NASA's Wild Aeronautics Ideas

on an airplane lately? Uh? Yeah, actually not long ago in May? Yeah, for me, it was earlier this month. Where did you fly Outer Banks? Well, technically I flew into Norfolk, Virginia. Then we rented a car and went to the Outer Banks. Nice. Yeah, sunny, sunny Fort Lauderdale. I haven't been on a plane since last year. I'm

just wondering. Was there anything remarkable lead different in your experience of flying as far as the actual like technology of flight was concerned when you went on that flight compared to the one before it. Uh nope, nope, not yeah, not for me either. I Mean the most remarkable thing was that Delta had once again updated their safety video, which now includes Oh no, no, actually, I really like I'm very fond of the kind of cheesy Delta safety videos.

I'm I really like them. They started with the the flight attendant who would would wag her finger, right, so they so she kind of started it off, and then they sort of took that ball and ran with it. Sort of took an inspiration from some of the commercials

out there that have been very silly. The reason why I even asked this, you know, I've gotten off in this weird tangent, is that I wanted to talk about a recent news item about the possibility that aviation could see some rap bid changes in technology and and uh

engineering due to a project at NASA. Huh. Now, we've talked about the possibilities in the future of aviation on the podcast before, but yeah, today we wanted to talk about a specific call for R and D. Yeah, yeah, Now, we have talked also about NASA having some pretty you know, far out there R and D branches already. There's of course Eagle Works, right, which is associated with the M drive, which we discussed in our episode. I think it was probably called the M drive, or probably had the word

m drive in there. You can look it up. Yeah, they're they're all about they're all about long shot propulsion physics ideas that probably won't work, but if they do work, it would be awesome. And and it's there specifically put together to say, hey, you know, let's go on the fringe for this stuff, because if it works, it's the benefits are outstanding. And if it doesn't, well then maybe we'll learn stuff in the process. It's kind only playing

the lottery. You're not likely to win, but if you do awesome, right exactly, I assume that's the way you were thinking of either and either way you might learn, and either way you might learn something about math in the processes you and I hope learned something about math.

So the one we're going to talk about now is is a project called the Convergent Aeronautics Solutions Project or c a S. All right, because Eagle Works is certainly not the only branch of NASA that does research and development, and it's not even the only one that does, you know, pretty far out their ideas. NASA has several areas, several several divisions or projects that are all about uh inspiring

and welcoming some revolutionary approaches to technology to really advance aeronautics. Yeah, we often forget what that first A and NASA stands for. We tend to think of NASA as the space organization, and you know, space is probably cooler than airplanes, so it's easier to remember. But yeah, they deal with aeronautics. Yeah, so c A s that that Convergent Aeronautics Solutions Project I just mentioned. Is itself a branch of the Transformative

Aeronautics Concepts Program or t A c P within NASA. Yes, so the t A c P is its purposes to cultivate multidisciplinary revolutionary concepts to enable aviation transformation. That's straight from their web page over at NASA. And in other words, it's all about experimentation and rapid development of technologies that could advance our aeronautics technology. Now, the t A c P is itself a branch of NASA's Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate or Armed but not Dangerous But not dangerous, I

guess you know aeronautics. I guess there's an element of danger that comes with the territory. This director. It recognizes the impacts that aviation has on the economy and infrastructure of our nation and aims to develop ever more efficient aviation technology. You know, like cheaper, better, stronger, faster, more green. Isn't that a daft punk thing? Cheaper, better, stronger, faster, more green thing must speak think of a different song.

It's just a joke. Better, faster, strong, never mind, I understand. Okay, I'm waiting for you to proceed. I see you're allowed, but I can't do it. So there are three programs encompassed by the T A c P. That's a C A S which we're talking about today, along with Transformational Tools and Technologies or T T T, which is a software development program and Leading Edge Arrow research for NASA, or LEARN, which is a program that awards grants to

external universities in law for aeronautics research. We will talk more about those later, ye, just to give a kind of wrap up to the whole Like what is this whole section of NASA all about? Okay, but what's the deal with C A S. Well, they're dedicated to conducting short duration activities to establish early stage concepts and technology feasibility for high potential solutions. Those are not my words, those are NASA's words, that sounds like a mission statement.

