Seeing our principles at work
By Ben Iannotta|November 2024
Here at the magazine, we strive to give you the truths that will equip you to shape the future of aerospace and live as well-informed members of the aerospace community and society. We do that by thinking independently, by listening and by recognizing that you are busy. Most of you have time for only the most important and fascinating developments. We have to tell you about those in a clear and compelling manner devoid of marketing speak. When a story doesn’t need to be long, it should be short. When a photo can tell the story, we should let it. In your work, you probably have first principles — foundational truths that cannot be adjusted without ruining the experiment. The preceding are among our first principles. Under the principle of listening, we’re curious: What attributes in a work of journalism make it worth your time? How would you measure the success of a piece of journalism? Please email us at editors@aerospaceamerica.org if you have thoughts on those.
Our first principles were at work in this issue. Here are some examples: For the cover piece, our thinking was that no matter your role, you should know whose hypersonic weapons are of most concern in the West, China’s or Russia’s? How we arrived at this moment in history. What’s being done to protect innocents from this new class of weapons. That’s what you’ll get in our cover story by Mike Gruss, “The West’s boogeyman.”
Also, we all know that artificial intelligence is huge, but how will it be used in aerospace to help society? One way could be to sharpen air traffic control as the skies become even more crowded with jets and entirely new kinds of electric and hybrid-electric aircraft. Aaron Karp and I spent lots of time on the phone with researchers and leaders of the U.K.’s artificial intelligence initiative, Project Bluebird, to produce the Engineering Notebook piece, “AI at work: mastering the airspace.”
In an example of letting the photo tell the story, see “Hurricane Milton” and the lightning captured in its outer band by the GOES-16 satellite. The photo conveys the human stakes of severe weather forecasting. Lives were lost to a tornado in Florida, but it’s also likely that some were saved by data contributions from this technology.
In planetary science, Europa Clipper was launched last month on its $5 billion mission of scanning this icy moon of Jupiter for the ingredients of life. NASA expressed confidence about the spacecraft’s ability to achieve that mission, after a last-minute epiphany that the kind of transistors in the spacecraft have proven to be vulnerable to radiation. See our Q&A with astrodynamicist Stefano Campagnola, who aims to help NASA be ready five years from now, just in case Clipper’s orbit must be adjusted.
In satellite communications, direct-to-cell internet services are planned, but how will competitors manage this feat? Jonathan O’Callaghan looks at two competing ideas in “Direct-to-device satellite internet sparks competing concepts.”
After publishing, we often do an after-action assessment and inevitably think of things we might have done even better. The beauty of our business is that there is always next month. Your innovation never stops, and neither does ours.
