finishing his graduate studies, Dr.
Mark was a research associate at MIT and
acting head of the Neutron Physics Group,
Laboratory for Nuclear Science until 1955.
He returned to Berkeley as a research phys-
icist, and then worked at the university’s
Lawrence Radiation Laboratory in Livermore
(1960–1964). In 1964, Dr. Mark became chair
of Berkeley’s department of nuclear engi-
neering while directing the Berkeley Re-
search Reactor.
In 1969, he was named director of NASA
Ames Research Center. As director Dr. Mark
managed the center’s research and appli-
cations efforts in aeronautics, space science,
life science, and space technology. He also
was a lecturer in applied science at the
University of California, Davis (1969–1973).  al Research Council committees, and on
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, he held
positions including as secretary of the Air
Force, director of the National Reconnais-
sance Office, deputy administrator of NASA,
and director of Defense Research and En-
gineering at the Pentagon. Dr. Mark devot-
ed much of his career to nuclear deterrence
during the Cold War, including the devel-
opment of secret technology for spying and
enhancing America’s nuclear capability.
He moved Austin in 1984 when he was
named chancellor of the UT System. He also
taught aerospace engineering in UT’s Cock-
rell School of Engineering.  Board. Mr. Patton was also an AIAA Fellow
Over the years Dr. Mark had also served
as a consultant for the Institute for Defense
Analyses,the National Science Foundation,
the U.S. Air Force Scientific Advisory Board,
the vice president of the United States, and
the Defense Science Board. 
In 2008, the Space Foundation awarded
Dr. Mark with the General James E. Hill Life-
time Space Achievement Award, and in 2012,
the Air Force Space Command awarded him
the Air Force Space and Missile Pioneers Award.
In 2011, he was recognized with the AIAA von
Kármán Lectureship in Astronautics.
AIAA Fellow Patton
Died in December
Robert J. (Bob) Patton, aeronautical engi-
neer and retired Senior Vice President of
Vought, died on 26 December 2021. He was
99 years old.
Mr. Patton began his studies at the Univer-
sity of Michigan before serving for three years
in the Army Signal Corps during World War II.
He returned to the University of Michigan to
complete graduate school (MSE, aero) in 1947.
He joined Consolidated (subsequently Gener-
al Dynamics) as an aerodynamicist, and worked
on the B-36, B60, B-58, RB-57F, and F-111, and
was the FB-111A Program Director.
In 1971 Mr. Patton became Chief Engi-
neer for the U.S. Air Force on its B-1 Bomb-
er in Dayton, OH. He worked as Director of
Manufacturing Control at General Dynam-
ics Electric Boat Division in Groton, CT, from
1974 to 1976. He then joined Vought Aircraft
in Dallas, TX, where he worked on the Sat-
ellite Interceptor Program, the C-17, A-7F,
B-2 Bomber, and other classified programs.
Retiring from Vought in 1990, Mr. Patton
worked as a consultant for several years. He
served on the Air Force Scientific Advisory
Board, on numerous Air Force and Nation-
the Independent Review Team for the Lock-
heed Joint Strike Fighter Program.
Mr. Patton was the recipient of numerous
honors, including the 1986 AIAA Reed Aero-
nautics Award. He was elected to the Engi-
neering Hall of Achievement of the Univer-
s i t y o f Te x a s a t A r l i n g t o n a n d t h e
University of Michigan conferred on him its
Aerospace Engineering Alumni Society
Merit Award. In 1997, the Secretary of the
Air Force recognized Mr. Patton with the
Decoration for Exceptional Civilian Service
for his four years on the Scientific Advisory
and a member of both the National Acade-
my of Engineering and the Academy of
Medicine, Engineering, and Science of
Texas.
CAREER OPPORTUNITIES

 !  "!#$ %  &  '
%# (%)

  
   


 
  
   
 
  

 
 


  
 

 

 
 
   

 

 
! "#""$
 
 

   
 
 %
 &
 
   
 
   ' 
$
 
( '
  
 


%    
 ' $
)

 
   (
(%  
  
 * 

 

+
 ,

  -+,  &
  *  
 ' 
   VISIT US ONLINE AT
 
% 
 
 
   
 
% 
 
  .

