The Greatest Challenge Facing Aeronautics

This is an essay I wrote as part of my application for a NASA scholarship. I should be hearing back about it next month. Funny story though, at first I read the instructions and though it said the maximum length was 10,000 words; so, I was about half way there when I realized that it actually said 10,000 characters. Such a me thing to do lol suddenly I had quite a bit of revising to do! I really didn't want to cut my paper by more than half cause I hit some really interesting points, but that's the way it goes.

So, here is the short version:

...and the long one: (spelling and polishing might not be the best 'cause I had to shorten it lol)
Although, the above technical challenges are relevant, the most pressing problem facing Aeronautics is best explained by Neil DeGrasse Tyson:

 

 

"If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people to collect wood and don't assign tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea."

-Antoine  de Saint-Exupery

If you have not already, watch Carl Sagan's Cosmos. It is well worth it.

My First Real Research Papers

The first think I'd like to post is really the culmination of years of work in high school. While I am continuing to pursue the topics of CFD and hybrid rocket propulsion, these are the first papers I really have to show for it. Along these lines, I have developed numerous related Fortran and Matlab codes which I will be giving you access to as well. In fact, having this blog might even motivate me to turn many of my scripts and functions into GUIs or executable files. Let me know if you would like this.

Upon visiting Purdue and taking his Fluid Mechanics class my first semester, I became friendly with Dr. Steven Collicott and shared these papers with him. Passing the one about gas dynamics along to Dr. Gregory Blaisdell, I was offered a research position this summer as a part of the Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship! Of course, I happily accepted the offer and will be studying the application of high order Weighted Essentially Non-Oscillatory (WENO) schemes in conjunction with centralized compact methods for the Large Eddy Simulation (LES) of supersonic turbulent flows. I will definitely be keeping you posted about this, since it is just that awesome.