What does that actually mean? Well, it's it's all about this idea of let's let's try and invest in projects that have the potential to advance aeronautics dramatically, um even

if we aren't completely convinced that they will succeed. Right, it's asking, it's taking projects from within NASA, carried out by NASA employees that are these weird experimental, high risk, high reward kind of things, right, and so they the teams at c A S. Whenever they're working on a project, they're specifically supposed to conduct experiments, they're supposed to learn from their failures, and supposed to be an environment where you can take these these risks, not knowing if it's

going to succeed or fail, and there's not repercussions. If you do fail, you're just expected to learn from those failures, and hopefully you would you would be able to learn ways of carrying out the experiment successfully. But if it turns out there is no way of succeeding, you're still

going to learn in the process. You're also supposed to continue conducting those experiments and you repeat this until you reach the end of the research cycle, which maybe two to two and a half years, and at that point, uh, the team's performance and work is reviewed to determine if the solutions that were developed by the team actually address the issue and meet the pre established goals for that project. Whatever they might be. Now they have to be. They don't.

It's not that they have to work, just that they have to work. They do. But beyond having to work, they have to be feasible ideas, so in other words, like real world feasible, like not like theoretically right right where you're like laboratory feasible Exactly. It can't be something where in the lab if we pour in four cities worth of electricity into this thing, then we can get it to float an inch off the ground. That's not

a success. Even if you achieve we open a black hole inside the engine and it goes really far, Yeah, we go to a totally different place. Uh No, that that would not. That would also not because there's a

success that would be catastrophic. So the promising solutions, the ones that NASA feels, you know, the various people who are reviewing these projects, the ones that they feel are feasible and beneficial, would then be pursued by moving that project over to a different arm of NASA or a direct transfer of knowledge to the aviation community to say, hey, we did this experiment where we designed an air craft wing in this way and found that it generates much

more left in this manner, We're giving that information out to everybody so that everyone can benefit from it. That's the idea behind it. So um it's also very similar to what we've set on Forward Thinking many many times, the idea that it's all right if you pursue a line of research and you ultimately find that it's not viable because you learn that, you learn that it's not viable, and you maybe even learn why and can apply that to future projects which might become feasible. Yeah, it's it's

impossible to anticipate everything that you will learn. Whenever you are pursuing any given line of research, right, you might learn something that is not germane to the specific goal that you have been assigned, but could be very interesting for other applications. So there there's real value to research, and that's something that NASA is really promoting within the organization itself, and it's something that we on Forward Thinking have promoted quite a few times, so specifically we wanted

to talk about. There was an article, several articles actually, it was reported all over the science news sphere that the c A S Project was entertaining six wild aviation ideas well. First of all, each team there were several things that had a competition. It was a competition. It was actually, uh, they were inviting people to pitch ideas to the c A S Project. So they were like, bring us your weirdest ideas for how to make airplanes

much better. Kind of They had a little bit more of a guideline than that, but though not by a whole lot. They they told each team they would have to explain their idea and approach and uh, what they were going to do. They would have to justify it

to a panel made up of NASA managers. So it almost comes across like one of those shows like Shark Tank where the team, you know, an entrepreneur has to has to present their business model and try and defend it from experts who are either enchanted by it or just you know, they're perplexed, they don't know what or or they just aren't impressed at all. Yeah, we should make airplanes. They doublest food drugs. Yeah, that would that would probably uh not make it through to the next round.

