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—— JAXA recently integrated the Japanese government's aviation technology laboratories into a comprehensive aerospace development agency, like NASA. Are there advantages to developing aviation and space technology together?

I think there are some key advantages to marrying the aeronautical research areas with the space technology areas. We've been doing that for a number of years within NASA and at NASA-Dryden, because a lot of the space technology projects end up either taking off from or landing on land, and those final phases often involve the same types of technologies and issues that are associated with some of the advanced aeronautical vehicles. So as new space technology vehicles are developed, a certain phase of that development involves atmospheric flight. And that's something that an agency like JAXA or NASA is well positioned to accomplish.


Pathfinder Plus Photo

Pathfinder Plus flight in Hawaii on June 24, 2004

—— Have you collaborated at all with Japan?

Yes, we have had some collaborative activities with the Japanese over the last few years. One example was in the summer of 2002, with the Communication Research Laboratory and the Telecommunications Advancement Organization of Japan*, again using these unpiloted aerial vehicle platforms that we had developed. The Japanese organizations wanted to do a telecommunications experiment using a high-flying or high-altitude unpiloted vehicle. So we developed a partnership to carry this experiment on one of our high-altitude vehicles, called the Pathfinder Plus. It was a solar-powered vehicle that could fly to 60,000 or 70,000 feet [18,000 or 21,000 meters]. The idea was to carry these telecommunication relay payloads, and try to utilize them for either cell-phone technology or video telecommunications technology. We were hoping to demonstrate that a high-flying aircraft platform could be used for that type of application, similarly to a very high telecommunications tower, and to be able to use an airplane platform for that instead of a ground structure. It was quite a successful experiment, and we're hopeful that we'll have future collaborations of that type.

* Editor's Note: In 2004, these two agencies were merged into the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology.


—— What percentage of work at NASA-Dryden is funded by or related to the military?

NASA is a civilian agency, so most of our work is in support of the civil side of the aeronautics arena. We do have partnerships and collaborate with the Department of Defense and other government agencies to help develop concepts that would eventually go into military applications also. But in general, most of our work is in collaboration with industry partners in support of civil aviation. Maybe 20 per cent of our work is in support of the Department of Defense and some of their advanced concepts. The majority of our work is in support of civil space and aeronautics applications.


—— Could you explain the different roles played by the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) and Dryden?

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency supports the Department of Defense, so they're that part of the government. The Dryden Flight Research Center supports NASA, which is more in the civil part of the government. We do have collaborative partnerships with DARPA on occasion, and some of our work is in collaboration and support of their activities. They do advanced technology development for the Department of Defense; we occasionally get involved with them in partnerships to help test and validate those technologies.

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