Carbon Crunch

Carbon Crunch aims to enable scalable, fast, and agile production of hypersonic aeroshells. The program will focus on accelerating carbon-carbon (C-C) hypersonic aeroshell production by developing and applying cutting-edge composite manufacturing methods that are inherently faster and more scalable. Performers will be asked to demonstrate an end-to-end manufacturing process (from raw materials to near-net-shape densification) that demonstrates high quality, rapid production, and quick design-cycle turnaround. Once the process demonstrates reasonable cost and orders-of-magnitude improvement in throughput, the technology can be transitioned to hypersonic programs of record.