Podcast: AIAA SciTech Surprises—Sustainability And Hypersonics In San Diego

Forced to go virtual in 2021 because of the pandemic, the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics’ annual SciTech forum returned in January 2022 as an in-person conference in San Diego with some virtual access.

Listen in as Senior Editor Guy Norris discusses the success and surprises at this important aerospace event with Graham Warwick, Executive Editor for Technology.

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Rush transcript:

Graham Warwick:

Hello and welcome to Aviation Week's Check 6 Podcast. I'm Graham Warwick, Executive Editor for Technology, and today I'm joined by Guy Norris, our senior editor in the Colorado Springs bureau, which as I'm looking at him on the camera is his basement. Morning Guy.

Guy Norris:

Morning Graham. Yeah, giving all the trade secrets away here.

Graham Warwick:

Yeah. Sorry about that. Anyway, it's January and every January, usually, Guy and I go to the AIAA SciTech conference organized by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics. and probably the premier meeting of all the world's aerospace researchers and technologists. And if you've ever listened to us before, Guy and I get quite excited when we go to SciTech but we've missed it for a couple of years because of COVID. But this year they decided that they would have their first in-person event for some time. I wasn't able to go because I was sitting freezing my butt off in the woods of the Shenandoahs taking a break, but luckily Guy was able to go in person.

So Guy, this was the first one for a while, COVID is still out there. How were things in San Diego?

Guy Norris:

Well, first of all Graham, you were missed I have to say that. It just wasn't the same without you. But I think the main thing was I was shocked actually at how many people were physically there. Obviously, they did have a large attendee list virtually, but there was, if you combine the two, there was over 3,000 attendees there in person or at least registered on site. Another 2,100 or so online and basically that together produces about 5,000 people which was the same as the last time they were at San Diego. In fact, I did a little interview with the AIAA executive director Dan Dumbacher, who was kind enough to talk to us during the event. And I asked him if he was surprised by the actual in-person registration, the volume of people and in fact this is what he said.

Dan Dumbacher:

We were watching the registration numbers pretty close and what we noticed was even with Omicron that curve kept going to the point where today we have roughly 3,100 registered for onsite, roughly 2100 for online. So about 60/40 online/on site. And if you think back about it, the last time we did SciTech in San Diego we had about 5,000 people here.

Graham Warwick:

Well, that's good for them to know that they took the effort of having an in-person event and got a good turnout. Did you notice any difference in the audience because of this was the first one for a while and obviously there are still concerns out there about the pandemic. Was there a different audience than usual?

Guy Norris:

Yeah, there was actually. I mean, you could literally see that there was a disproportionate number of students and younger members of the AIAA basically. And I wasn't sure whether this was a reflection of AIAA [which] as you know, has been really pushing hard to increase encouragement of student participation and basically bringing younger people to the event.

And part of this was to do with companies who are looking to recruit as well as obviously the academic population really trying to get their research out there into the broader community. But of course against this, there was other factors as you mentioned COVID. I think the younger population would literally more willing to accept the risk of traveling at this time. And against that also, on the corporate side, a lot of the executives or engineers even who usually come from these companies, were restricted by their corporate travel policies which are still pretty clamping down on some of it, especially after Omicron. And in fact, I talked to Dan about this as well and here's what he had to say on this.

Dan Dumbacher:

Just seeing that the young people, the students, the young professionals and the energy that they have, and the creativity coming out, and some of the questions coming out with innovation challenge and some of these things that we've been doing, this is great. Because the young people are the future of this Institute. They're really the future of this industry. They're the future. They're the people that are going to take us to Mars and commercialize low Earth orbit and autonomous flight around the world. And they are here, they're working it, and they're getting themselves for prepared and they are all in. It is great to see.

Graham Warwick:

I'm not a young chicken anymore. As we know, I'm a bit of an old hen and so I can understand why some folks might be not quite ready to travel yet. And of course the corporate thing is a major drag on these events. But Guy, you and I both know that it wouldn't be AIAA SciTech if we didn't have the occasional surprising product reveal, which you and I really enjoy because we're pretty much the only journalists at SciTech. But it has become a bit of a feature in recent years where the companies are actually, unusually for a purely technical conference, are actually going to make in news. So what was it like this year?

