RAND: no life-cycle cost savings from joint aircraft

RAND has a recent report out examining the historical performance of joint (i.e. multi-service) aircraft development programs. Their key findings are:

• Joint aircraft programs have not historically saved overall life cycle cost. On average, such programs experienced substantially higher cost growth in acquisition (research, development, test, evaluation, and procurement) than single-service programs. The potential savings in joint aircraft acquisition and operations and support compared with equivalent single-service programs is too small to offset the additional average cost growth that joint aircraft programs experience in the acquisition phase.
  
  
• The difficulty of reconciling diverse service requirements in a common design is a major factor in joint cost outcomes. Diverse service requirements and operating environments work against commonality which is the source of potential cost savings, and are a major contributor to the joint acquisition cost-growth premium identified in the cost analysis.
  
  
• Historical analysis suggests joint programs are associated with contraction of the industrial base and a decline in potential future industry competition, as well as increased strategic and operational risk due to dependency across the services on a single type of weapon system which may experience unanticipated safety, maintenance, or performance issues with no alternative readily available.
  

Here's the Abstract:

In the past 50 years, the U.S. Department of Defense has pursued numerous joint aircraft programs, the largest and most recent of which is the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter (JSF). Joint aircraft programs are thought to reduce Life Cycle Cost (LCC) by eliminating duplicate research, development, test, and evaluation efforts and by realizing economies of scale in procurement, operations, and support. But the need to accommodate different service requirements in a single design or common design family can lead to greater program complexity, increased technical risk, and common functionality or increased weight in excess of that needed for some variants, potentially leading to higher overall cost, despite these efficiencies. To help Air Force leaders (and acquisition decisionmakers in general) select an appropriate acquisition strategy for future combat aircraft, this report analyzes the costs and savings of joint aircraft acquisition programs. The project team examined whether historical joint aircraft programs have saved LCC compared with single-service programs. In addition, the project team assessed whether JSF is on track to achieving the joint savings originally anticipated at the beginning of full-scale development. Also examined were the implications of joint fighter programs for the health of the industrial base and for operational and strategic risk.

JSF is now expected to be more expensive than 3 F-22-like single-service programs:

Phil Roe: Colorful Fluid Dynamics

Echos of Tufte in one of his introductory statements: "It's full of noise, it's full of color, it's spectacular, it's intended to blow your mind away, it's intended to disarm criticism." And further on the dangers of "colorful fluid dynamics":

These days it is common to see a complicated flow field, predicted with all the right general features and displayed in glorious detail that looks like the real thing. Results viewed in this way take on an air of authority out of proportion to their accuracy.
--Doug McLean

This lecture is sponsored by MConneX.

Roe wraps up the lecture by referencing a NASA sponsored study, CFD Vision 2030, that addresses whether CFD will be able to reliably predict turbulent separated flows by 2030. The conclusion is that advances in hardware capability alone will not be enough, but that significant improvements in numerical algorithms are required.

Algorithmic Improvements: just as important as Moore's Law

There were a couple interesting comments on slashdot recently about future computing technologies that might allow us to enjoy the continued price/performance improvements in computing and avoid the end of Moore's Law. Here's one that highlights some promising emerging technologies (my emphasis):

I see many emerging technologies that promise further great progress in computing. Here are some of them. I wish some industry people here could post some updates about their way to the market. They may not literally prolong the Moore's Law in regards to the number of transistors, but they promise great performance gains, which is what really matters.

3D chips. As materials science and manufacturing precision advances, we will soon have multi-layered (starting at a few layers that Samsung already has, but up to 1000s) or even fully 3D chips with efficient heat dissipation. This would put the components closer together and streamline the close-range interconnects. Also, this increases "computation per rack unit volume", simplifying some space-related aspects of scaling.

Memristors. HP is ready to produce the first memristor chips but delays that for business reasons (how sad is that!) Others are also preparing products. Memristor technology enables a new approach to computing, combining memory and computation in one place. They are also quite fast (competitive with the current RAM) and energy-efficient, which means easier cooling and possible 3D layout.

Photonics. Optical buses are finding their ways into computers, and network hardware manufacturers are looking for ways to perform some basic switching directly with light. Some day these two trends may converge to produce an optical computer chip that would be free from the limitations of electric resistance/heat, EM interference, and could thus operate at a higher clock speed. Would be more energy efficient, too.

Spintronics. Probably further in the future, but potentially very high-density and low-power technology actively developed by IBM, Hynix and a bunch of others. This one would push our computation density and power efficiency limits to another level, as it allows performing some computation using magnetic fields, without electrons actually moving in electrical current (excuse me for my layman understanding).

Quantum computing. This could qualitatively speed up whole classes of tasks, potentially bringing AI and simulation applications to new levels of performance. The only commercial offer so far is Dwave, and it's not a classical QC, but so many labs are working on that, the results are bound to come soon.
3D chips, memristors, photonics, spintronics, QC

I think Moore's Law is a steamroller. But, like the genomics sequencing technology highlighted in that post on Nuit Blanche, there are improvements just as fast, or faster than Moore's law. The improvements from better algorithms can yield exponential speed-ups too. Here's a graph (from this report) depicting the orders of magnitude improvement in linear solver performance:

Couple these software improvements with continually improving hardware and things get pretty exciting. I'm happy to live in these interesting times!

