The American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, better known as AIAA, is a professional society for the field of aerospace engineering. AIAA has over 30,000 members from 91 countries and 95 corporate members. It was created in 1963 by the murder of the American Rocket Society and the Institute of Aerospace Sciences, and it's recently rolled out a brand refresh to go along with its brand new leadership. [Music] Welcome to Team Iron as Deep Space from N2K Networks, I'm Alice Carruth.
Clay Murray was appointed as AIAA Executive Director in late 2024 and has hit the ground running to update the organization and figure out ways to make it grow. I caught up with Clay at the International Rocket Engineering Competition, better known as the IREC. My name is Clay Murray, I'm the Chief Executive Officer for the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics. So you're relatively new to this role, you only started about eight months ago, tell me about what it's been like coming into AIAA, which is such a great and established brand. Well, you know, it's interesting because I've been a lifetime member of AIAA, I'm an AIAA fellow, it's been an organization I've been part of for the bulk of my professional career. So when the opportunity came up to take the leadership role here, it was super exciting for me. A lot of people ask me, why are you doing that? You've been in the commercial industry for more than 25 years, why would you want to go run this institute? And I said, because I love it, it's just like the volunteers of the organization. It really is a great opportunity for me to give back and to be engaged across the whole industry. So it's exciting times. It is. And you've now done, like I say, that first six months on the job. What have you covered in that time? Oh gosh, incredible scope. So the other great part of it is now I get to go back to my roots in the aero side. So I've been a space guy for most of my career, but I started in the office of aerospace at the U.S. Department of Commerce. So it's great to be going back to air shows, to going to competitions, to be engaged with students. It's been a whirlwind, to be honest with you, from the start of about seven months ago, working with our student branches, our regional chapters and sections, and really traversing the whole country. I've been up to Boston. I've been out to the West Coast, to LA, up into Colorado, to Arizona. And now I'm here in Texas. I've been a couple trips to Texas and engaging with the local, because we're really about our volunteer army. We have 33,000 members of the organization, mostly aerospace engineers, but we're much bigger than that. We have folks like myself. I'm not an engineer. Don't tell anybody, by the way. I'm running a 30,000 member society that I'm not an engineer, but it's all engineers. But it's great to be connecting on a local level, because that's really where the action is. That's where our volunteers are engaging. And I would say the students are probably the most fun part of that, right? They bring the energy. They bring the new ideas, and it's spectacular to go to these kinds of competitions. We're here at IREC in Texas. I was at the Design Buildfly Competition out in Tucson two months ago, and the energy that they bring and the excitement. I mean, this is the future of aerospace right in front of me, and they're so smart. They're so engaged. It's just a lot of fun. So it's obviously a focus I'm seeing for AIAA to support a lot of these STEM events. Tell me why AIAA is so focused on STEM and student events like this? So let me just back up for a second, which is to say that I've been doing space and aerospace for 32 years, and there's no more exciting time than what we're doing right now. This is the future. It's now the technology is finally kind of caught up in the software and finally caught up to what our desires were 30, 40 years ago in terms of access to space, in terms of vertical flight, in terms of hypersonics and supersonic flight. The design elements now have changed so rapidly that we're really at this exciting time where everything we imagined would be happening from hypersonic, supersonic, transfer, and vertical flight, you know, planes that can take off and the props turn, and then all of a sudden, and then automation and automated flight, reusable rockets going back to the moon, going to Mars, refueling in orbit, space tugs, you know, orbital transfer vehicles. All of these technologies are now, right now, right in front of us. They're either operational or they're about to become operational. And so, or on the arrow side, they're getting certified. So these things are going to fundamentally transform how we transport things, how we, as a society, move forward, how we're going to understand the solar system and planet Earth, how we're going to continue to explore and utilize resources. And these things are what was science fiction, right? This is what we were thinking about in the 50s, 60s, and 70s, that we thought the aerospace industry was going to look like. So it's just super exciting to be a part of that. Like, I never thought or even dreamed that, like, at this point in my career, it would be happening. So I think that's great. I tell the students I meet all the time, this is really this, you know, like, I wish I was your age. I wish I could actually start over, because right now it's all opening up. Yeah, it's a very exciting time. And it's a really exciting time to see you guys involved in the IREC, which is the world's largest rocket engineering competition. That MOU you guys signed, what are you agreeing with Ezra to do moving forward? First of all, extraordinary partnership. These guys have built in 15 years, the world's largest, most international rocket competition. It's amazing to be here, to feel the energy, to see the teams, what Ezra has done is outstanding. And when I first connected with them, I said, "Look, I have no interest in hosting something like this, but how do I become a part of it? How do we do a work at AIAA as an institute, as a technically led organization, and help you build this event, and make it even bigger and better over time?" And so I think it's really a perfect symbiotic partnership between the two organizations. And by the way, there's a volunteer army here, and thanks to all those folks that