 
  * 
 '
 '  


  &    -+, aerospaceamerica.aiaa.org

*

 
 &
  
 
 
   '
  ( 
' 
 
$

    
      
  

% 
'
    
% 
 
 
'  *

$
!% 
  ' (%     
/  
 
 0 
%
 ' (  
 
  
 (
  
 
 ( 
    
 
  
 ' $ !% 1



/   
   
 
% 
    
 

&
 

 
 
     
 
 
$

   

  
 


    * '   $

      (
 
    2 
  '
!' "3    

% 
   (  


  
 *$

  '  
  
  *  

   %  0%   
  
 
 
% 

% 
 
% 4 
 

% 
 

  
 
 
 
    
$   
 (  
 (
4   
 ' 
   

 ( 
 $

 
   
 
  
 % 
  * 
( 



%     
 

  

 
' ' 

 

$   '    

 
  
   ( 
 
    ' 
  
* 
  
%  %

    $    '
  
  % ( 
  

5#   
  5## *  (    
 
 
 
  6 
    
 &%  
% 



$  
 %   
 ( ' &  
 
 




 % 

      
 
- 
 


 
 % ' %  &  
% 
 - 
 

$ ! 
 


 
 
   
' 
7 7--$$-$

  
   


 
8 
&
 


 




 
$
  
 
  39   
-
   '%
 
":# 8
 
 
% 
  
3"#  
$

 
&
 & ;< 
$


  
4 
% *  
 % 
     

  
 
   4* 
 (   % % 
% % &% &


% 
 
%

 
% '   
$ 

  
'  ( 
% 
% 
  


  
% % 
 $
  



  
 &% 
 
   
  

   

 %
 4% 
   ( 
 


 (
  
$ =    


 

 
 ( 
 


   
 
% % 
% % 
%
 '% & 

% 
  *
$ 
( 
  
% (  
 
  
   '  
 ( 
 

$
 ( 

  6 ( 


 
 
'    
   
 
 
 %    7--$$-

% ( (  &

(  4     

  6$

 

 
 
 
   
  '   

% 
  ( 


 6 ( 

 
 
'    
   
  %
   7--((($$$--% ( (    (  
(  4 
   

  6$



  
4 
% *  
 % 
     

  
 
   4* 
 (   % % 
% % &%
& 

% 
 
%

 
% '   
$

aerospaceamerica.aiaa.org | FEBRUARY 2022 | 59

CAREER OPPORTUNITIES

60 | FEBRUARY 2022 | aerospaceamerica.org

 CONTINUED FROM PAGE 64

figurative tree of knowledge. Believing our-

selves to be separate and independent from
our universe is the original sin, the peccatum
   ! "# $  $%" &$$ originale, alluded to in the Bible. For many,

  
   


 
 


  
 
 this interconnectedness remains ellusive,

 

 
 
   
  

 
 
 
but as with any sin, it is not inevitable. Just as
 

   
  
 !  "
 
   
 nearly all of us learn not to lie or steal, we can

   # 

 
$ # # 
 


! 
  
 
learn not to pollute space by reviving our

$ 
 
  
  %
  &
 
  
'%&(   
  

) &
  
 
  


 '&( sense of interconnectness.
*

 
   $
$!  
 ! 
 "
 
! 
# The challenge is to make the evidence of

! $  
!  " !
 
    
! 

 this interconnectedness more difficult to

! 
# 
 
 
 !
   
$ ignore. The answer resides with our comput-

  !  
   
   
  
! 
+ ing machines evaluating massive quantities

          
 %&   


of disparate and heterogeneous data such as

  #
  
  
!  ,++$$$   +!

  ,++$$$   + aggregating climate data, vehicle locations

    
      
   on land, air and sea, geopolitical tradewinds,

! 
#
    
! 
 