DoD Unmanned Systems Roadmap 2013

The FAA isn't the only one "roadmapping". The US Department of Defense recently released a road map for unmanned systems.

Strategy and budget realities are two aspects of the Defense Department’s new Unmanned Systems Integrated Roadmap, released today. The report to Congress is an attempt to chart how unmanned systems fit into the defense of the nation. “The 2013 Unmanned Systems Integrated Roadmap articulates a vision and strategy for the continued development, production, test, training, operation and sustainment of unmanned systems technology across DOD,” said Dyke Weatherington, the director of the unmanned warfare and intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance office at the Pentagon. “This road map establishes a technological vision for the next 25 years and outlines the actions and technologies for DOD and industry to pursue to intelligently and affordably align with this vision,” he continued.

DOD Looks 25 Years Ahead in Unmanned Vehicle Roadmap

The funding profile is interesting. The roadmap mentions a reduction in funding for unmanned systems over the next five years. One of the results in Ehrhard's study of UAV development is that funding for these systems tends to dip in the interwar periods relative to manned systems.

EELV Competition Legislation

The NDAA is being done a bit differently this year.

This legislation is substantially based on two bills: (1) HR. 1960, the National Defense Authorization Act for FY14 which passed the House on June 14, 2013 by a vote of 315-108; and (2) S.1197, a product of the Senate Armed Services Committee which passed out of committee on the same day by a vote of 23-3.

Because passing this legislation before the end of the calendar year is vital, these two products were merged through a series of negotiations at all levels of the House and Senate. Negotiators also considered, and in many cases included, a number of proposals offered by members of both parties that were intended for consideration by the full Senate. This legislation represents a broad bi-partisan consensus about America’s national security goals, resources, and policies.

The text of the "pre-conferenced" bill is available on the House Armed Services Committee site.

One of the interesting portions is Section 145: Competition for Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle Providers.

The Secretary of the Air Force shall develop a plan to implement the new acquisition strategy for the evolved expendable launch vehicle program described in the acquisition decision memorandum dated November 27, 2012.

The acquisition decision memorandum mentioned in the law is described in this article. The plan is supposed to include:

• proposed cost, schedule and performance
  
• mission assurance activities
  
• manner in which the contractor will operate under the Federal Acquisition Regulations
  
• the effect of other contracts in which the contractor is entered into with the Federal Government, including the evolved expendable launch vehicle launch capability contract, the space station commercial resupply services contracts, and other relevant contracts regarding national security space and strategic programs
  

That last portion is most interesting to me. What are the effects of the CRS contract, and the infrastructure subsidy contract on competition for EELV-class launches?

GE Jet Engine Bracket Challenge Winners

Topologically Optimized Bracket by KMWE + TU Delft

The winners for the GrabCAD GE Bracket Design challenge have been manufactured and tested. See all the pictures here. The team I mentioned previously that was using topology optimization went ahead and manufactured their bracket themselves. What a great demonstration of metal additive manufacturing (3d printing) and topology optimization. I hope the GrabCAD folks get the promised detailed feedback for all the entries up soon.

FAA Releases UAS Integration Roadmap

From the press release:

WASHINGTON –The U.S. Department of Transportation’s Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) today released its first annual Roadmap outlining efforts needed to safely integrate unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) into the nation’s airspace. The Roadmap addresses current and future policies, regulations, technologies and procedures that will be required as demand moves the country from today’s limited accommodation of UAS operations to the extensive integration of UAS into the NextGen aviation system in the future.

By way of AUVSI. The Roadmap and Comprehensive Plan are both available to download from the FAA site.

LockMart SR-72

NASA SP-2001-4525

AvWeek has a nice marketing piece for Lockheed-Martin's Mach 6 ISR/strike concept based on Blackswift that they're calling SR-72. They have a nice set of graphics that compares the the new Mach 6-capable combined cycle engine to the old Mach 3 SR-71 cycle.

YF-12 Inlet Schematic

The SR-71 provides a nice historical example of design for high-temperature metallic structures. There is also a great deal of detail on the research NASA did on the YF-12 which includes quite a bit of declassified material on how the YF-12 family managed the inlet boundary layer and shock train across the wide range of Mach numbers at which it operated. One of the aircraft involved in that research program is at the museum so folks can go see it, and there is a virtual tour of the SR-71 cockpit available for those who can't make it to Dayton.

Free (not Libre) TopOpt App

This little app from the TopOpt research group at the Technical University of Denmark is lots of fun to play with. Versions available:

• iOS AppStore
  
• Android Google Play
  
• On the web
  
• pre-compiled binaries for Linux
  

You can move around boundary conditions and forces to see what 2-D arrangement of material is the stiffest. There is also an option to export the geometry to an stl file for 3-D printing.

I couldn't find links to any source for this implementation, but it is based on the methods in the 99- and 88-line codes I've written about previously.