Guy Norris:

Well, you're so right Graham. In fact, normally as you say, there's a good mix, we get some stories out of the papers and the sessions as you know. But surprisingly the exhibit itself produced at least two real nuggets for us. One of course was Boeing unveiling really, the sleek hypersonic shape, which was what they were between the lines saying was a more realistic version of the hypersonic vehicle they unveiled at SciTech in 2018. You remember that one of course. It caused a lot of excitement, it was a hypersonic air transport concept. The following year they unveiled a sort of military oriented design. This time it's something which they're referring to as a hypersonic multi roll vehicle. It's a Mach 5  to Mach 10 type range vehicle and evidently it really shows the heritage of everything that you can imagine Boeing's been through and its heritage companies like Rockwell and McDonald Douglas since the NASP program and even a bit before.

So twin fin with a very sharp leading edges and of course it's got two engines which we think are probably turbo Ram jets, a big deck between the tails, which provides ample space for another secondary stage. So, I think the obvious direction this seems to be going for is a two-stage to orbit launch system. But of course weren't really saying that and-

Graham Warwick:

The vehicle looked, the pictures that you posted from it, looked... It's starting to look a little bit like Lockheed’s SR-72. More like it than the original Boeing design which was as you say a NASP oriented type of thing. This thing seems to be moving much more towards what we've seen some of the other companies look at. Particularly when they're talking about maybe getting something, a demonstrative vehicle that could then evolve into an operational vehicle. This seemed to be much more a practical proposition.

Guy Norris:

Yeah, absolutely. And you could say that I think Boeing themselves are a little bit frustrated and that they'd been able to show, tease it really a few years ago, but that anybody who's in hypersonics would know that what they were showing wasn't realistic. It was sub-optimal. This was much more optimized shape and there was obviously a lot more to talk about in terms of the details and I think we're probably going to write about it at some stage to that effect. The other thing that was a surprise was that Scaled Composites were exhibiting at AIAA for the very first time, primarily to look for recruiting actually. On their stand they had a new concept, classic scaled composite design.

This one was called the Encore. It was a high altitude optionally piloted design. I think it was the model 412 they described it as. And essentially it was like a son of Proteus except a big boy, much more capable vehicle, up to 70,000 feet thereabouts and with a 10,000 pound payload. They wouldn't exactly say what engine they were looking for but judging by the design and everything, it looked very much like a high-end business class engine. Well beyond the FJrr that powers the Proteus. And they're throwing this at the military really. They're very much interested in ISR capabilities and the word U2 replacement was thrown around, but I think realistically, despite the fact that Northrop has apparently got RQ 180 out there somewhere, why would they want to replace it already? But I think this is definitely aimed at a niche role in ISR and Scaled sees the opportunity.

Graham Warwick:

It definitely looks--you can see the Proteus lineage to it. And Proteus is still I think being used as a test bed even though it's been many decades since it flew. But you can also see the influence of Scale's work on Stratolaunch. I mean, Stratolaunch is way, way, way, way bigger but you can also see that it's clearly influenced this design.

Guy Norris:

Oh yeah, absolutely. In fact, all three of the people who were there talking to us at the stand were veterans of the rock basically. They'd all been through the process of working on different parts of that program. And I think when you look at it you're quite right.

If you look at the empennage for example, gone are the days when you'd see that Burt Rutan influence -- vertical tails -- and now it's Stratolaunch tail and a miniature version tsort of thing. But yeah, you design elements from all of those and it's clearly going to influence I think everybody who works there from now on. Why wouldn't it?

Graham Warwick:

Yeah. I remember doing an interview with the previous boss at Scaled which of course is owned by Northrop now and how Stratolaunch completely changed what folks were doing at Scaled. Before that maybe you'd work on one program end to end and then you'd do something else. On Stratolaunch, you were given a piece of the aircraft -- you were the outer wing lead or something like that and it was really not something they were used to doing at Scaled. And so clearly it must have had an influence on how they...

Now they're coming back more to their traditional prototyping role. It must have an influence on how they approach the design. So, I know the show floor can get quite busy at SciTech particularly when they've got beer and sandwiches, but what was it like? I mean, did they get good traffic down there?