Um So the play for themselves, Yeah, I think they've already learned that lesson from the way that airlines are handling food. Now. Every team had to have a membership made up of experts from multiple disciplines and have members from more than one NASA Aeronautics Center. There are three or four of those, as I recall, uh, And the teams had to come up with an answer, a potential

answer to one of two big questions. Their their study that they want to conduct is supposed to address one of two big ones, the first big question, and it's an or and either or not a they have to answer both questions. Um So. The first one was can we demonstrate an aviation system with maximum efficiency and minimal environmental impact? Which can be interpreted in many different ways, and in fact, we'll see from some of the selected

projects how those interpretations were made. The second one was demonstrate the feasibility for urgent medical transportation from the wilderness of Alaska to the Mayo clinic without human interaction. That's a very different kind of requirement, right, And and they specifically said, like, yes, the way we framed this was so that you would have specific parameters to work within to design your approach, but the solution would be applicable

across the world and all sorts of different scenarios. They just specifically framed it in this way, just just to give you something to work towards. Was the idea, Not that we're planning on having a lot of medical disasters to Alaska that need to go to Mayo Clinic. No, sure, it seems kind of like the Darker Robotics challenge, right. It's a it's a specific scenario, but it's designed so that you can test what can be done and applied

to many scenarios. It's very apt. Yes, that's exactly right. So, out of the seventeen teams that pitched ideas, six were selected for study. They would be the wild and or crazy ideas we have mentioned before, and the study cycle will last between two and two and a half years, depending upon the individual studies. And here are the six. Okay, the first one, Yeah, there's a problem with electric vehicles. They got batteries. Batteries terrible, They're gigantic, they're big, they

take up a lot of space, and they they contribute weight. Yeah, aircraft, by the way, weight not something you want to add to an aircraft if you can help it, because then you need more energy to keep the aircraft aloft. And if you're using more energy, then it's not so green now, is it. Or maybe you have decreased the amount of time it can spend in the air and perhaps it's not a practical solution. Need a bigger battery, which makes you need to use more energy, which makes you need

a bigger battery. Which. Yeah, So we when we talked about the solar powered aircraft and how it's it's designed. Um, the one that's slowly making its way around the world. It uh you know, that was the solar Impulse to solar impulse to it. Their design was such that they were trying to maximize the effectiveness of batteries while minimizing their weight because obviously, if you're using electricity to propel your your aircraft, um, you want to cut back on

that weight as much as you can. So how can you do that? Well, the first one we're talking about is the Multi Functional Structures with Energy Storage project, which is pretty catchy. They're actually looking at making batteries, so that the batteries themselves form the shape of the vehicle. Yeah, they're they're they're the that's the casing. It's the actual material that thee Yeah. So basically the plane is the battery.

To have all this like structural material there and then put a battery in it, you just have the structure of the plane and be a battery. Right. The walls of the structure are our batteries. They're not. The batteries aren't added to an already existing infrastructure. They are the infrastructure. Which is really a cool idea. It's not unique to the aeronautics industry. In fact, the automotive industry has been looking at this where Yeah, I've read about battery designs

for electric vehicles that would work this way. Yeah, they would be incorporated in the roof of the car or the walls of the car, so that you know, you don't have this large space. It also adds the carrying capacity, you know, to the vehicle where you can you can use the space that would have been you know, filled

up with batteries to hold other stuff. Now, I remember one problem that went along with this when I was reading about it in cars was that it sort of made it a problem if you have a collision, right, right, I would I would imagine that would be a difficult point of of when the body of the thing can catch directly on fire. Usually the body of vehicles is made specifically to not catch on fire, but batteries are

pretty notoriously flammable. Yeah, it's it seems like it would also be a problem just that you would hurt the reusability of the car and its recoverability from even the small accident if just like damaging you know, one of the sides of the car or something, actually damage the power source. Yeah, you would probably have to have it replaced. It would make it. It would make the maintenance or

at least the repairs much more expensive potentially anyway. Uh, And I'm sure those will be some of the things that the study will have to look at too to measure that risk versus payoff. Like, yes, it makes sense, does it. That's part of the real world challenge, right, Yeah, and it's an interesting question. Other teams are also looking at how the batteries and motors of of these systems can be improved. Yeah. The high voltage hybrid electric propulsion

system is one of number two. This is number two, and they are looking at two different things. One is they were looking at a way of cutting back on that expense of if your power transmission system is damaged, how can you how can you address that? So they're looking at self healing materials their high voltage system. This