 
#  -

 and more. The objective would be to discov-
! 
  # $!     
)  

# 
! er unknown relationships across previously
 # $  
 
  
 # $
  
 
 assumed independent processes and events.
$ &     
 
  
 # 
! .
 

)   
   
 
! 
  Humans are excellent at extracting infor-
  
 
 "
 

 
 
    mation from data when it’s presented as dif-
 
 
 
 ferences and rates of change, and inferring

   

  
 


    - #   correlations and causality by understanding

      $
 
    / 
 context while rejecting extraneous data. We
 # # 0    

! 
   $  

do this much better than machines. What we

  
 - 
  #  
  
  - 


, 
 ! 
  
    
!     $    aren’t good at is evaluating a raw, massive
  #
!   
  ! 
 
! 
   
 $ hyperdimensional trove of data. Instead of
! 1 
 

  
 $  
 $ 1  trying to force humans to excel at something
 
 #
 '( 

 $ 
  &
1 
# 
 we are incapable of doing, let’s instead invoke
   ' (!  
 2   


  


 ,++  +3400 the assistance of machines in a way that com-
plements what humans are in fact good at. This

  
   


 
5 
"
 


 



 
 

  
 
  06   
+
 is the role of augmented intelligence.
  #!  
4 5
 
 
! 
  
0  
 Once machines comb through these data,

  "

 " 78 
we can then identify otherwise unknown


  
1 
! -  
 ! 
     
 causalities. The results would explicitly show
  
 
   1- 
 $   ! ! 
! ! us the degree to which we are all intercon-
"! " 

! 
 
!

 
! #   

nected and provide us with greater insight to


   #  $ 

! 
! 
  


  
! !

 
 %  


  
 "! 
 
   
  
include the consequences of our activities on

   

 !  1! 
   $ 
 


 $
the environment. The machines could also
  
 9    

  

 
 $
 


  make use of social scientific signals to deter-
 
 
! ! 
! ! 
!  #! " 

! 
 mine the most effective way to convey this
 -
&
$ 
  
! $    
  

  #  
 $ 
 


 $ 

  : truth to us, one that would likely lead to a
$ 

 
 
#    
   
   
 more positive outcome than the one seen in
!    ,++  +

! $ $  "

$ “Don’t Look Up.”
 1     

  : Once we are no longer ignorant about our

 

 
 
  interconnectedness, we can accept the grav-
   
  #   

! 
  $  ity of wicked problems like ones posed by

  : $ 


 
 
#    
   
 space traffic and orbital debris. We will thank
 !    ,++$$$   ++! $ $    $
our machines for being our key to under-
 
$  1     

  :

standing ourselves more than ever before. In


  
1 
! -  
 ! 
     

  
 
   1- 
 $   ! ! 
! ! the end, it will take machines to lead us back
"! " 

! 
 
!

 
! #   
 to knowing our common source. In the mean-
time, please look up.

