The Secrets to be Discovered in the Next 60 Years
I am leaving for the Farnborough International Airshow (FIA) next week. I’m thinking about the technology and the innovations I will see on display, and all the conversations I will have with aerospace leaders from across the world. I am also thinking about our history.
When we think about the advancements between the image on the left, and the image on the right, we have to ask ourselves "Has the well of aerospace discovery dried up?" What has the aerospace industry been doing for the past 60 years? What will we see in aerospace in the next 60 years? How much of what we will see in the UK next week will still be on display at the 2086 airshow? I believe we can predict the future by studying the past.
The Wright Brothers
Orville and Wilbur Wright launched the aerospace industry with a twelve second flight across a Kitty Hawk beach 120 years ago. Years later, Orville reflected on all he and his brother had accomplished: “Isn't it astonishing that all these secrets have been preserved for so many years just so we could discover them?”
Since that day in North Carolina, new discoveries have driven the aerospace industry to incredible heights. In the following 60 years, we moved from cloth-covered wooden wings to jet engines and rockets. Crossing a beach turned into crossing an ocean, and leaving the ground became leaving the planet.
By the end of the 1960s, we put a man on the moon, a Mach 3+ spy plane in the air, and developed a supersonic transport. The outlook for the future of aerospace pointed toward interplanetary space travel and technology to fly aircraft higher and faster. Looking back from 2026, however, that is not exactly what happened. In fact, humans have not walked anywhere off the Earth since December of 1972. The SR-71’s last flight was in 1999, and the Concorde has not flown since 2003.
The well of discovery that Orville described didn’t dry up in the second six decades; it just took a different path than we expected. Humans did not explore other planets; robotic probes did. Spy planes did not become hypersonic; weapons did. Commercial air travel did not get faster; it got cheaper and longer range. In 2026, nearly anyone can fly anywhere on the planet.
Three Factors from the Past
What “preserved secrets” should we look forward to discovering in the next six decades?
Predicting the future requires understanding the past. Looking back over the last 120 years, I would propose that there were three key factors beyond just technology driving aerospace discoveries:
World Events
Politics
Economics
Protecting sovereignty at both a national level and a personal level can motivate people to accomplish incredible things. War threatens sovereignty at all levels, which is why WWI resulted in the development of aircraft with metal frames, enclosed cockpits, and integrated machine guns. WWII saw more innovation as we scaled aircraft design and manufacturing beyond what anyone thought possible to fight different types of wars on many different fronts.
The $1.5T U.S. defense budget and the spending growth in NATO can only do so much to motivate nations and industries to innovate and grow. Sometimes it requires existential threats to motivate societies to make technological leaps.
Sputnik had little practical utility, but the political impact of that small sphere did more to motivate the U.S. space program than anything before or after. How much longer would it have taken the U.S. to land on the moon if they were not motivated to get there before Russia?
Wars end, and politics change, but aerospace companies will always look for ways to make more money. Passengers willing to pay a premium to fly quickly across an ocean brought us the 707 and eventually the Concorde. The space industry became commercialized as it enabled new companies with new rockets to dramatically reduce the cost of lifting things into orbit. And, combat drones may help keep human pilots out of harm’s way, but they are also far less expensive to build and maintain than crewed aircraft. I expect that FIA 2086 will feature demos from more uncrewed aircraft, than piloted aircraft.
While economics can fuel innovation, it can also stall it. For example, the 787s and A350s that were delivered last month are fundamentally the same tube-and-wing aircraft as the 707s delivered in the late 1950s. That means the basic design of commercial transport aircraft has not changed in more than 60 years. Why? There has been no financial incentive for it to change. I think we will still see many tube and wing aircraft at FIA 2086.
Looking to the Future
There will world events, politics, and economics take the aerospace industry next? What factors will drive aerospace discovery in the next sixty years, and what will those discoveries be? Will we find a practical way to fly across an ocean without producing carbon? Will humans travel beyond our solar system? Will AI and robots replace soldiers on the battlefield like it is replacing software engineers and factory workers? I will be looking for the answers to all these questions in Farnborough later this month.
Orville was right. It is astonishing that all these secrets were preserved so we could discover them. But what is truly astonishing is how many more secrets remain to be discovered in the next 60 years.