is so delightful to me. It's the kind of stuff that that the insulation of their electrical systems would be made of stuff if they can find such stuff that that, upon receiving damage, would be prompted to like like like the the damage that it receives in the form of physical or electric uh punch would cause it to heal over that damage. Essentially, the electricity passing through this the chemicals that are bonded to that insulation would prompt it

to to expand and close those wounds. Uh. And the cool thing about this is that it would really cut back on maintenance costs. It would also allow the aircraft to automatically address any sort of emergency situation that involved the damage to the power system without requiring an emergency landing. It would do it all automatically and there's no like, there's no switch to throw or anything. It's because of the chemical It's material science, right, it's chemistry, material science

that uh that allowed this to happen. At least that's what they're hoping to to study and and develop. Keep in mind, these are all proposals. This is not stuff that necessarily exists right now. Concept. Yeah. So the second part of their approach is that, uh, they want to explore ways to make the electric system practical for aircraft.

So they want to make electrical systems that will have a reasonable size and weight, very similar to the battery issue, not just batteries, but the electric motors, all the all the infrastructure that would come with an electrical power system in order to make it feasible, and they to explore options in high voltage. Variable frequency drives and v f

d s are sort of control systems for engines. They can really save energy by changing an engine speed and torque as needed, kind of on the fly, literally on the fly in this case, because airplanes. Uh sorry, anyway, I ever apologize for a pun Embrace them? Oh No, I don't know. I don't like embracing them. They're all sticky. The dark side. Um vfd s are currently used in

industrial manufacturing and ships. But but there are these big, old, clunky mechanical things controlled by big old clunky computers, and so they're they're not as of yet practical for airplanes. So I'm excited to see what this project winds up looking at. Yeah, that that should also be interesting. And remember all of these have the potential to revolutionize aeronautics in some way or another, right, that's the whole reason

why they were selected. Number three is Mission Adaptive Digital Composite Aerostructure Technologies, And this is one of the ones that I'm really excited about. It's a material science one and super cool stuff so one. This is another kind of two parter um. They want to combine two different lines of research into a new approach, and in aeronautics, one of those is a material science in the form of composite materials. And now composite materials can be incredibly

light and incredibly strong. We have talked about compositive composite materials on this show before. Yeah. For example, if you wanted to create an actually feasible flying car, one of the things we've talked about is that you might be able to redesign the cars structure with lightweight composite materials. So that it might be edging closer to reasonability that this could take off and land with some kind of electric motor, right, because you're lowering the weight, but you're

not compromising the strength of the structure. Now, the second line of research that they want to combine with that first one is looking at materials that would be capable of changing their shape to adapt to flight conditions. So this would be like and there have been aircraft that can do this where they can they have wings that can change shape during flight in order to give um

different effects, like to increase or reduce drag. This is in large part to reduce the need for things like flaps on an aircraft, so it actually can reduce weight, it can reduce complexity of the aircraft a fewere little

mechanical bits to get broken. Yeah, So if you could do both, if you could create a composite material that also had this shape changing adaptation technology built into it, then you could have an aircraft that is able to be very effective and much greener because it's it's lighter, so it doesn't need um as much power to remain aloft, whether that's electric or fuel or whatever. Um and it has fewer parts so it doesn't have to it doesn't

need as much main's it's pretty cool. Yeah, yeah, So those are all of the kind of hardware studies that are going on. The last three are more on the software end, right. So the first one is the autonomy operating system for u A v s. And we've seen autonomous u a v s. They're pretty nifty, you know, the ones that can follow simple instructions. A lot of u a v s are under direct human control, it's

a remote control, but some are autonomously operated. But in general U a v s are not great at reacting to changing dynamic situations. I know I'm being redundant there, but still they're not being They're not able to react

the way a human pilot can. Sure. Well, I mean this is the reason we don't just have autonomous airplanes pretty much, right, I Mean, we have autopilot that works just fine, but you want a human pilot there who can react if something goes wrong, right, right, So you know, if you command a a U a V to travel from point A to point B and has a pre programmed flight path and everything is fine, then as long as everything's working properly on the U A V you

have a reasonable expectation that's going to arrive at point B. Again, also assuming that has enough energy to get there. You know, all those assumptions aside. It should get to its destination. But if conditions change, the U A V may not be able to detect it, or if it can detect it, it it may not be able to react to it.

