Q&A with Executive Director Jamey Jacob

OAIRE launched in the fall of 2021 with the goal of bringing the state’s aerospace and innovation economy together to drive collaboration and innovation in Oklahoma. Now under the umbrella of The Innovation Foundation at OSU, how would you assess the institute’s momentum?

Growth has been tremendous, and we are accelerating at an exponential pace, both in terms of the projects and the organization of the institute, as we stand up the structure and acquire new capabilities and new team members to help support that.

I’m very pleased with the progress we’ve made. If you look at just the growth in terms of the number of projects, the number of staff members we have on board right now, which includes both research staff and support staff, it is much larger than we anticipated, including research faculty, as well. And our physical reach is now tremendous. That includes our hub here in Stillwater, of course, but we’re also in Oklahoma City, Tulsa and Lawton.

That helps support our land-grant mission and support the entire aerospace ecosystem across the state. That includes supporting research and development for businesses and government agencies as well as workforce development, education and outreach, all of which will be accelerated and enhanced by The Innovation Foundation at OSU.

What is one key advancement that you would point to as a significant victory for OAIRE so far?

I would point to the LaunchPad Center for Advanced Air Mobility, which is being stood up on the OSU-Tulsa campus and supported by an $18 million grant from the U.S. Economic Development Administration and a similar scale of funding from the George Kaiser Family Foundation with our partners at Tulsa Innovation Labs. I think that is certainly our biggest win to date because it demonstrates not only the immense support we’re seeing for this type of effort, both at the federal and regional level, it signals the future of not just OAIRE but of the entire aerospace landscape.

OAIRE has attracted plenty of headlines for its work in unmanned aerial systems, which includes what are commonly called drones, but OAIRE is so much more than that. What does OAIRE encompass and why is it important for it to unite such a wide variety of disciplines and efforts?

OSU has a very rich aviation and aerospace tradition spread across a number of different fields, everything from pilot training, to aerospace outreach and education for NASA, to what we’d call traditional aerospace engineering. The goal is to be able to leverage these unique strengths to create and foster technological innovation across the entire aerospace ecosystem.

As an industry, why is aerospace crucial to the Oklahoma economy? 

The aerospace industry in Oklahoma is the second largest industry, behind energy. The third is agriculture. But what makes aerospace unique, particularly emerging aerospace applications such as autonomous aircraft, is that it connects to and impacts energy — everything from oil and gas exploration to wind turbine inspection — and agriculture with livestock monitoring and the use of drones for autonomous crop spraying. It touches nearly everything, even health care and emergency response. And Oklahoma still has major advantages in the aerospace game because we have all of this open land.

This spring, you testified before the U.S. House Committee on Science, Space and Technology. What was your takeaway from that experience?

It was very encouraging to see the bipartisan support for advanced air mobility, which includes not just UAS, or drones, but urban air mobility as well, and how unified Congress is in the support of this important technology for the nation. A particular point of emphasis was making sure the U.S. retains the lead in aerospace and autonomous aviation as well as critical applications, such as first response, weather monitoring and prediction, wildfire response and national security. Whether the question is a Chinese spy balloon or how to slow the spread of wildfires, the marriage of aerospace and aviation innovation is the technological skeleton key to our future.

We’ve seen several so-called “golden ages” in aerospace. The first of these were right after the development of the Wright Flyer, and then you saw aircraft start to really come into their own during the WWI and WWII eras. Then there was the jet age in the ’50s, and, of course, the space age in the ’60s. Now, we’re in a new “golden age” of aviation that’s really focused around electrification, the ability to take battery power and try to apply it to unique aircraft designs.

It’s made aircraft more efficient and opened the entire field up to a much broader swath of the population. In a sense, it has democratized the industry, and I love that.