Podcast: Sustainable X-Planes, Lunar Infrastructure & More At AIAA In Vegas

Guy Norris: Welcome to Aviation Week's Check 6 podcast. I'm Aviation Week senior editor, Guy Norris. Last week I was in Las Vegas with our executive editor for technology, Graham Warwick and our emerging technologies' editor, Garrett Reim. We were there to cover the AIAA, Aviation Forum and ASCEND conferences, which was a joint event held in Caesars Forum, where program managers and researchers shared cutting-edge developments in air and space. So without further ado, here's our conversation from the event. And I started off by asking Garrett about his impressions of the show.

Garrett Reim: Yeah, a lot of focus this year from the ASCEND side of the conference, that's the space side of the conference, on lunar infrastructure. Of course, there's the Artemis missions to get astronauts back to the moon, but then there's a lot of thinking for the next decade or two, how do we sustain a presence there? And the consensus is you're going to have to have an infrastructure, and that infrastructure has got to be thought out because it all interacts with each other. So Lockheed Martin was making the case for fission surface power. They're very big on space nuclear, whether that's propulsion or power on the moon.

Guy Norris: And they rolled out their sort of architecture here, didn't they? They decided to use this as the venue for it, really.

Garrett Reim: Yeah. They had this, what they call a novella. It's like a white paper, and they put forward these concepts before, but now they've put a little bit more math behind it and they've looked at how long it would take to generate enough rocket fuel using solar panels or using fission surface power, and where should things be placed on the moon. That one big concern of NASA, another Artemis Accords signatories is surface plume interaction or the moon dirt getting kicked up and interfering or damaging equipment. Regolith is really sticky and it's hard to get off things once it's up in the air, because of the low gravity on the moon, it just kind of floats on. And so that impacts infrastructure. Where are you placing the ice mining facility? It's got to be a ways away because you don't want to be kicking up a bunch of dirt.

Where's the lunar lander land? Do you build a wall around it to contain the regolith floating up? And then how do you move electricity between all those things? Do you use cables? Do you do power beaming? Cables may not be good for ice mining because the cable could heat up the ice, so maybe you use power beaming in that instance. So there's all these things that kind of fit together and are trying to making investments now trying to understand and think about, "Okay, what makes the most sense?" So a lot of the conference is people coming together, debating, discussing, trying to figure out where to put their money and their time.

Guy Norris: And it is interesting, isn't it, because they've combined Aviation and Ascend around one central exhibit area, the exhibit area's got over 70 exhibits, as we should say, and there's also over 3,800 attendees between the two events at the show. But you do get the strange contrast exhibits, for example, as the model of the X-66 on the NASA sustainable aviation stand, and then just a little bit away, there's a sort of a lunar rover sitting over there and it's gold, reflective coverage. What about you, Graham? You've obviously been walking around too. What struck you as been interesting this week?

Graham Warwick: Yeah, so I've been focused on the aviation side to explain this is it's a big single floor here at Caesars Forum, and as you come down the escalator, the first thing you come to is basically the ASCEND part of the conference. Then you've got the joint exhibit center and on the farthest way away where you have to walk the farthest is the aviation part.

So I've been focused over on the aviation part, and I think the theme really is that there are multiple alternative propulsion demonstration programs that are moving into the actual hardware demonstration phase. So we had sessions here that briefed on, so there's an organization called ARPA-E. It's the Advanced Research Projects Agency Energy. It's part of the Department of Energy and it's kind of the DARPA of the Department of Energy. And recently they've moved quite aggressively into aviation and they've funded programs, two key programs.

One is to develop multi-megawatt integrated power units. So these are electric motors that combine the motor, the inverter controller, and the thermal management, all in a single package. The idea being that the air framer would kind of just get this package with a couple of wires that needed to go into it and they would put it in the airplane. Much more of an analog of a turbine engine than what we're seeing at the moment. If you go now, you buy a motor from somebody, you buy an inverter for somebody else, buy batteries or whatever from different people, and then you do the integration here. The idea here is to integrate it all. So they're all moving into quite large-scale demonstrations, and we're talking about motors up to five megawatts here, conventional electric and superconducting electric. So these are big demos that are coming.

They also have another program. That's called ASCEND, funnily enough. They have another program called Reach, which and the idea of Reach, because they're all focused on trying to electrify a single airliner, which is the holy grail, but also the unattainable holy grail. And so reach is about taking low carbon or carbon-neutral liquid fuel, converting it to electrons, and then driving electric propulsion, because there is no doubt that liquid fuel has the highest energy density of any energy storage medium that they can think of in the near term. So you take what we already understand, carbon-neutral liquid fuel, and then you develop an efficient conversion process to get that energy that's in the fuel into electrons and then from electrons into, so they have a lot of them that use solid oxide fuel cells and other types of things like that. So they're all moving into demonstrations in the next few months.

