FY 2002 Aerospace Technology Enterprise White Paper
Office of Aerospace Technology (Code R)
Associate Administrator: Samuel L. Venneri
Public Affairs Contacts: Michael Braukus 202/358-1979
Jim Cast 202/358-1779
The total Fiscal Year 2002 Appropriations budget request for the Aerospace
Technology Enterprise is $2,375.7 million; this is comprised of $1,504.5 million of
formerly Science, Aeronautics, and Technology Appropriations Research and
Development funding and $871.2 million of formerly Mission Support Appropriation
funding.
The Aerospace Technology Enterprise’s responsibility is to provide revolutionary
advancements in science and technology that sustain global U.S. leadership in civil
aviation and space. Some of the highlights of the FY 2002 budget are:
2nd Generation Reusable Launch Vehicle (RLV): One of the Enterprise’s high-visibility
programs, the 2
nd
Generation program will substantially reduce technical, programmatic and
business risks associated with developing a safe, reliable and affordable RLV architecture.
Low-cost, reliable space transportation remains the key for a more aggressive civil space
program, greater commercial utilization of space and U.S. launch industry competitiveness.
A central tenet of the National Space Policy is the transition of routine space activities to the
private sector to concentrate NASA resources on high-leverage science research,
technology development, and exploration activities.
The 2ndGeneration program will invest in technology, design and advanced development
efforts to enable at least two competitive options for a new architecture. In the middle of this
decade, NASA’s efforts will lead to full-scale development of commercially competitive,
privately owned and operated, Earth-to-orbit RLVs. NASA’s intent is that such vehicles
would be owned and operated by the private sector to meet both government and
commercial launch requirements. The program’s objective will be to dramatically improve
safety while significantly reducing the cost of launch services.
Research, Education, and Training Institutes (RETIs): During FY 2002, the Enterprise
will establish five university-based RETIs in an effort to strengthen NASA’s ties to the
academic community through long-term sustained investment in areas of innovative, new
technology critical to NASA’s future. At the same time, the RETIs will enhance and broaden
the capabilities of the nation’s universities to meet the needs of NASA’s future science and
technology programs. The role of the RETIs is intended to be research and exploitation of
innovative, cutting-edge emerging opportunities in technology that can have a revolutionary
impact on the missions that NASA pursues in the future. At the same time the university
RETIs should expand the Nation’s talent base for research and development.
Air Systems Simulation Modeling: An expanded effort to model the airspace
environment will be accomplished under the Aviation Capacity Program. To meet the
demands for the airspace system of the future, a revolutionary change will be necessary in
the fundamental approach to airspace operations. This effort will provide the technical basis
to guide policy by enabling the systematic exploration of revolutionary concepts and by
defining the technologies needed to implement the concepts, as well as the concepts’ limits.
21st Century Aerospace Vehicle: NASA’s vehicle-systems base research effort will begin
to focus on developing the technologies needed for a 21st century aerospace vehicle. This
research will develop and verify critical technologies that provide leapfrog capabilities
compared to today’s state-of-the-art vehicles. The futuristic craft will be able to change their
shape in flight like birds to optimize performance or perform complex maneuvers in
complete safety, and be capable of self-repair when damaged.
Design for Safety: One area of Information Technology (IT) emphasis will be “Design for
Safety.” This research activity will provide a dramatic change in how systems engineering
and operations will be performed, placing risk estimation and risk countermeasures for
overall mission and human safety on a more rigorous, explicit and quantifiable basis. This
would allow design trades to be evaluated based on a risk factor, with the same fidelity and
confidence used for other mission or system properties such as cost, schedule and
performance.
Bio-nanotechnology: Bio-nanotechnology computing and electronics can provide
capabilities orders of magnitude better than the best of today’s electronics. Developed as
detectors and sensors, they could enable spacecraft systems to be much smaller, with
higher performance, and lower power-consumption than possible with today’s technology.
Biologically inspired materials will have multi-functional capability (carry loads, thermal
control, embedded sensors and actuators),and overall performance far greater than current
materials. Key capabilities of these systems will be the ability to adapt to changing
conditions and Agency mission needs, and to detect damage or degradation before it
becomes serious and reconfigure or repair themselves.
Aerospace Autonomous Operations: An expanded IT focus on Aerospace Autonomous
Operations will enable better, faster, cheaper, more reliable aerospace missions by
extending the scope of decisions and actions that can be done under computer control. This
research will enable NASA unmanned missions to accomplish more by improving
autonomous decision-making and enhancing the interpretation of science data returned. It
will enable human missions to be cheaper and safer by providing more sophisticated
interactions between astronaut and machines. Finally, it will enable ground operations to be
cheaper and faster, by allowing a reduced ground-operations team to send more complex
high-level instructions. This activity will strongly benefit from the more fundamental research
being developed under the Enterprise’s Intelligent Systems program.