So something like whether yeah, sure, sure if there's a thunderstorm that was unexpected in the area and the U A V needs to change course, yeah, exactly, or that there is what if a monkey jumps out of the top of a tree right after it takes off, grabs hold of the U A V and then is holding on. That's could happen. What if? What if what if the U A V? What if a flock of birds flies

in the U A V's path? I mean, there are lots of different situations that could potentially have What if a flock of monkeys flies you know, actually was the banded flock of seagulls is playing while the V I think runs run so far away? I think a flock of birds is what happened to that that aircraft that had to land in the Hudson Rivers after Captain Selley, Right, yeah,

is what happened. So, and there was a case where you really needed a human pilot who knew what to do when something went wrong, everyone lauded the pilot's efforts to to land the plane or to crash land the plane safely. UM, same sort of thing here. The u a V s generally lack the ability to make these

kind of assessments and and change plans spontaneously. They're very good at following specific instructions and and following a simple series of steps because because their robots, that's what that's what robots do. But creating an AI that allows them the ability to to change in changing conditions is something

that this project would specifically be exploring. So they'll be looking into recent developments of AI and seeing how to apply them so that a ua V would be able to do an emergency medical lift from Alaska and fly to the Mayo clinic even if conditions are not stable between the two. So that's that's pretty cool. The next one is learn to fly. Now, this study is all about looking into the possibility of getting rid of that pesky testing phase that we have with aircraft. UM. This

may be more of an industry problem. Yeah, this one, This one is a little this one is a little weird for me to think of because I don't know how I feel about this. I mean, I understand the concept, the concept being we know a lot about aeronautics. We've got a lot of experience in it. We have very

sophisticated computer models that can simulate conditions. That all goes into the process when anyone is designing anything new with aeronautics, testing anything out, there's always computer simulation that precedes any prototype. Oh sure, it's a lot cheaper to to simulate building a giant metal thing that it needs to actually do it and go like, well this fly, let's just take it. Let's just throw it off a cliff and find out. Yeah, especially if if you find out that it does not fly.

It's much cheaper to do that in a computer then to find out in real life. So the Learn to Fly program is a study to look into do we know enough at this point where if we create a design, we can run it through computer simulations to test that design thoroughly enough so that we can go straight from

design to building. The whatever that change in aeronautics happens to be and implementing it directly and skipping that that ground test period where you would typically build a test vehicle and then do several test flights to make sure everything was working. The question is can we skip that step at this point? Do we know enough to be able to skip that step? That's what that study is

specifically going to look at. And if that is true, if we can do that, it means that we can move into an era where there's much more rapid prototyping and development, where the things that we are designing can be incorporated without that long period of testing. But that's what the study is going to look at. What is that actually reality? Could that really be us? Are we at that point yet? Are do we just need to

go poke stuff? Yeah? Yeah, exactly? And which is it's it's good to hold a study to figure that out rather than just say, hey, guys, let's try something now. The final one is kind of interesting too. It's called digital twin. I liked this idea. I thought this was interesting. So the idea here is that they would study the feasibility of building a virtual model of an airplane of a real existing airplane. Would it's twin throughout its life and then every time anything happens to the real airplane,

you update the virtual airplane to match it. And yeah, and also can see the effects of aging because the the virtual airplane will age the same way the actual one does. I assume you could even accelerate the aging just to see at what point is this one particular component going to need to be replaced. Sure, I think that's a really interesting and smart idea, because I've often wondered this, like, Okay, we have a lot of fairly

old airplanes out there that are still in operation. This seemed to be doing fine, but how long until they're not doing fine? And how are we gonna know? Yeah, do we have to wait for something to break in order to or is it? Like is it I'm sure that there's systems out there, you know, like my car where they go you know, well, it's a hundred thousand miles. You should really take it in for a transmission job

something like that. Ladies and gentlemen, I have just been informed that the check engine light has come on the control panel, So we're going to have air traffic Control come out and check that. Yeah, I mean it's it's it's true. We do first of all, aircraft have lots of different uh, notification systems on them to let you know if something is not working, but sometimes those fail.

