2025-2026 UCAH Design Competition Thesis: UVA Hypersonic Low-Altitude Research Projectile (Hyper-LARP); The Military Industrial Complex and American Aerospace Research and Development Funding Practices as a Socio-Technically Designed System. 49 views

As I began my fourth year at the University of Virginia pursuing a bachelor’s degree in aerospace engineering, I had to select my capstone project. Though this is standard for most engineering programs, I was shocked that nearly all the project options were the design of weapons systems. Options ranged from a hypersonic missile to a novel reconnaissance drone design to a missile ejection system. Though I had known how tightly my major was tied to defense programs within the industry, it was surprising how ingrained it was within the undergraduate experience and academia as a whole. I ended up on the hypersonic missile design team — part of the annual design competition for the University Consortium of Applied Hypersonics (UCAH). Though UCAH is technically not a military organization, its objectives are explicitly to produce professional engineers who would take part in United States Department of Defense (DoD) programs. My technical report comes directly from my work on within the UCAH competition and though my efforts to be as neutral (non-military) as possible are not clearly enumerated, I managed to contain my effort to the development of systems and processes applicable to any aircraft design project, not just military ones. Every sector of aerospace engineering is tangled with national defense by the nature of their parallel interests. All equipment and expertise applicable to commercial projects are fundamentally the same as for military interests. There are no practical differences between military and commercial engineering. However, as time goes on, particularly in time of national militarization, defense slowly steers the aerospace engineering field away from its scientific goal: the pursuit of knowledge and truth. Within both my technical and STS pursuits, I sought to answer this question: How can one work within the aerospace engineering field while maximizing the benefit to commercial and societal needs, not just military interests? The inspiration for my STS topic came from my career search, I realized that the vast majority of the opportunities I found, both private and public, industry and research, were military-based. All my life I heard stories of our great trek to the moon, our electronic friends on Mars – where had that gone? This led me to investigate what pressures shape the research and development field and by what mechanisms it is changed. Ultimately, I wanted to understand how the system had changed so that, one day, aerospace research and development might turn towards purer notions of aiding humanity.

BS (Bachelor of Science)

Hypersonics; Hypersonic Aerodynamics; University Consortium of Applied Hypersonics; UCAH; Computational Fluid Dynamics; CFD; Hypersonic CFD; Surrogate Modeling; Uncertainty Quantification; Military Industrial Complex; CUBRC; Joint Hypersonics Transition Office; JHTO

School of Engineering and Applied Science Bachelor of Science in Aerospace Engineering Technical Advisors: Chris Goyne, Xinfeng Gao STS Advisor: Travis Elliott Technical Team Members: Victoria Sun, Michael Della Santina, Michael Novak, Soren Poole, Genevieve Forrer, Joe McPhail, Channing Reynolds, Arwen Nicolau, Ava Frodsham, Eric Voigt, Joshua Stoner, Kayla Kadlubek, Lukas Hange

English

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2026-05-07