Trailblazers

Frontiers April 2016 Issue

BY DAN RALEY As Boeing approaches the start of its second century in July 2016, Frontiers visits with some of the men and women who have helped make Boeing a global leader in aerospace. evin Bowcutt’s youthful curiosity was a lot like the hypersonic aircraft he later designed—it took off in a hurry. Exposed to his first science class in grade school, he was fascinated by technology. He wanted to know how everything worked. He built things at home without prompting, such as a self-made motor, a generator, a telegraph. During this time of discovery, Bowcutt developed a passion for flight. He assembled balsawood gliders and bought remote-controlled airplanes. He even devised a plan to save money by mowing lawns and doing other odd jobs to purchase his own Piper Cherokee airplane, an idea his father discouraged. “I wanted to learn to fly before I drove,” Bowcutt said. “That was my dream.” Today, Bowcutt is still looking to the skies for inspiration and pushing technological boundaries however he can. As Boeing’s chief scientist for hypersonics and a Senior Technical Fellow in Huntington Beach, Calif., he’s done things that others said couldn’t be done. Bowcutt was a key contributor to the hydrogen-powered X-43A scramjet, the fastest aircraft on record—it reached speeds of Mach 9.6 in 2004, or just under 10 times the speed of sound. A scramjet is an air-breathing engine that requires no turbo-machinery; instead, it uses vehicle motion to compress ingested air before burning the supersonic airstream. 40 | BOEING FRONTIERS In the fast lane Boeing’s foremost hypersonics expert feels the need for speed He led the conceptual design and optimization of the X-51A WaveRider, an unmanned, experimental vehicle that relied on its own shock waves for compression lift and set the record for the longest air-breathing propelled flight at hypersonic speed—it flew on scramjet power for 3.5 minutes at Mach 5.1 in 2013. With increasing attention given to Mars and extended space exploration, Bowcutt wants to build a space plane. It would need to be hypersonic, using a combination of turbine engine, scramjet and rocket propulsion to leave Earth’s atmosphere, and be reusable for continuous voyages to make it affordable, he said. The cost to launch a vehicle into space currently runs $5,000 to $10,000 per pound, he explained. The repeated use of a space plane could dramatically lower this expense, even to a few hundred dollars per pound, encouraging additional markets that would establish space travel as something commonplace, Bowcutt said. “It would readily change the world—like the cellphone and the computer—if we could routinely fly in and out of space,” he said. As Boeing prepares to celebrate its centennial, Bowcutt is among the many men and women who have made milestone contributions to Boeing or its heritage companies. He is considered one of the world’s leading experts in his field, according to George Orton, Boeing hypersonics project engineer. “His multidisciplinary design and optimization process is unique in the industry—no one else has it,” Orton said. “He can look at all different sorts of vehicles and apply this technique that he’s developed. Without him, I don’t think we could have been as successful.” As part of the coming centennial celebration, Bowcutt also is sharing his expertise with the Curiosity Machine, an educational resource intended to inspire the next generation of innovators. He has created design challenges for inquisitive students not unlike him so long ago. Bowcutt first encountered hypersonics technology while attending graduate school at the University of Maryland. He joined a research project funded by the U.S. Army that was used to design aerodynamic shapes that would “break the hypersonic lift-to-drag barrier.” President Ronald Reagan’s 1986 State of the Union speech—one in which he described a proposed Orient Express airplane that would fly from the U.S. to Japan in a few TR A I LBL A ZERS K


Frontiers April 2016 Issue
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