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My name is Neal Hass. I’m an aerospace engineer here at NASA Langley Research Center. I work in the Hypersonic Air
Breathing Propulsion Branch where we work on the technology and development to scramjet engines for global reach and
access to space.
I got involved with NASA as a graduate student. One of my fellow graduate students was working on a NASA project, and
he and I began working together on this project, and before I knew it I was working out at NASA Dryden Research Center.
I’ve worked with a myriad of flight test experiments, everything from subsonic stuff to supersonic to the
hypersonic. In particular subsonic stuff, I’ve worked with solar powered, hydrogen fuel cell powered large winged
vehicle bodies. In the supersonic I’ve worked with all the fighter jets, F-16’s, 15’s, 18’s, you name it, I’ve touched
them all, and then I also worked on the B-52 with lifting bodies and things like that, but my most memorable
experiences are working with the fastest manned aircraft, the SR-71 Blackbird, where we did flight test experiments
and rocket experiments on that vehicle. I also worked on the Hyper-X scramjet flight test demonstrator, which was the
first autonomous hypersonic scramjet powered vehicle to travel out to Mach 10, and then recently we’ve been working
some new technologies with inflatable reentry vehicles to find new ways to bring payloads back from the International
Space Station.
Probably the most exciting aspects of my job are that I never know what to expect from day to day. I have to be
creative on a day-to-day basis with how I come about solving the technological challenges associated with my job. The
environments of a hypersonic flow field are very challenging, it’s very volatile, and so we have to be
creative about how we develop and do the test engineering of these types of engines.
Of all the subjects that I learned in school, my job is basically a marriage of all of them. The science and math
give me the skills to understand and model physical phenomena associated with hypersonic flow and high-speed
entry and things like that, but of course that is not enough; we have to be able to do communications, and that
requires English and writing and that kind of stuff because we have to be able to communicate what we’ve learned in
those tasks and pass that information along to the community, not only the technical community, but also to of
course the educational community to get that information out and inspire the youth to seek out careers in science and
technology.