And then there's the NASA Electrified Propulsion Flight Demonstration program, which there's two teams, one led by General Electric, GE, and one led by MagniX, that are going to electrify existing turboprop airliners and fly them. So they're all moving into the hardware demonstration. So Magni-X is running its motors in NASA's neat electric aircraft test facility, and they're beginning the modification of their testbed, which is a de Havilland Canada dash seven, and they have a particular approach to hybridization of an airplane that they will test with that. So that's really the interesting thing is here is this really we're seeing these demonstrations that we've been writing about and talking about for several years now are all moving into this hardware demonstration. And if these ARPA-E programs work, they are a big leap ahead in energy density and power density for electric systems. They're still very low technology readiness level, but they would be and will be if they succeed, a major step.

Guy Norris: Great. Well, I mean, you're absolutely right. I think that's the thing that certainly struck me was the fact that, again, it's another of those years where I do remember writing or reading about stuff that now we're seeing not only models, but hard evidence of real progress. Same with you then, Garrett, you're seeing some sort of tangible progress in some of these? I mean, obviously with space it's a very different area, isn't it, with the goals and the ambitions are so huge and lofty.

Garrett Reim: Yeah, you are seeing progress. There have been several private missions to the moon that have struggled and failed, but they're back at it. Companies like ispace for example, they're going to have another few tries. And so it seems like the money's there to keep trying, and then people, they're learning from their failures, and presumably that translates to more progress. But the money keeps coming more and more people keep pouring into the space industry, and there is tangible progress being made.

Graham Warwick: I thought one of the interesting things, just when we'd be sitting in the evening catching up, listening to you, I always felt that certainly on Aviation Week, I was always the lone voice writing about servicing in space. Because it fascinates me. I've always found that a really interesting area. And of course we had those really big government-funded demos that kind of really never went anywhere. And we had a DARPA demo many, many years ago that did succeed. But then all these other programs kind of didn't really, dragged on. But now I think we're seeing an awful lot of activity around the, which again goes to infrastructure, but this is more this lunar type, the actual infrastructure in space. I just think it's fascinating.

Garrett Reim: Yeah, no, there definitely is. Astroscale is a Japanese government-backed startup. They have been circling around a upper stage H-II booster, and they keep sending back fascinating images. They get closer and closer to it. The follow-on mission for that will be attempting to grapple it. Gitai, I believe that's how you pronounce it, they're a Japanese company turned American, moved from Tokyo to Torrance, California. Their specialty is in robotics, robotic arms. So they built a lunar rover, which is really just a vehicle for the arm. And also, next year they tell me they're planning to launch a 500 kilogram satellite with a robotic arm on it to do some in-space servicing, debris removal kind of things. It could have multiple applications. Once you can get the rendezvous proximity operations down, which is probably the trickiest part, and you have a robotic arm, then you can refuel, you can move things around, you can maybe maintenance things. So certainly they're getting to the point where they could unlock a lot of additional services in space.

Guy Norris: Well, I hate to bring the conversation more down to earth, but just remembering that for those poor people stuck on the planet, we were quite interested to see some really interesting presentations about a huge variety of novel aviation or aircraft concepts. We should start with a couple of the big ticket ones. For example, JetZero did a really detailed update on their blended wing project, which really did give a lot of good detail, not only about what they're building, but how they're going to build it, and the fact that they're sort of looking to apply some SpaceX principles to a lot of it. And it makes you think how many more industries are being benefiting, I suppose, from the legacy already of what SpaceX has achieved.

Another company well, there was, for example, as I did mention, the X-66 is already again on the NASA and the Boeing stands. This time is a bit different because this one fairly faithfully represents the real X-66, which of course is a hybrid of an old MD-90 fuselage, ex-Delta aircraft, which is as we speak, is slowly being repurposed to become the fuselage of the X-66 with a wing that will be built at an all composite wing, virtually that's going to be built by Aurora in Virginia, I think West Virginia.

And then looking in further afield, there's a briefing from, for example, LTA Research about the Pathfinder-1 rigid airship, which now does seem to be actually in the initial stages of flight testing in the Bay Area. I mean, this is just a few examples of the huge variety that found you find here at AIAA, at this event.

Graham Warwick: So one of the things I like I've always liked about these AIAA conferences is the really strange presentation, the off the wall one that makes you go, "What?" So my one this time was a presentation from some folks at Georgia Institute of Technology, and it's the air breathing supersonic arc jet engine. And what it basically does, it takes the combustion chamber of a conventional turbine engine and replaces it with an arcing chamber. So instead of burning fuel to heat up the air and drive the turbine, it uses a continuous electric arc to heat the air to thousands of degrees and push it out into the turbine.

