The aeronautical breakthroughs that occurred in the year of Aviation Week’s birth, 1916, seem quaint today. Zeppelins were coming into their own as a major means of projecting airpower. The armored cruiser North Carolina became the first ship to launch an aircraft by catapult while underway. And a nonstop flight from Chicago to New York set an overland distance record of a whopping 590 mi.
One hundred years from now, it may be that the aviation advancements of 2016 will seem just as pedestrian as 1916’s milestones seem today. But from my vantage at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency(Darpa), I think even future historians will agree that 2016 was an incredibly creative and productive time for aviation and space technology. It sure has me excited. Here’s my list of the top five areas where some of the most thrilling changes are already in play:
Brad Tousley Credit: DARPA
1. The ability to traverse airspace or aerospace above traditional subsonic speeds of Mach 0.7-0.8 will radically change transportation, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance and weapon systems architectures. Scramjets and hybrid-engine architectures that allow runway-type operations from a standing start up to Mach 5+ and beyond will drastically change point-to-point transport, architectures to deliver satellites to low Earth orbit (LEO), and time-critical reconnaissance and strike options. Affordably accessing speeds well beyond subsonic limits will fundamentally change aerospace systems and architectures.
2. We are seeing amazing breakthroughs in vertical-takeoff-and-landing (VTOL) systems. Over the last 50 years, VTOL efforts have largely focused on two differentiated areas: The first—open-rotor systems (e.g., helicopters) with effective hovering efficiencies but limited forward-flight speeds due in large part to retreating blade stall limits, and the second—high-speed forward-flight aircraft (e.g., the F-35) with short-takeoff-and-landing capabilities but inefficient hovering capability. But today, the trade-space between these two VTOL boundaries is opening significantly. Advances in distributed propulsion well beyond the twin-rotor V-22, hybrid electric power systems and advanced digital flight control will transform VTOL capabilities in fundamental ways, including speed, hover efficiency, payload allocations and cruise efficiencies.
Credit: DARPA Concept

3. From the Wright brothers to Chuck Yeager and, most recently, Capt. “Sully” Sullenberger, human pilots have been at the center of aerospace systems in terms of flight proficiency, safety and mission performance. The future is going to yield dramatic advances in collaboration between humans and machines within the cockpit and between cockpits or flight control stations, wherever they are. This will yield improvements in safety and mission performance per platform and pilot, between platforms and with disaggregated systems of airborne platforms. Pilots will primarily perform mission-command duties while enabling machines to perform tasks for which they are advantageously suited.
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4. Space launch systems since 1958 have largely been treated as nation-state capabilities, resulting in highly reliable but expensive and inflexible transport systems to LEO, medium Earth orbit (MEO) and geostationary Earth orbit (GEO). The dramatic spike in interest and commercial investment in launch systems portends unprecedented “time to space” capabilities and multiple options for affordable, resilient, proliferated commercial and government service-level agreements for system delivery to space. Space will become a routinely accessible environment, similar to national and international airspace, and commercial launch and new architectures will vastly amplify the space commons.
Credit: DARPA Concept

5. Our understanding and situational awareness of the LEO, MEO and GEO space environments over the last 50 years were largely limited to fixed data sets and sensors viewing space objects that were constrained by immutable orbital laws of mechanics, with just minor changes over periods of months and years. Those limits and assumptions are now invalid. Space has become a real-time, dynamic environment in all aspects—including traffic management, understanding of clutter and debris, operations, awareness, and command and control. We are on the brink of a future in which we will sense, understand, visualize, plan and conduct government and commercial operations in space in real time and on time scales of seconds, minutes and hours.
All of these advances point to a coming century of remarkable flexibility and facility above the Earth’s surface. For anyone looking back through the digital archives at this article as you prepare to write something for Aviation Week’s bicentennial, please know that we are having a great time pushing the envelope back here in 2016. 
Brad Tousley is the director of  Darpa’s Tactical Technology Office, which hunts for the advanced weapons and space system technologies with the highest payoff. Before joining the Pentagon in 2013, he was an executive at Logos Technologies.