Abstract
In the process of considering what I wanted to research for my thesis, I had initially decided to study how military funding pressures shaped modern academia. I was interested in this because my capstone project studies hypersonic flight, which is a research area with utility essentially only in a military context. Given that, I was curious about what happened in American university history which led to an undergraduate capstone studying matters mostly useful to the military. Upon Donald Trump’s second inauguration and his subsequent slashing of grants at the National Institutes of Health, I was inspired to look into other times politicians used funding pressure to shape research, and what the long term ramifications were.
My capstone studies the feasibility of using CubeSats, which are a size classification of small satellites, to inexpensively study the performance of materials under hypersonic reentry conditions. It is a multi-year project, with this year’s focus being to validate the effectiveness of our satellite communications solution. Previous groups had completed most of the design of the reentry vehicle, leaving our group to design a deployment system, procure parts, simulate the flight, and assemble the whole system. My team’s role was to simulate the flight, which we did using an initial MATLAB script, which approximated the drag coefficient of the reentry vehicle as that of a cone and integrated its net forces using an atmospheric table to find velocity and altitude over the entire flight. With a set of velocities and atmospheric conditions at various altitudes, we used Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) with a model of our reentry vehicle to find more accurate drag coefficients. We then used those drag coefficients in a python script to integrate a more accurate set of forces over the flight. Our simulations proved that the reentry vehicle was statically stable, meaning it would not tumble, and that we could expect to see speeds near the low hypersonic range. The culmination of our project is a test flight, scheduled for August 12, 2025, aboard a sounding rocket launched from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Wallops Flight Facility.
My STS research project analyzes the relationship between the US government, and
especially the military, and academia, from the founding of Harvard until roughly the end of the Cold War. I use Social Construction of Technology (SCOT) to analyze the decisions that led to the close relationship between academia and the government throughout the history of the US and before. My analysis culminates in an analysis of Project Excalibur, a component of President Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), which attempted to design a space-based laser powered by the explosion of a nuclear bomb. I then analyze the costs of Project Excalibur and compare its long term benefits to society to those of cancelled solar energy research. I chose solar energy research as a foil to Project Excalibur because its federal funding was severely cut shortly before Project Excalibur, and modern society is staring down the barrel of an energy crisis, as drivers increasingly choose electric cars and datacenters proliferate. Solar energy was fascinating to research because it shows the potential good that government funding of research can do, when it is applied well. One of the most frustrating sagas to read about was a 1970s scheme to replace remote and extremely expensive fuel powered generators at DoD facilities with solar panels. This would have both created a vast new market for solar panels and saved the DoD money, all while making critical defense infrastructure more resilient to attack. It would have been a near-perfect complement for basic research into solar panels, providing the industrial base for the innovative products of new research. Unfortunately, it was never enacted, and going into the 1980s, leaders cut the already meager funding for solar research.
My technical and research projects demonstrate different sides of the influence of military and government funding on academia. My technical project needed significant financial assistance to make it to launch, and while the funding did not come from the Department of Defense (DoD), our backer is a defense contractor. While I was working on my technical project, I was interested to discover more ties to my STS project. One of these is that the rocket our experiment will travel on is powered by the engine from a Patriot missile, a type of missile defense weapon. Another is that, probably owing to the relative lack of civilian uses for hypersonics, information on how to conduct hypersonic CFD experiments was scarce. Overall, conducting my STS research alongside my technological project helped me to think about the broader implications of my work and how I can live out my ethical beliefs as I progress through my career.
Notes
School of Engineering and Applied Science
Bachelor of Science in Aerospace Engineering
Technical Advisor: Christopher Goyne
STS Advisor: William Davis
Technical Team Members: Sydney Bakir, Luke Dropulic, Max Cristinzio, Caleb White, Cole Bixby, Jason Morefield, Arooj Nasir, Benjamin Petsopoulos, Michael Wennemer, Franklin Escobar, Cade Shaw, Zachary Morris
