NASA scientist discusses new technologies

NASA Langley Chief Scientist Dennis Bushnell gave a talk titled “Frontiers of Electric Aircraft Propulsion” to an audience of roughly 30 students in the Engineering Quadrangle on Wednesday night.

During lecture, Bushnell presented a variety of innovative technologies for the future.

“I’m going to try to cover most of the future of civil aeronatics,” Bushnell explained. He started with the impact of current technologies from telecommunication to tele-education, telemedicine, tele-politics and telemarketing.

“With this [new] technology, people can live where they want to because they don’t have to travel to work,” he explained.

He then moved on to one of the key innovations he said he supports: personal air vehicles, or PAVs.

He described these vehicles as the next innovation in the advance of transportation, from the sea transportation of the 1700s to the railroads of the 1800s to the automobiles of the 1900s.

The PAVs would be automatic and robotically controlled but also centrally monitored for errors, he said.

“It turns out this market for these PAVs is huge,” Bushnell said. “The estimated market is a trillion dollars.”

Bushnell next discussed innovations in propulsion, proposing many possible paths for the future including electricity, biofuels, fuel cells, solar thermals and nano plastic photovoltaics.

Bushnell discussed the pros and cons of all the options and said he was especially enthusiastic about halophyte biofuels and low-energy nuclear reactions.

Bushnell described halophyte biofuels, which use seawater plants, as an intuitive energy source.

“This really seems like a no-brainer,” he explained. “What do we have a lot of? Desert wasteland, sea water and half of the plant kingdom.”

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Meanwhile, he said, low-energy nuclear reactions had replication issues and had not been able to produce enough energy to even boil water until this January, when a group of Italian scientists discovered a way to use it to produce over 10 thousand kilowatts of energy over several days.

Bushnell explained his enthusiasm about the possibilities of new technology but said that human conservatism was the main obstacle preventing immediate implementation.

“The problem is us — our conservatism,” Bushnell said. “We’ve become hideously risk-averse.”

Androniki Tsakiridou ’12, who attended the lecture, said she found Bushnell’s optimism inspiring but thought his analysis was not completely balanced.

“He was really optimistic,” Tsakiridou said. “He proposed a clear plan [but] there must be something missing with biofuels. He has just showed us the golden points [about biofuels], not what [problems] would prevent it.”

Kathryn O’Connell ’12, who organized the event, said that while many of the options Bushnell presented may never be realized, they are nevertheless intriguing.

“It was definitely a lot to think about and shows how much progress we can make in the future,” she said.