On Nov. 30, NASA is hosting an unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) industry day in San Diego.
The purpose of NASA’s Industry Day is to gather input from commercial and academic partners who have an interest in or have technologies available that can support NASA’s projects that work in lockstep with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to address the challenges facing UAS integration.
NASA’s Unmanned Aircraft Systems Integration in the National Airspace System project, or UAS in the NAS, is designed to reduce technical barriers related to safety and operational challenges associated with integrating larger UAS – those that weigh 55 pounds or more and fly higher than 500 feet, including full-size, repurposed Predator and Global Hawks drones – into the NAS. For UAS that weigh under 55 pounds and fly below 400 feet, NASA leads the UAS Traffic Management program, or UTM, which focuses on integration solutions to safely enable large-scale small UAS operations in low-altitude airspace.
During the industry day, NASA is looking for support for the UAS in the NAS project’s Systems Integration and Operationalization (SIO) demonstration, planned for summer 2020.
NASA says specific objectives for the industry day include as follows:
- Gaining technical information on relevant industry efforts such as technology development cycles and overall plans for UAS commercialization;
- Obtaining schedule-related information to determine whether or not a 2020 SIO demonstration date is feasible;
- Acquiring reasonable fiscal rough orders of magnitude (ROMs) from the industry to guide partnership/acquisition decisions and ensure the SIO demonstration can be successfully executed within resources;
- Communicating NASA expectations for the NASA partnership development process; and
- Fostering coordination across industry participants and potential partnership teams.
For additional information, visit NASA’s request for information notice here.
