Yesterday, on the annual Thanksgiving dinner of USAIRE in Paris, I was awarded the second place in the student award competition of 2009! The aim of this year’s contest was to study how the aerospace world of 2050 will look like, and write a 10-page paper about this. The official title was ‘What will the civil and military space look like in 2050? What consequences will this have on our industry’s competitiveness and innovation ambitions?’

USAIRE is a 50-year old association of American and European companies focused on aerospace and advanced technologies. Members include Airbus, Boeing, Dassault, EADS, Eurocopter, Lockheed Martin, Northtrop Grumman, Raytheon, Rolls-Royce, Thales and many more. The Thanksgiving dinner took place at the Cercle d’Union Interalliée, in the very centre of Paris, close to Place de la Concorde. After the dessert, it was time for the announcement of the results.

And second place it was. Prizes include two tickets Paris – New York on Air France, a Panasonic Toughbook, a cheque from USAIRE (and a very generous one at that), and a year long subscription to both Air & Cosmos and Aviation Week and Space Technology. Yes, I’m very happy You can find the full text here (pdf, 10mb), or enjoy the summary:

What will people see in the sky four decades from now? How will the civil and military airplanes and spacecraft of 2050 look? My text takes a broad technological approach. I have tried to extract the fundamental trends from the present and the recent past, and extrapolate them four decades out. It is crucial to keep in mind the circumstances, the big picture. The world, with its bubbles and its crashes, its war and its peace, will decide which technology becomes important, which will turn out to be a commercial success.

To summarise my text, I would like to focus on five important evolutions.

1. What weʼve been seeing recently is the steep rise of unmanned aerial vehicles, especially in military service, both in surveillance and combat tasks. By 2050, efficient and autonomous UAVs of all shapes and sizes will be the majority of military air hardware.
2. These autonomous air vehicles are part of a paradigm change towards high-precision, network-centric warfare, in which controlling space and cyberspace become crucial. Protection of military satellites will be of vital importance. The militarisation of Earth orbit, although controversial, will be impossible to stop. Still, it is geopolitics, international conflicts between now and 2050, that will decide how far this will go.
3. Autonomy, ʻfly-by-wireʼ, already has a big impact on the civil aviation market. With ever more advanced systems, flying will become easier and safer, perhaps even allowing every family to own a ʻpersonalʼ airplane for shorter distances. In order for that to happen, however, major issues would need to be solved, like air traffic control and runway availability.
4. As for civil aviation, the other major trend is energy efficiency, the topic of last yearʼs Student Award. A world with peaking fossil fuel prices will present a major challenge. At some point, incremental improvements in efficiency will no longer be sufficient and new airplane configurations and other innovations will be called for.
5. In civilian spaceflight, recent years have seen the first small steps of a major paradigm shift, in which private industry will take over the transportation aspect of space. Space agencies will be paying per kilogram or per seat, and their focus will shift to exploration, science and technology. Step by step, an international space infrastructure will be built, including for example space traffic control and asteroid monitoring. As of today, it is an open question when this will happen and how fast it will go. More certain is that in space, the big aerospace firms of today will have a hard time keeping up with smaller, more flexible and innovative newcomers.

With ever-smarter UAVs, advanced fly-by-wire technology, energy efficient transportation and Earth orbit bustling with both military and commercial activities, the aerospace world of 2050 will be very different from the one of 2009. Different, but promising.

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