Tools Lighten Designs, Maintain Structural Integrity
While the Agency had long been known for bringing its cutting-edge technologies to the public sector in the forms of commercial spinoffs, it was not until 1996 that NASA had ever licensed software to a private company. In that year, the National Aerospace Plane project came to an end, unrealized, but with many technologies ready to be applied to new missions and additional aerospace research. It was then that Langley's Craig Collier licensed the ST-SIZE software he had helped develop for the X-30 and struck out on his own to bring the software to the broader market.
Transcript
00:00:01 from the launch vehicle hydrogen tank to the crew module to the launch abort system to the lunar lander systems nearly every piece of the new structure that's being designed is being impacted with hypersizer software and that to me is the biggest most exciting thing I can talk about it's all about the shape of things to come Craig Kier owns a small company
00:00:26 called ker research Corporation in Hampton Virginia in the late 19 1980s he was working at NASA's Langley Research Center where he was part of a team that developed software called St size at the time Collier's team used St size for new high-speed aircraft designs when NASA decided not to continue the high-speed research ker had an idea and in 1996 he licensed St size from Langley to start
00:00:53 his own company the first thing we worked on was essentially just uh trying to establish what we wanted the software to do in the future and then trying to figure out how much effort would require to get there St size evolved into coler's own software hypersizer and their first work with NASA began at Glenn Research Center as a partner on a team with NASA and pratton Whitney to
00:01:20 perform some software integration for an arrow project I think it was the uh first opportunity we had to be a sort of like a team partner and and it was not just us and NASA but it was actually a major corporation Pratt Whitney so it gave us a chance to be able to use the tool um and to be able to share the database and to be able to see how they use the Tool uh first hand not long
00:01:47 after ker teamed with the Air Force research laboratory in locked Martin on a design for a long range strike aircraft it had morphed into something a little bit more modern than that particular vehicle but this was an exciting time for us because we were uh Again part of a three-way connection of of entities it was our company the tool provider it was
00:02:12 the government agency afrl and this time it was led Martin who you know has a long tradition of making fighter planes coming full circle in 2005 the firm received a small business Innovation research or sbir contract to partner with Langley on structural designs for NASA's crew exploration vehicle known as the cev they're the ones that have kind of taken you might say the design
00:02:38 manuals of a Boeing Corporation or of some Corporation or of NASA or something and kind of formalize that into code so you can go to the level of just saying I want a piece of builtup structure here like a stiffen structure or a piece of honeycomb or something with beams and stiffeners all together and tell it to size that for you since then Coler has received several SBI phase 3 Awards and
00:03:03 several NASA centers are using hypersizer on almost all aspects of creating the cev we use it on programs for Aries and the the crew capsule itself and for the preliminary studies we do in architecture studies where you're deciding what elements to put into a space exploration architecture so some very upfront uh structural weight estimating work that's been the the
00:03:27 Genesis of the kind of need we had here for hypers siiz the NASA work is also having a positive impact on hypersizer as it helps build out the software's capability and a number of commercial Aerospace customers are now using it to design their new vehicles from St size and NASA to hypersizer and Coler research it is all about the shape of things to come