FEBRUARY 2022 | 61
100, 75, 50, 25 YEARS AGO IN FEBRUARY
LOOKING BACK
COMPILED BY FRANK H. WINTER and ROBERT VAN DER LINDEN
1922
Feb. 6 The
1 international
Washington Naval
Conference comes to a
close after four months
of deliberations, placing
limitations on the size and
number of battleships,
heavy cruisers and aircraft
to restrict the production of
warships. The terms of the
agreement allow the United
States to convert two under-
construction battlecruisers
into the aircraft carriers USS
Lexington and Saratoga,
which form the backbone
of American naval air power
during the interwar period.
Japan converts a battleship
into an aircraft carrier and a
battlecruiser into the Akagi.
All of these ships played
key roles in the Pacific War.
Jeffery S. Underwood, The
Wings of Democracy, pp.
55-58.
1947
Feb. 1 Several domestic
British air services formerly
operated by the Associated
Airways Joint Committee
are transferred to British
European Airways under
the Civil Aviation Act. The
committee was formed in
1940 by a group of private
companies to operate air
services on behalf of the
government in the national
interest during wartime.
Flight, Feb. 13, 1947, p. 175.
Feb. 17 A WAC-Corporal
sounding rocket launches from
White Sands Proving Ground
in New Mexico and reaches an
altitude of about 73 kilometers.
The WAC series has been
tested since 1945, although
V-2 rockets converted to
high-altitude research vehicles
62 | FEBRUARY 2022
are supplanting the WACs.
However, WAC-Corporals will
soon serve in the Bumper
missile program as second
stages of V-2s. F. Ordway III
and R. Wakeford, International
Missile and Spacecraft Guide,
pp. 209-210.
Feb. 17 The initial 25-hour
flight testing of Bristol
Airplane’s Theseus Mk. 11,
the world’s first turboprop
engine design, is carried
out using an Avro Lincoln
airframe. The Theseus has
a static sea level power of
1,950 horsepower plus 500
pounds jet thrust. Several
of the engines used in
subsequent tests are fitted
with four-bladed 4-meter-
diameter de Havilland
Hydromatic airscrews. The
Aeroplane, March 28, 1947,
pp. 312-313; Aviation News,
Feb. 17, 1947, p. 14.
Feb. 18 The first launching
of a missile from a submarine
takes place when a Loon
missile, a U.S. copy of
Germany’s wartime V-1, is
launched from the deck of
the submarine USS Cusk in
Point Mugu, California. E.
Emme, ed., Aeronautics and
Astronautics, 1915-60, p. 56.
Feb. 20 The first
2 launch of a V-2 rocket
for Operation Blossom takes
place at White Sands Proving
Ground in New Mexico. The
rockets in this series are 165
centimeters taller due to the
addition of a new nosecone
to allow experiments that
usually involve the parachute
ejection of a canister. Some
canisters contain fruit flies or
seeds that will be exposed to
cosmic rays; others enable
measurements of gas ratios
in the upper atmosphere.
David DeVorkin, Science with
a Vengeance, pp. 103, 283.
| aerospaceamerica.org
Also in February United
Helicopters of California
announces the flight of
the J-5, the first U.S.-built
helicopter design to use
compressor thrust to offset
rotor torque. This is the
latest helicopter innovation
of United president Stanley
Hiller Jr. Aviation News, Feb.
17, 1947, p. 10; Jay Spenser,
Vertical Challenge: The
Hiller Aircraft Story, p. 26.
1972
Feb. 1 Brazil inaugurates
its second meteorological
tracking station in Brasilia, its
capital. The first station was
established in Rio de Janeiro.
NASA, Aeronautics and
Astronautics, 1972, p. 42.
Feb. 4 The largest
3 aircraft owned by
NASA, the Lockheed C-141
Starlifter, is delivered to the
Ames Research Center in
Mountain View, California.
Weighing 147,000 kilograms
with a wingspan of 49
meters, the aircraft was
modified to accept a 91-cm-
diameter infrared telescope
and two computers to turn
it into a unique aircraft
observatory. Aeronautics
and Astronautics, 1972,
p. 43.
Feb. 14 The USSR
launches its Luna 20 robotic
probe from the Baikonur
Cosmodrome in southern
Kazakhstan. On Feb. 22,
the craft lands in the Terra
Apollonius highlands
region and gathers lunar
samples via a percussion-
rotary drill designed to
handle hard and loose rock
samples simultaneously.
The spacecraft retrieves
the samples and returns to
Earth on Feb. 25, the USSR’s
second robotic spacecraft
to land on the moon and
return with lunar samples.
NASA, Aeronautics and
Astronautics, 1972, p. 53.
Feb. 14 Hughes
Aircraft Co.’s Intelsat-
IV F-4 communications
satellite begins full-time
commercial service over
the Atlantic Ocean to 15
Earth stations. Launched
on Jan. 22, the satellite is
the first of Hughes’ fifth
generation of geostationary
communications satellites.
ComSatCorp Release 72-10.
Feb. 17 A team at NASA’s
Langley Research Center
in Virginia achieves the
first full automatic landings
by a piloted helicopter
at a predetermined spot,
NASA announces. This
accomplishment is a
milestone in a research
program aimed at permitting
helicopters and future
takeoff and landing to fly
routine missions under
poor visibility. The landing
approaches are fully
automatic 3 to 5 km from the
planned landing spot. NASA
Release 72-34.
Feb. 20 U.S. Air Force Lt.
Col. Ed Allison completes a
14,052-kilometer flight in a
Lockheed HC-130H Hercules
from Ching Chuan Air Base
in Taiwan to Scott Air Force
Base in Illinois, setting a
new world record for a
nonstop, unrefueled flight
by a turboprop aircraft in his
flight of 14,052 kilometers.
Airman, July 1972, pp. 2-8.
Feb. 20 Astronaut Alfred
M. Worden reads a number
of his space poems before
a meeting of the Poetry
Society of Texas. Worden
orbited the moon alone in
the Endeavour command
module during the Apollo
15 mission in 1971 while
astronauts David R.
Scott and James B. Irwin
explored the lunar surface.
Washington News, Feb.
22, 1972.
Feb. 20 NASA’s
4 Kennedy Space
Center in Florida unveils
a commemorative plaque
to celebrate the 10th
anniversary of Friendship 7,
the first U.S. crewed orbital
space flight. Piloted by
astronaut John H. Glenn Jr.,
Friendship 7 was launched
by a modified Atlas rocket
from Cape Canaveral Air
Force Station and circled
Earth three times during
the 4-hour, 55-minute flight.
Baltimore Sun, Feb. 23,
1972.
Feb. 25 NASA Marshall
Space Flight Center director
Eberhard F.M. Rees receives
the Hermann Oberth
Award from the American
Institute of Aeronautics
and Astronautics for his
outstanding achievements
in astronautics. Rees is
cited for his “many valuable
contributions to lunar
science, planetary formation,
and better understanding
of the origins of the solar
system through the Apollo
program,” among other
programs. The award is
named after Hermann
Oberth, considered one of
the founders of astronautics.
Marshall Space Flight
Center Release 72-14.
Feb. 27 The USSR tests its
new SS-NX-8 underwater
ballistic missile with a
range of 5,500 kilometers,
according to U.S. Navy
Admiral Thomas H. Moorer,
chairman of the Joint Chiefs
of Staff. New York Times,
Feb. 27, 1972, p. 10.
 1 3
2 5
Also in February The National
Association of Aerospace Clubs of
France presents the First European
Conference on Space and Youth in
Paris. Aerospace groups from 23
European nations are invited toward
planning a program of intra-European
cooperation for youth in the aerospace
field that includes joint youth rocket
projects. NASA, Aeronautics and
Astronautics, 1972, p. 75.
1997
Feb. 12 Japan’s new M-V launch
vehicle launches HALCA, the world’s
first orbiting radio telescope. Short
for Highly Advanced Laboratory for
Communications and Astronomy,
the telecope is placed in an elliptical
orbit of about 620 km by 21,400
km to provide a lengthy time for
astronomical observations. The
observations are electronically
combined with those of about 40
ground observatories in 14 countries
including Australia, Japan and the
U.S. Aviation Week, Feb. 17, 1997,
p. 56.
Feb. 20 Images from NASA’s
5 Galileo spacecraft reveal that
Jupiter’s moon Europa has large
amounts of water, which strongly
suggests the possibility of life. The
flyby 587 km from the surface of
Europa also captured images of what
appear to be icebergs floating on a
sea. Aviation Week, April 14, 1997,
pp. 32-33.
Feb. 23 The U.S. Air Force launches
a 2.3-metric ton Defense Support
Program missile launch warning
satellite aboard the first Titan IVB
rocket, the world’s most powerful
expendable launch vehicle design
since the Saturn V. Development of
the IVB cost almost a billion dollars
and incorporates two 1.7-million
lb thrust Alliant Techsystems all-
composite solid-fuel boosters. The
551,000-lb thrust Aerojet liquid fuel
aerospaceamerica.aiaa.org
core ignites just before booster
separation. Aviation Week, Feb. 10,
1997, p. 90, and March 24, 1997, pp.
60-61.
Also in February Pratt & Whitney
and Russian NPO Energomash
company enter a partnership to
build and sell the Russian-designed
RD-180 rocket engines. Lockheed
Martin intends to use the engines on
its commercial Atlas 2AR vehicle as
well as on the Evolved Expendable
Launch Vehicle because it costs
a great deal less to produce than
comparable U.S. engines. Aviation
Week, Feb. 10, 1997, p. 101.
| FEBRUARY 2022 | 63
Please look up
BY MORIBA JAH | moriba@utexas.edu

