Twelve companies and two academic organizations received a total of $50 million in NASA’s latest round of funding for the Hi-Rate Composite Aircraft Manufacturing project.
The awardees are members of NASA’s Advanced Composites Consortium, which will match the funds they received, the space agency said Friday.
HiCAM’s production concepts center on next-generation thermosets, as well as resin-infused and thermoplastic composites. Recipients of the new grants are expected to conduct small-scale development of material processing, inspection, and assembly techniques, as well as structural performance evaluation.
ACC is a private-public alliance focused on developing technologies to accelerate production and minimize the cost of composite aircraft structures and materials. Consortium members that received grants were awarded to the following:
- Advanced Thermoplastic Composites
- Boeing (NYSE: BA)
- CGTech
- Collier Aerospace
- Collins Aerospace
- Electroimpact
- Hexcel
- Lockheed Martin (NYSE: LMT)
- Northrop Grumman (NYSE: NOC)
- Solvay
- Spirit AeroSystems
- Toray Advanced Composites
- University of South Carolina
- Wichita State University National Institute for Aviation Research
HiCAM is slated to receive $184 million from NASA, and $136 million from partner organizations. Full-scale demonstrations of the project’s winning technologies are scheduled for the year 2028.