Guy Norris:

They did. Yeah. In fact, strangely enough one of the protocols for COVID was yes, the food was available but you couldn't eat it on the exhibit floor. So that was one of the weird things about this show. Every day you had to do a medical verification check that would give you a sticker to allow you access to the floor to all of the sessions, a different colored sticker button. And then for example, on the exhibit floor, you'd stand in line, pick up your food box but then you'd have to go out to find somewhere an outdoor dining spot. So, it was quite handy, it was in San Diego the course with the weather being beautiful as usual. But I did ask Dan Dumbacher about the attendance on the show floor and was he surprised at the size of the exhibit? And this is what he said about this.

Dan Dumbacher:

The exhibit floor has been a pleasant surprise. We didn't know what to expect on registrations and we really didn't know what to expect on the exhibit floor. And as all of this evolved over the last month or so, we had some small number of exhibitors pull out for safety concerns and other reasons, but in the end it wasn't a large number. It was a group of people. So now we have a good group of people here, you can see the recruitment going on, ties back to the young people are here, and then there's even exhibits that are here but not on the floor. You talked about the ones on the floor, Gulfstream is running and taking students over to their test flight aircraft parked over at the airport and using that as a little bit of a recruiting tool.

Now that works on young people. When I was their age, show me a test stand, I'm there baby. I think what you're seeing is it's indicative of the excitement and the growth in the aerospace industry, both aeronautics and space. And if they're recruiting, that's because they have business and they need help to get the business objectives met, and you see what's going on, and that's what's playing out here.

Graham Warwick:

So that's SciTech behind us and good to see that we’re getting back to in-person events. Now AIAA has for us, particularly Guy and I, and watching technology, has some other big events each year that mean a lot to us, aviation, propulsion, and energy, and then obviously Ascend on the space side. So what's any changes ahead for us as we go forward from this? I mean, presumably they're moving back into in person, but only other things that we can expect?

Guy Norris:

Well, the message was that this year are obviously AIAA is back. They feel like although Ascend was like the bit of a launch pad for them late last year, that  SciTech really did re-establish them back on the track despite Omicron. And one of the big things they said was the theme of this conference was enabling sustainability through aerospace technology.

Because as you and I know sustainability can mean a lot of things to a lot of people, right? It's not simply the sustainable aviation in terms of the environmental impact and making sure that aviation doesn’t become a factor in more of an encroachment really on decarbonization sort of thing. It's obviously there are other ways of saying sustainability, like how do you do operations in space that aren't just one way or excursionary exploratory trips? How do you make air traffic control sustainable? How do you actually manage the growth of traffic? So there's all these different elements. So, they talked a lot about that and that's going to be a continuing theme throughout the rest of the year at the various conferences. And in fact, my final clip that I want to play for you here is Dan's summary really of not only his perspective on this year's SciTech, but also what we can expect for the rest of the year. So maybe we can listen to that.

Dan Dumbacher:

This has been a very bright start. Sustainability will continue to be a theme. We talked about sustainability the workforce, we've talked about sustainability of aerospace technology, we talked about space traffic coordination today. All of those important things. Aviation's going to be talking about sustainability when it comes to commercial air travel. Ascend is going to be talking about sustainability, particularly in terms that if we're going to have a thriving space activity there has to be a commercialization of lower orbit, eventual commercialization of lunar activities. And that's what sustainability is about is the long term. It's not go we're past the days where the government just puts up a program on the table and says, "Go do this, plant the flag and come home." It's about how do we make this stuff work economically? How do we serve the needs of society with autonomous flight and air taxis and whatever it might be? Commercialized lower forbit for the future.

Dan Dumbacher:

And that's what's so great about all this is we're only at the beginning stage. And I sit back and I look at this and I'm thinking there's a lot to come. And what we see here at SciTech this week, at aviation, at ascend, and even the events and the webinars we do in between, it's all about building towards that future and making that future a reality. And we got the young people, the workforce here to do it and they are creative and they're passionate and they're energetic. And as I like to always used to say about my students is if you point them in the right direction, give them a little bit of help and get out of their way good things will happen. And this is going to go, you can see it this week clearly.

Graham Warwick:

So good. That's brings us full circle here where SciTech is back, Guy was able to get there for us. Thank you very much, Guy. Hopefully I will not be sitting on the side of a mountain in the Shenandoahs next year for the next conference. But so we are going to wrap this Check Six Podcast I hope you've enjoyed it. Our special thanks to our producer in London, Guy Ferneyhough. Hope you can subscribe to Check Six on Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, Stitcher, and Spotify. So thank you for listening and join us again next week for another Check Six.