In order to meet its long-term goals, the Aerospace Enterprise has decided to realign and
refocus some of its research and technology programs toward long-term, revolutionary
advancements in aerospace capabilities. These changes resulted in the termination of
aeronautics programs that were evolutionary in nature, had a more near-term focus, and
were not on the critical path towards achievement of the Enterprise’s goals. The terminated
programs and projects include the Rotorcraft, Advanced Aircraft and Intelligent Synthesis
Environment programs, and the Computational Aerospace Sciences and NASA Research
and Education Network projects in the High Performance Computing and Communications
Program. Elements of the Intelligent Synthesis Environment program have been integrated
into the more encompassing “design for safety” activity. In addition, selected Space Base
projects are not funded in FY 2002.
Aerospace Base Research and Technology — $637 million
NASA’s Aerospace Base Research and Technology (R&T) provides the vital foundation of
expertise and facilities that meet a wide range of aeronautical and space transportation
technology challenges for the nation. The Aerospace Base also maintains the core
competencies necessary at the research centers for NASA to accomplish its mission. The
R&T Base programs are:
Computing, Information & Communications Technologies (CICT): In FY 2002, CICT
will see the completion of major steps towards autonomous science exploration, including
the development of the conceptual high-level autonomy architecture for planetary rovers. A
collaboration has been formed with the Mars 2003 mission team to demonstrate the
benefits of advanced planning and scheduling technology for automated sequence
generation. The technology will be integrated into existing tools to be used by the mission
and will be considered for incorporation into the mission following the demonstration.
Aerospace Vehicle Systems Technology (AVST): In FY 2002, the AVST program
continues its healthy balance between aeronautics activities and contributions to space
transportation. Technologies in the areas of safety, environmental compatibility, general
aviation, next-generation design tools, experimental aircraft and access to space will be
continued. Tasks for space transportation will be completed, including the second flight of
the Mach 7 Hyper-X vehicle and the first flight at Mach 10.
Aerospace Propulsion and Power: During FY 2002, the effort to improve engine safety
will continue. The UltraSafe Propulsion project will develop new composite, containment-system
structural concepts that can be transferred to the Aviation Safety Program for full-scale
validation. Pulse-detonation engine (PDE) technologies will be further matured, with
the demonstration of critical sub-system performance in one or more PDE system concepts.
In addition, the Propulsion and Power Program will focus on technologies applicable to
engine designs for 2nd and 3rd generation reusable launch vehicles.
Aerospace Flight Research: In FY 2002 the Environmental Research Aircraft and Sensor
Technology (ERAST) project will continue with the development and demonstration of a
turbo-prop, unmanned aerial vehicle for routine flight operations, with capabilities that
exceed the minimum Earth Science Enterprise altitude and duration requirements. The
Revolutionary Concepts (RevCon) project is intended to close the technology-transfer gaps
between developmental technologies and concepts, and flight-validated systems and
aerospace vehicles
Space Transfer and Launch Technology (STLT): In FY 2002, the STLT Program will
focus on technological advances to increase safety and reliability while reducing launch
costs beyond the 2nd Generation RLV Program.
Aerospace Focused Programs — $720.6 million
NASA’s Aerospace Focused Programs address national needs, clearly defined customer
requirements and deliverables, critical program decision and completion dates, and a
specified class of research with potential application. The focused programs are:
Aviation Safety Program (AvSP): The goal of NASA’s Aviation Safety Program is to
develop and demonstrate technologies that contribute to a reduction in aviation accident
and fatality rates by a factor of five by the year 2007. In FY 2002, the Aviation System
Monitoring and Modeling project will demonstrate tools for merging heterogeneous air-service
providers’ databases to aid causal analysis and risk assessment. Also, this project
will add provisions to include the general-aviation pilot community to the National Airspace
System Operational Monitoring Service survey system. The System-Wide Accident
Prevention project will determine, through simulations, the error probabilities of present and
future hazard/risk contexts and the probability of reducing the likelihood of error given
proposed mitigation strategies. The Single Aircraft Accident Prevention project will
demonstrate high-fidelity, six-degree-of-freedom simulation models of loss-of-control and
recovery conditions, as well as simulations of subsystem concepts for the prevention of and
recovery from these conditions. The Weather Accident Prevention project will demonstrate a
national capability for digital data-link and graphical display of weather information. This
project will also demonstrate a forward-looking, onboard turbulence-warning system. In the
Accident Mitigation project, analysis tools for aircraft structural-crashworthiness prediction
will be validated.