T
he movie “Don’t Look Up” humoroulsy satired our society’s greed and stupidity even in the face of
an apocalyptic comet headed toward Earth, but the fi lm also saddened and motivated me. The ap-
athy struck a chord with my own as-of-yet unsuccessful efforts to awaken the populace and policy-
makers to space debris and its potential consequences on our lives, whether from disruption to GPS-based
precision timing services for bank transactions, the loss of Earth observing satellites for land and water Moriba Jah is an
management, or the harm to future space exploration. astrodynamicist, space
environmentalist and
It is evident to me that wicked problems cannot be solved if people can’t seem to connect with how the
associate professor of
unsolved problem could hurt or limit them. So the challenge is to find a way to effectively persuade people aerospace engineering and
to accept the gravity of the problem. This fi lm helped me realize that a different approach from our current engineering mechanics at
appeal to altruism or alarmism will be required if we are to break through and fi nd solutions. the University of Texas at
People sometimes ask me whether I believe a cataclysmic event in space will be needed for the global Austin. He holds the Mrs.
Pearlie Dashiell Henderson
community to take holistic and coordinated action. After Russia’s November anti-satellite test, I thought
Centennial Fellowship in
that the specter of astronauts rushing for safety aboard the International Space Station would be conse- Engineering and is an AIAA
quential enough to drive change, provided I and others discussed it loudly and clearly. But my voice and fellow. He also hosts the
those of others has perhaps fallen on partially deaf ears. Not enough of humanity realizes that Russia caused monthly webcast “Moriba’s
a form of pain and suffering, even if no astronauts were physically harmed and as yet no satellites have Vox Populi” on SpaceWatch.
global.
been damaged.
Clearly, solving the space debris problem will require more than gathering and publicizing more evi-
dence. We’ll need to spark a philosophical awakening that makes people more sensitive to that evidence.
Space environmentalism as my dharma or raison d’etre sprang from my epiphany during my adolescent
years that our universe is of a common source and therefore all things are us, or in other words, intercon-
nected. If a majority of humanity were aware of this interconnectedness, many global problems would be
solved because we would understand that to cause harm to or hate anything is ultimately an act of self-harm.
My thesis about why this is hard to achieve is alluded to in the Book of Genesis and can also be seen in
how children develop. At fi rst, children do not know themselves to be separate from their environment.
They are ignorant of living among individuals, just like Adam and Eve were ignorant of nudity until they
ate fruit from the tree of knowledge. Through experience and evidence provided to them by adults, children
gradually come to see themselves as individuals, and at that point many will forget that they are intercon-
nected to all things. Acquiring this knowledge of individualism is equivalent to eating from the Bible’s

