The final plenary session at the 2025 AIAA SciTech Forum featured technologists from three startup and innovative companies in defense, space, and aviation who discussed their take on innovation and where they see the future of innovation across the aerospace community. Moderated by Tony Mitchell, chief technology officer of Honeywell’s Electromagnetic Defense Solutions, the panel included:
Stephen Milano, senior director, Advanced Effects, Anduril Industries, shared how the autonomous vehicles and space system maker has redefined speed to market for the defense sector with its software-defined pioneering solutions.
Jeff Schloemer, senior director, Engineering, Astroscale U.S. Inc., discussed his firm’s mission to create “a serviceable space domain,” which includes space debris removal, spacecraft refueling, and the extension of the life of spacecraft.
Buddy Sessoms, EL9 chief engineer, Electra.aero, introduced his firm’s concept of creating a new class of aircraft for sustainable aviation, as part of Electra’s vision of air travel without airports, emissions, or noise.
Defining Innovation
Asked how they define innovation at their firms, Anduril’s Milano said his company intentionally doesn’t define innovation.
“Just aggressively attacking problems creates innovation. We tend to allow innovation to be something (that) comes from the ground up … from the engineering core as opposed to a top-down innovation strategy,” he said.
Schloemer noted Astroscale similarly doesn’t follow a standard definition of how engineers innovate; it is neither obvious nor simple, but rather “comes from a wholesale vision of everything we’ve been doing for the last 50 and 60 years in space.”
He emphasized the need for a holistic vision of innovation, including business models and policies to create “a sustainable space ecosystem.”
Sessoms said one thing innovation must do at Electra “is create value.” He cited examples of innovations in batteries and hybrid propulsion that don’t create a new capability but are just new or different.
“At Electra … we are actually creating a new way to travel” with his firm’s new aircraft that can take off and land in lengths as short as 150 feet, making regional air mobility more accessible and improving the safety and economics of fixed-wing aircraft. “That’s what we see as innovation – it has to be commercially viable, and it has to create a new capability,” he said.
Revolutionary or Evolutionary Innovation?
Asked if their firms pursue revolutionary or evolutionary innovation – that is, technology that was more aspirational or realizable, the panelists shared different takes.
Anduril has grown exponentially by taking early aspirational innovative ideas and identifying sensitivities that would make them realizable and successful.
“The way to disrupt yourself is look at the sensitivities,” Milano said. “There was some catalyst in the past that somebody identified that is about to happen. What we are intentionally looking for are these sensitivities and bringing them into that new state and to that next level of maturity.”
For Astroscale, breakthroughs in their architecture “can’t come at the expense of feeling alien to the customer. It’s got to feel approachable.”
“We try to as hard as possible to use what’s already there that allows us speed to market, that allows customers to buy those services now,” Schloemer added, noting that it could involve taking a solution like rendezvous proximity operations and packaging a solution “in a way no one has seen before.”
Electra’s Sessoms said companies must have “a greater or larger vision” to drive innovation.
“For us, it’s sustainability. We can be sustainable right now as a plug-in hybrid and as the technology improves, we could eventually go to a battery.”
He cited the philosophy of Electra’ s founder, AIAA Honorary Fellow John Langford, who believes that you should “think big, start small, act now.”
“So, evolution does become aspirational. It’s all building blocks. Just make sure you provide that path and act quickly and never stop.”
Innovation Cycles – How They Got Here
The panelists also discussed their innovation cycles – whether their big breakthroughs were a combination of funding and a new idea, or a lightning-strike moment.
In Electra’s case, “We want to bring an aircraft into your neighborhood.” Long-lift aircraft have been around for years but weren’t “practical or safe because they rely on the skill of the pilot,” Sessoms said.
The aha moment for Electra came with the emergence of hybrid propulsion and distributed electric propulsion that allowed for a fully effective runway in a smaller footprint. “When you add in fly by wire, we can make it easy for any pilot to fly,” he said.
For Astroscale, “no one was thinking about space sustainability” when the company began a decade ago. “That vision took courage to look at a problem and say, ‘How do we address it so we aren’t stealing space from future generations?”
“Our product cycle starts with, ‘What are our customers’ pain points? How do we delight them and then, once those happen, how do we entertain them and keep them buying?’” Schloemer explained.
Anduril’s Milano noted that in the defense tech space, companies look to identify a need or to fill a gap in capability.
“Our founder, Palmer Luckey, seven and a half years ago started his defense tech company saying, “The acquisition system for defense tech is broken. We can do this better. We can save hundreds of billions of dollars … being able to bring commercial technology to bear in the defense space.”
“That ethos carries through with all our product designs,” continued Milano, explaining that product teams are not given a budget to then solve a problem. “We’ll fund it to whatever degree necessary to make it a reality. If it’s an innovative idea that fills a gap and solves a problem for the warfighter, we’re going to figure out how to do it.”