Aviation Systems Capacity: During FY 2002, the Advanced Air Transportation
Technologies project will demonstrate through simulation an interoperable suite of decision-support
tools for arrival, surface and departure operations. Development work will lead to
the transfer of surface-management-system technology to the Federal Aviation
Administration (FAA) Free Flight Phase 2 Program in FY 2004. The capability will reduce
arrival and departure delays and inefficiencies that occur on the airport surface due to
surface issues and other restrictions.
Ultra Efficient Engine Technology (UEET): The Ultra-Efficient Engine Technology
(UEET) Program is to develop and hand off revolutionary propulsion technologies that will
address local air quality concerns by developing technologies to reduce oxides of nitrogen
(NOX ) emissions by 70 percent at landing and take-off conditions, with comparable
reductions in cruise operations. UEET will also address the potential of climate impact on
long-term aviation growth and provide critical propulsion technologies to reduce fuel-burn by
15 percent for large subsonic transport and eight percent for high speed and /or small
subsonic aircraft. The result be a dramatic increase in performance and efficiency of engine
technology with comparable reductions of carbon dioxide emissions. Planned and designed
to develop high-payoff, high-risk technologies, the UEET program will enable the next
breakthrough in propulsion systems to spawn a new generation of high-performance,
operationally efficient, economically reliable and environmentally compatible U.S. aircraft.
In FY 2002, the program will complete sector testing of a low-NOX combustor concept
capable of a 70 percent reduction in NOX (from the 1996 baseline) and demonstrate one
additional concept for reductions of other emissions.
Small Aircraft Transportation System: The Small Aircraft Transportation System (SATS)
Program is aimed at improving mobility and increasing access to air travel. Specifically,
SATS is an air transportation proof-of-concept to reduce intercity travel times by half and
increase the number of local communities served by air transport tenfold or more to
augment today’s hub-and-spoke air transportation and provide on-demand air service at
equivalent airline costs. In FY 2002 the program will forge agreements with outside
organizations to create the alliance, and prepare operational requirements, functional
architecture, and technical documentation required for the infrastructure to support the
SATS concept.
Quiet Aircraft Technology: Plans for FY 2002 include the development of a systems
approach to propulsion-airframe aeroacoustics which will account for the placement/
movement of individual noise sources on non-conventional aircraft platforms. The model
also will account for acoustic interactions between the noise sources and platform and will
be easier to use. Source diagnostics tests will be completed which will give engine
component designers an insight into the fundamental physics of the mechanisms that
generate broadband fan noise. The data generated by these tests will be used to improve
the computational algorithms used in computer codes to predict engine noise. Also, an
advanced concept for reduced jet noise will be initiated, and if promising, tested at
laboratory scale later in the program.
Future X-Pathfinder: Now part of the 2nd
Generation Reusable Launch Vehicle program,
the objective of the Future-X Pathfinder Program is to flight-demonstrate advanced space
transportation technologies through the use of flight experiments and experimental vehicles.
The X-37 space-plane technology test-bed is a modular demonstrator vehicle that will be
the first experimental X-vehicle to be flown in both orbital and reentry environments.
Currently, the X-37 is slated to fly two missions on the Space Shuttle, beginning in 2003.
However, results from the 2nd Generation Program’s NASA Research Announcement
procurement could influence not only these plans, but also future plans for the X-37.
Commercial Technology Programs — $146.9 million
NASA’s Commercial Technology Program includes Commercial Programs, Technology
Transfer Agents and the Small Business Innovative Research Program. NASA’s
procurement could influence not only these plans, but also future plans for the X-37.
Commercial Technology Programs — $146.9 million
NASA’s Commercial Technology Program includes Commercial Programs, Technology
Transfer Agents and the Small Business Innovative Research Program. NASA’s
Commercial Technology Program facilitates the transfer of inventions, innovations,
discoveries or improvements developed by NASA personnel, or in partnership with
industry/universities, to the private sector for commercial application leading to greater U.S.
economic growth and competitiveness.
Aerospace Institutional Support — $871.2 million
The Aerospace Technology Enterprise’s responsibility is to provide institutional support for
the four NASA Aerospace Centers: Ames Research Center, Dryden Flight Research
Center, Glenn Research Center, and Langley Research Center. Also supported by the
Enterprise is the portion of the Marshall Space Flight Center responsible for the Space
Launch Initiative. This funding represents Civil Servant payroll and travel, Research and
Operations Support, and non-programmatic Construction of Facilities.
