Dear Fellow Forlorn Speed Fans,

A typical Washington May weekend. Took the kids to soccer and horseback riding. Had the in-laws over for dinner. Read news stories about Aerion’s demise. Swept cicada exoskeletons off the porch. It’s hot, but sunny and beautiful. A nice early summer here in DC.

Wait, what? Aerion’s dead?

There are a lot of things that SpaceX has done in recent years that are absolutely marvelous. The company has quickly come to dominate the launch services industry with its Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy partially reusable rockets. In 2020, the company successfully launched a record 26 times, vastly outpacing any other rocket program, including Chinese and Russian ones. Falcon left other American launch programs in the dust long ago.

The largest market in our ten-year UAV EO/IR forecast will be for UCAVs (Unmanned Combat Aerial Vehicles) and the greatest growth will be for small UAVs, admittedly from low levels today and with few program of record funding lines in unclassified DoD documents. We see development and production of increasingly sophisticated sensors for smaller tactical and mini/nano-UAVs, with a continuing “trickle down” of large-UAV sensor capabilities to small UAVs.

Electro-Optical/Infrared (EO/IR) sensors are still the default sensor for the vast majority of UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles). UAV EO/IR system funding increased rapidly in the decade after 9/11, with some growth continuing in recent years. But the financial crisis of 2008, proposed budget cuts, and sequestration resulted in several years of up-and-down funding, and considerable uncertainty.