CONTINUED ON PAGE 61

64 | FEBRUARY 2022 | aerospaceamerica.org

 CHALLENGING TIMES,
UNIQUE OPPORTUNITIES
There’s no shortage of challenges facing the aviation
DAILY THEMES
industry: supply chain is at a pivotal point, there is
a downturn in demand, environmental sustainability i Current State of the Industry
is critical, and experts warn of a growing talent
i Supply Chain
shortage. At this inflection point, how do we turn
setbacks into comebacks? We have the opportunity i Engineering for Safety
to reset expectations, redefine roles, and accelerate i Environmental Sustainability
change. Join us as we set the stage for the future
i Future State of the Industry
and explore the next golden age of aviation.

Registration Opens 1 March

aiaa.org/aviation

SPONSORS
As of 24 January 2022
 24TH ANNUAL AIAA
CONGRESSIONAL VISITS DAY
14-18 MARCH 2022 | VIRTUAL

Join us for Congressional Visits Day (CVD)

as U.S.-based AIAA members—including
engineers, scientists, researchers, and
students—meet with national decision
makers and discuss critical community
issues in aeronautics, astronautics,
and defense.

WHY ATTEND?

i Gain a better understanding of current issues

impacting the aviation, defense, and space sectors

i Discover how to personally engage your

congressional representatives

i Learn about the legislative process

i Develop an awareness of policy and how it affects

what aerospace engineers do and how you do it

i Network with your aerospace community peers

REGISTER TODAY

aiaa.org/CVD