Expanding our coverage of defense and Congress
The Aerospace America staff grew in January, when we welcomed a second staff reporter: Aspen Pflughoeft.
Aspen joined us from McClatchy, where she spent nearly four years. She led the company’s international and science coverage for its real-time news team, which means she has a knack for covering and writing about complex news.
For Aerospace America, Aspen will be building out our defense and congressional reporting as it relates to aerospace technology and issues. That means tracking the Air Force and Space Force’s emerging technology programs, monitoring progress on the Golden Dome missile defense effort, following NASA and Pentagon research funding proposals on Capitol Hill and watching how defense contractors are directing their technology investments — plus much more.
We’re thrilled to have her aboard and hope you enjoy our expanded defense coverage. If you have ideas or tips, you can contact Aspen at [email protected].
What’s next
We’re looking forward to a busy few months, from the Space Symposium in Colorado in April, AIAA’s ASCEND coming to Washington, D.C., in May, and the AVIATION Forum in June. No matter your specialization or niche, we hope you enjoy and potentially learn from the stories inside these pages and our coverage of these events.
Top of mind for many space officials and executives is the race to the moon between China and the United States. NASA made news in late February when it significantly restructured its own plan to return astronauts to the lunar surface in two years, inserting a new demonstration mission in 2027 to test rendezvous and docking between the Orion crew capsule and one or both of the commercial landers in development. The agency now hopes to conduct not one, but two lunar landings in 2028.
For our cover story, Leonard David and Associate Editor Cat Hofacker take a closer look at the Chinese and U.S. progress — and the stakes of landing astronauts first this time around. We’re of course closely tracking Artemis II (which as of this writing was slated to launch as soon as April 1), but with this story, we wanted to zoom out a bit and examine why this has shaped into what top officials describe as a race and what that means. Indeed, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said at a February conference that if China beats the U.S. back to the moon, it would call “almost everything [the U.S. is] pursuing across all these emerging and important technological domains into question.”
Also in this issue, staff reporter Paul Brinkmann checks in on NASA’s Dragonfly rotorcraft, which was a topic of great interest at AIAA’s SciTech Forum in January. Indeed, he spotted multiple technical papers and talks about the mission, and spoke to scientists and engineers about their efforts to overcome key technical challenges so the spacecraft is ready for a 2028 launch to Titan. Paul talked with some of the project leaders to offer a closer look at what those obstacles are, as well as the plans to overcome them.
Also at SciTech, Cat sat down with Boeing’s top safety official for a discussion about implementing sweeping changes at the aerospace giant over the past several years. You’ll find excerpts of that conversation in the Q&A section.
For those interested in innovative aircraft, I’d direct you to our Engineering Notebook for a deep dive into DARPA’s X-65. Flight tests with this remotely piloted demonstrator could give us the first in-depth examination of active flow control and, if successful, unlock new opportunities for aircraft design.
We’ve also added a new department this year with the Book Spotlight, which takes a look at upcoming and recently published books that might be of interest to our readers.
Of course, there’s much more in this issue, and, as always, I welcome your ideas for future coverage. We hope you enjoy the issue — and that you visit us online to see our daily coverage of aerospace technology, including our expanded set of topics.
