The Present and Past Declines of U.S. Aerospace

At the opening of the American Institute of American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA)  SciTech conference in San Diego this week, a group of renown panelists painted a troubling picture of the challenges faced by the U.S. Aerospace and Defense community.

Timothy Persons, chief scientist at the U.S. Accountability office, said a rising national debt makes it tougher for the government to fund basic research. Former Pentagon acquisition chief Jacques Gansler warned that U.S. technical superiority is at risk, nothing that France is "way ahead" on night vision technology and citing Israel's edge in vehicle armor. Mark Albrecht, a principal space advisor to President George H.W. Bush, said there is an urgent need to conceive and articulate a new national security strategy that can be connected to actual force structures.

Carissa Christensen, a leading space and technology analyst, agreed that science and technology priorities are not aligned with the threat environment and that federal funding of R&D remains inadequate -- while adding that today's space industry is a science and technology success story.  And former NASA Administrator Daniel Goldin offered a scathing critique of the government's cumbersome science and technology policy and said that no program should last more than two presidential terms. All in all, it was a sober opening to an important conference that drew thousands of science and technology workers, including hundreds of young professionals.

While many of the warnings bear heeding, the theme of American aerospace technology in decline is hardly new. A deep dive into Aviation Week's 100-year archives shows that similar concerns were voiced by this magazine in our January 20, 1958 issue, at the dawn of both the space age and the era of modern jet travel. While the cover story of that issue was titled "Boeing Seeks to Lead Jet Age Market With 707s," the editorial near the front of the magazine focused on a much more somber theme: "Why the Soviets Succeed."

The editorial, signed by Editor-in-Chief Robert Hotz and coming just months after the Soviet Union stunned the world by successfully orbiting its Sputnik satellite, warned that the U.S. Was falling behind its rival not only in space but in fields such as aircraft propulsion. The U.S. proved up to the challenge over the long run, and the Soviet Union's collapse in 1991 was in part due to the fact that it could no longer keep up with Western technological advances. Will the nation be up to the newer set of challenges outlined at the AIAA event this week?