Northwest Aerospace News June | July Issue No. 3 | Page 29

H
acker says JCATI takes a broad
view of aerospace. The impetus for
starting the program may have been
driven by Boeing and commercial air-
planes, but “we’re trying to get people
to think more broadly,” she said. That
can mean space-related research or
drones, research into batteries – even
research that can help companies im-
prove their manufacturing or business
operations.
“Space systems, controls, UAVs,
composites, electronics, biofuels,”
Hacker said. “We think of aerospace,
it’s a big tent for that. The space indus-
try is growing. The UAV industry is
growing. There are other markets and
applications.”
That’s certainly the case with Echo-
dyne’s technology.
Echodyne is one of the companies
spun out of Intellectual Ventures, the
company owned by Myhrvold, who
made his name and his fortune as Mi-
crosoft’s first chief technology officer
in the ‘90s and used his Microsoft
millions to buy up and license interest-
ing patents. Gates and Allen are among
the major investors who’ve put money
into Echodyne — so is Madrona
Venture Group, which has been an ear-
ly-stage investor in many of Seattle’s
biggest tech companies for the past 20
years, including Amazon and Redfin.
2017 keynote speaker
Miguel San Martin
from NASA JPL discusses his
Mars Rover work in “From
the Sojourner to the
Curiosity Rover.”
Speaker Annamarie Askren from
Blue Origin chats with attendees
at the 2017 JCATI symposium
Echodyne is focused on developing
uses for metamaterials.
Without delving too far into the phys-
ics, we can understand metamaterials
as being man-made materials that
have different properties from natural
ones – in particular, they don’t reflect
energy the same way their analogs in
the natural world do.
2017 WSU JCATI awardee Amit Bandyopadhyay and his students with their project
poster “Additive manufacturing of multi-material structures for space application.”
JUNE | JULY 2018 ISSUE NO. 3
29