Iain Boyd News

The University of Colorado Boulder has received a $2 million gift from The Anschutz Foundation to support the university’s diverse research in aerospace and national defense—from tracking and protecting satellites in orbit to improving the security of mobile devices. The effort dovetails with a new research partnership between the CU...

Check out the latest Buff Innovator Insights Podcast with Dr. Iain Boyd, H.T. Sears Memorial Professor of Aerospace Engineering Sciences and Director of the Center for National Security Initiatives at CU Boulder. We’ll hear about how Dr. Boyd followed his early interest in math from Scotland to England, and then...

Professor Iain Boyd shares the myraid ways space impacts the daily lives of billions of people worldwide, and its increasing importance to national defense in a new column in the Colorado Gazette. Boyd, director of the Center for National Security Initiatives on campus in addition to being a professor in...

Researchers at CU Boulder are leading a new $15 million, multi-partner institute with NASA over the next five years to improve entry, descent and landing technologies for exploring other planets. The new Advanced Computational Center for Entry System Simulation (ACCESS) institute was announced Tuesday by NASA. It will focus on...

A new graduate certificate is moving at five times the speed of sound into the University of Colorado Boulder. CU Boulder is now offering a graduate-level hypersonics certificate to both...

Professor Iain Boyd discusses the development of new hypersonic defense systems in a new column at Defense News: A recent article in The New York Times strongly implied that hypersonic weapons under development at the U.S. Department of Defense are being overhyped. In particular, several points made in a recent...

Iain Boyd has an unusual specialty: He studies the insanely fast. The aerospace engineer specializes in hypersonic flight—or when vehicles hit speeds of roughly 4,000 miles per hour or more, the kind of conditions that spacecraft face when they’re plunging through the atmospheres of Earth or even Mars. At those...

No single scientist or engineer, no matter how smart, could solve the challenges of controlled, maneuverable flight of an aircraft or returning spacecraft traveling at more than five times the speed of sound. Temperatures on the vehicles can soar past 2,000 degrees Celsius, and conventional control designs won’t work. “It...

Professor Iain Boyd talks spacecraft propulsion systems in the lasted episode of the Mapping R^3 podcast. He discusses the different types of propulsion systems currently in existence, the constraints each type of propulsion system exhibits, & where propulsions systems could be in the future. Listen here...

Professor Iain Boyd discusses the potential for nuclear-powered rockets in a new column at The Conversation: With dreams of Mars on the minds of both NASA and Elon Musk, long-distance crewed missions through space are coming. But you might be surprised to learn that modern rockets don’t go all that...