And this is an idea that's really, really in its early, early stages, they've built kind of like a little working model to show that the idea, because the thing about this is this particular laboratory, they know a lot about electrical arcing because what they're doing is they work with the power companies to stop electrical arcing. So they work on circuit breakers, so they know how to quench an arc, but this flips on its head. They've got to learn how to sustain an arc. This thing is a continuous arc, a thousand volts, a thousand amps continuous arc. So they have this continuous feed of carbon fiber for the anode that gradually erodes over time and it keeps this thing running.

And so they've kind of showed that the idea does at least work at some basic level. But the funny thing is that the guy who gave the presentation, he got more questions on this than anybody else in this session. Clearly. And I have gone to several people since then, people I respect in this industry. And you're saying, "Oh, what are you seeing in the show?" And I tell them about this arc a bit, the jet. And their first reaction is, "Well, that doesn't... Oh, okay, well maybe. Right. Okay, that actually sounds quite", so I've actually given not the title, but the AIAA number of this presentation to loads of people who want to get Watson.

Garrett Reim: Well, yeah, speaking of regolith, I went to one presentation, I'm spacing on the institution this woman represented who was presenting, but they did some really fascinating, I think they used electron microscope to look at some regolith simulant and see how it sticks at a very microscopic level to itself. From very few touch points, regolith can stick to something. Other types of dirt or rock need to be touching in multiple points to bond. But they find on these really, really microscopic levels is that they create these, I think they call them fairy castles, I believe, because they're like these little grains that create little, almost like sand castles where the regolith sticks to itself. And it's interesting, but also important because if you're on the moon and you think you've dusted the regolith off of your sensor or your helmet or your body, it may not be so because it can stick so easily to everything. It's a gritty, strange problem.

Graham Warwick: So was it Velcro that came out the space program last time? It's going to be some other grippy thing that comes after this space program.

Garrett Reim: Teflon non-stick space suit, I don't know.

Graham Warwick: Well, it's going to be the opposite of non-stick that all-stick space suit. It's very interesting because yes, you're right. They'll have to develop engineered surfaces that will repel, like regolith-phobic surfaces or something like that, like water-phobic hydrophobic there. But also the actual mechanism that the regolith is exhibiting here actually could find application as well. You imagine making a material that adheres with that ease to something. You never know what use that they might find for that sort of fractal type of interface.

Guy Norris: I mean, one of the ones that struck me as being highly unusual, and I think hats off to AIAA for embracing this is somewhat thorny subject sometimes of UAPs, unidentified anomalous phenomena as they're calling it here. And the fact that there was some pretty serious scientific discussion here at that event or at this event, of course there's well-known Ryan Graves, now a former Navy F-18 pilot and founder of Americans for Safe Aerospace. That's his entry into it, which is also managing to corral a lot of the other disparate elements of research into what obviously has been considered fairly off-the-wall topic.

Graham Warwick: Fringe.

Guy Norris: Fringe. Thank you. Yes. But it was absolutely fascinating. I'm one of these people who is fascinated by the subject, and Robert Powell, who's the executive board director for the Scientific Coalition for UAP studies, gave an interesting presentation where they actually... What I've always sort of found very frustrating about this is that if there is such phenomena, obviously there's been all of these sightings of something over all of these years. Nobody seems to have really tried to put a proper scientific focus on it, or at least in a way that made a lot of sense.

And I think for the first time we're beginning to see through the efforts of these communities, sort of an agreement. So just in a very short, in a nutshell, he collected together, looked at over a hundred thousand sightings, cases from 1947 onwards and boiled them down to just over 300, 301 particular cases in which they were able to identify primary characteristics and shapes and events and also linked it to space and time of these sightings and broke them down to frequency of occurring, most frequently occurring shapes. So for example, disks not surprisingly accounted for 36.5%, but triangles, I remember a lot of people talk about triangles and it became known as the TR-3 at one point, 11% ovals, 8.6% spheres, 6%. Yeah, I mean it's just really interesting that there's the beginnings of what could be some hard-ish data on this. I don't know. It was very encouraging. Anyway, I think it is an area which obviously needs some serious research.

Graham Warwick: It's all right guy. They are coming back to collect you, so don't worry.

Garrett Reim: What listeners do not see is guy has a tinfoil hat on.

Guy Norris: You see, this is what happens, dear listener. You try your best. But no, I mean, and just to be sort of serious in this one last aspect, I think the safety aspect is a totally legitimate reason to, and that's not even disregarding national security, of course. So anyway, I rest my case on that one.

But anyway, I do think unless we've got anything else to say, we're running out of time a bit here. So that's a wrap for this edition of Check 6. Thank you so much for listening. And of course, thanks to our editor in London, Guy Ferneyhough. That's goodbye from us.