Build It and They Will Come?
Milano noted that it is not hard to build something faster than the acquisition process. “Sometimes, you are solving a problem that hasn’t been defined yet or you are defining it for yourself. It’s not ‘if you build it, they will come’; it’s building something that you predicted will be necessary.”
Astroscale’s panelist agreed. “If you’re ultimately building solutions to chase problems that don’t exist, that’s what’s not going to be successful.”
That’s where verification is so critical. “People want to see if your stuff works. If the ‘build it and they will come’ is a trust-building exercise, that’s useful because it’s building relationships between you and your customer’s customers. But if it’s putting cool tech out there for the sake of showcasing it, that’s probably not going to be as successful.”
Added Sessoms, “Start small, simulate at subscale, [have] early and active engagement with your customers or your potential customers – that’s the key. Electra has done that.”
He also suggests that companies “talk to the nerds – find out where their pain points are because that’s what’s going to make them want your product.”
Attracting Investment
Asked how best to attract investment needed to build a real market for a company’s technology or products, Milano responded that in the defense world, it’s about understanding the funding cycles for specific capabilities and providing a “legacy of performance” to government decision makers.
He cited Anduril’s work delivering a monitoring solution to the U.S. Border Patrol and ports. First, the company had to demonstrate its capabilities before the government acknowledged that the technology worked and was affordable. From there, Anduril had to align its offerings to government requirements and acquisitions structures before it could get funded by the individual services.
“It all starts with building that trust up first,” he said. Anduril, a three-time CNBC Disruptor 50 company, announced in August that it had raised $1.5 billion, with a valuation of $14 billion.
As a space company based in Asia (founded in Singapore and later moved to Japan), Astroscale had to convince investors that space sustainability “was a good idea,” recalled Schloemer. “How do you do that when the Japanese office and the UK office doesn’t have an aerospace industrial base to justify things commercial?”
He recalled that venture capital funded the company’s first satellite, which never made it to orbit.
“The founder put the chips on the table and built the next generation of satellites anyway,” said Schloemer. He credits the success of the recent ADRAS-J mission to lessons learned on earlier orbital attempts.
In November, Astroscale’s commercial debris inspection demonstration satellite, ADRAS-J, approached within 15 meters of a large piece of space debris – a rocket upper stage. According to Astroscale, it was the closest approach ever achieved by a company to space debris through rendezvous and proximity operations.
Building Capability with Government Partners
Electra’s Sessoms observed that NASA’s X-57 Maxwell experimental aircraft “effectively looks a lot like our prototype.” It was designed to reduce fuel use, emissions, and noise, but the program was cancelled because of problems with the propulsion system.
“We were able to realize what NASA wanted but was not able to fly,” he said. “Everybody wants to make the best use of their capital and I do think partnering with small companies like mine is how you do that. But you want to have the government entities partner with the small companies because they are a much more efficient use of capital.”
In November, NASA selected Electra among others to develop key technologies and aircraft concepts for next-generation commercial airliners that could enter service by mid-century. The award is part of NASA’s Advanced Aircraft Concepts for Environmental Sustainability (AACES) 2050 initiative, which is part of NASA’s ambitious research program to cement U.S. leadership in decarbonizing aviation.
Test, Learn, Iterate
To ensure that the first flight of new capability is successful, panelists agreed it comes down to modeling and simulation.
Anduril is all about “failing quickly and iterating” before the company ever flies hardware.
“Failing is good,” Milano believes, “but the next step is more important: recovering and doing the next step and iterating … The fastest way to get to the final product is to accelerate, fly what you can as fast as you can and then fail, learn, and then iterate that cycle as soon as you can.”
Astroscale’s Schloemer cautioned engineers not to test for testing sake. “If you’re just doing it because you want to pass the test, I would encourage your testers to think beyond that,” he said.
He added that it’s challenging to balance innovation with delivering capabilities under tighter timelines.
The panel hit home for several forum attendees, including Emmanuel Vielma, a recent aerospace engineering graduate from the University of Texas at El Paso, whose graduate master’s thesis paper won the American Society for Composites Student Paper Award.
“I work for a larger defense contractor. I think there’s a lot of insight there for students and early career professionals like me to keep in mind what we’re trying to do in the aviation industry. It was very eye-opening.”
Regarding testing, Vielma said, “It’s important to not just do testing, but to ask, ‘What are you trying to get out of it?’”
Waris Khan, a doctoral mechanical engineering student at Virginia Tech, who worked for four years in the space industry, said Astroscale’s sustainability message of not wanting to steal from the future resonated with him most.
“My goal is to be a bridge between startups and academia so I can drive both innovation demand and academic demand,” he said. “Innovation must have theoretical and experimental and computational backing – you have to do multiple simulations to know whether an innovation is feasible or not,” he said.
