National Academy of Sciences Air Force propulsion research committee

Tom's NRC service ~12 years before this lecture (c. 2004). Forty-member committee advising Air Force on $300M/year for improved jet engines.

I served on a committee of the National Research Council about twelve years ago, and we were supposed to be telling the Air Force how to spend the three hundred million dollars they have each year for improved jet engines. There were two of us who were materials people, and we had people on there from Pratt & Whitney and General Electric — these were the people who had headed up the design of the last major engine for those companies. The first day, forty of us in this room, and they said let's go around, everybody introduce yourself and tell us what you think this committee ought to be doing. I was going to explain that we've really reached the limit of our materials, we really can't get higher-temperature materials, because everything else oxidizes above 2200 degrees Fahrenheit. The guy sitting next to me happened to be the guy from Pratt & Whitney who had designed one or two of their major engines. He spoke first, and he said, we've really gone as far as we can in our design, and we really need better materials. I was going to say the exact opposite, which I did say and explain. He had convinced the board of directors of Pratt & Whitney to spend 18 million dollars of their own profit — niobium melts at very high temperatures, but it oxidizes very easily. He wanted to come up with an oxidation-resistant niobium. I did my doctoral thesis on niobium-aluminum, and I knew that was a fool's errand. He was the engine designer and he knew he needed higher-temperature engine materials, so he convinced them to spend 18 million dollars of their own profits — this wasn't government money — on developing a better engine material. I knew it was a fool's errand. And he admitted, we spent 18 million dollars and we got nothing. I could have predicted that. He maybe should have talked to a materials engineer at Pratt & Whitney before he had gone off and done that.