They're also regular maintenance checks obviously of aircraft, but this would be a way of getting a heads up before something becomes a problem where it needs to be repaired. Like you could say, all right, according to the model, these five components of this aircraft are going to need to be replaced next month. Let's do it now before anything gets to a point where it gets critical. Yeah, yeah, no, I I love this idea. I'm actually vaguely surprised that

that it's not already in operation. I also just I really want them to call it the picture of Dorian gray As long as long as this graphics file exists, this plane will not deteriorate in any way. But the plane and the graphics file gets more and more decrepit as time goes on. Look at the long gray Beard and this plane. That'd be weird. Uh what kind of airplane would Oscar Wild create? It would be a fabulous Yeah, we're on the same page on that one, all right.

So that those are the six ideas. Now we don't have a whole lot more information because these these projects have just gotten the green lights, so they're going to start seriously looking into the stuff. They get some funding. The funding depends upon the project. I think it's between one and five million dollars a year or something like that, which is a significant amount. Yeah, the projects are going to last between two and two and a half years.

They were just announced yesterday as of the recording of this podcast on June twenty second. So uh yeah, I'm excited to see what news develops, right and to talk about those other two parts anti a c P. Just to close this out, Lauren mentioned the Transformational Tools and Technology or t t T. That's all about advancing computational and experimental tools used by NASA and aviation applications. So they look into developing advances in technology will help analyze, understand,

and predict performance in various aviation concepts. So the cool thing about this his T T T is innovating in a way to make the tools to help judge how effective the other stuff being developed by the various branches of T A c P. You know, how effective are those and so it's it's uh, you know, sometimes you have to actually develop new tools to measure things to make sure that whatever the um the hoped for effect

is is actually being achieved. So that's pretty cool. It's all about developing those ideas that make other ideas uh, you know, we can judge whether or not they're really working. And then the leading edge arrow research for NASSA or LEARN is all about looking to creating totally new next generation capabilities and aeronautics research. So again kind of looking for the next huge leap um. Keeping in mind that usually advances and engineering come in lots of little steps, right.

We get, we learned things, we implement them, We make incremental improvements to the stuff that we build. We don't typically have enormous jumps. Although that those are very popular stories. Everyone loves the story of someone who comes up with a brand new, innovative idea that makes a huge difference. We just have to remember that's the exception, not the rule.

The rule is we tend to make gradual improvements over time, which is fine, um, And nothing should be taken away from the thousands of people who have contributed to those small increments. Those are things that have had a measurable impact. Oh yeah, definitely, and that's why. Yeah, it's it's really nice that that NASA helps support independent universities and research teams that are working on that kind of thing. Right, those are the ones that specifically are participating in the

Learn project. So yeah, really exciting stuff. I can't wait to find out in two to two and a half years which of these studies are going to tribute to real changes in aviation. Again, we may end up in the process learning things that were never anticipated at the beginning of these projects. So it's hard to say. If you make a virtual twin of an aircraft, apparently it's

always an evil twin. So all of them have gotes which then developed into the long beards we've already discussed, or possibly we learned that the digital twin feels all the pain the original airplane fields. Who knows. There's all these sort of things that we could learn and and and fun knowledge that will be handy in pub trivia and years to come. So uh, this was a This

was a blast to cover. If you guys have suggestions for future topics that we can cover on this podcast or in the video series, I welcome you to right to us and let us know what your ideas are. Our email address is fw thinking at how stuff Works dot com, or drop us a line on Twitter, Facebook or Google Plus. At Twitter and Google Plus, we are FW thinking on Facebook. Just search fw thinking in the search bar will pop right up. You can leave us a message there. We read all of them, and you'll

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