this thing has taken place, that we can create something together that's going to be much bigger. One plus one is going to equal five, six, seven here at the end of the day. We have 263 student branches in the U.S. and around the world. There's 143 teams here this year. About half of the teams that are here, a little bit more than half, are actually affiliated with AIAA. They are part of our student branch network. But there's another 62 teams here that are not. So I want to engage in those guys. I want to bring them into our family and what we do on the technical side, papers, presentations, conferences, events, technical publications, journals, and bring them into our family and help these students get access to that network and that capability. And hopefully they'll get jobs and stay with us and continue to be lifelong members of the organization. What we can bring here is a huge network that we already have established. We can bring those student branches and chapters that have not affiliated with this competition to this competition. And we're, by the way, on a track. I think we're going to try to double the number of our student branches over the next five years. That's our goal is to get to 500. And there's over a thousand students, excuse me, a thousand colleges and universities that are part of the NASA space grant consortium that's here in the U.S. So like 500, getting half of those. Like right now I'm at a quarter and that's not even talking about the internals. So I think there's plenty of headroom here. There's plenty of room to grow. And hopefully we can keep accommodating a building this, right? There's a lot of space here in Texas, right? Texas does nothing small. No, it's true. It's all big. So I think this is a great place if I was going to figure out a place to launch a student rocket competition. And so really excited, by the way, 100,000 foot ceiling here. The Rice University team is talking about trying to hit 75 plus a thousand feet. So it's super cool to be part of this. I can't wait to see what comes out of this one this year. Yeah. And is this all part of the future of what you're hoping to bring to the AAAA role now? You're as this lead for them. Yeah. They brought me in to try to grow the organization. It's been a wonderful organization, I say to be part of for over the years. And we made it through COVID. Thank goodness. We're on the other side of that. And now we're trying to figure out how do we grow? How do we connect with the next generation of aerospace professionals? And that sounds like an easy thing. Like, okay, okay. But really, like how do you actually do that? And so I described this a lot to people. I said, look, I'm not a digital native. My kids are all digital natives. They grew up with digital technology at their fingertips, touchscreens and phones and Instagram and all the ways that they connect and communicate with each other. I grew up in an analog world with typewriters and, you know, it was a very different place. And so networking was different. Right. When I grew up, you had to actually show up at the event and shake hands with somebody, get a business card and put it in your Rolodex. Those are all terms that nobody knows anymore. What does that mean? And now we're communicating in a much different way. So part of what I was brought in to do was figure out how do we, we had started this digital transformation before I got there. I want Dan Thumbhumpker did an amazing job. But we now have to complete the digital transformation. We have to figure out how do we communicate with students and young professionals in a different way? How do we engage with them? So whenever I go to a student branch, I say, well, how do you guys communicate? Where do you get your news from? How do you communicate with each other? And two things always come up. Instagram and Slack. And so I came back to my team and I said, we need to be all over social media. And we, which sounds kind of funny for a technical society of a bunch of rocket scientists and aerospace engineers, we need to be there. And we need to figure out how to launch a Slack channel. We need to get back into the university section. We, you know, when you think about it, I'm a sales and marketing guy. I sold rocket launches for years. I always had a global sales teams. And the whole idea is the top of that funnel. How do you fill the top of that funnel so you can actually then get to your real customers at the end of the day? You want to have as big of a universe of what we call the TAM, the total addressable market that you can have. And so my big goal right now is to grow that addressable market of students and aerospace professionals, show them what we got. You got to have a value proposition. There's got to be meaning behind this at the end. But trying to fill that funnel at the top with digital capability. We have to communicate digitally. We have to engage digitally and then do stuff. And yeah, we still do the face to face stuff. We still do the stuff where we have to actually meet as people and engage. But we also have to have a touch point with everybody. I talk a lot about the freemium model. I don't know. Do you know freemium? So freemium is like YouTube or Spotify is a great example of freemium, right? If you want to come in with ad supported content, you can come up and sign up and listen to music or whatever podcast. But if you want to have no ads or if you want to have another level of experience, access to a bigger library, then you have to pay to be a premium member. So you kind of move up this value chain as you go along. And I said to my team, okay, how many people are we communicating within our daily basis? And they said, well, we have 30,000 people on our distribution list for my daily launch. And I said, well, why is it so small? And they said, well, that's our number one member benefit. And I said, no, no, no, this is our number one way to communicate and attract people into the organization. You got to stop thinking about it as a walled garden, right? Like where you had, there's a paywall that you're going to hit. So I want to be able to communicate with all as many people as we meet connect, you're going to get our daily feed. Then I'm going to attract you to come to our events. And if you want to come to our events and you want a discount to attend, you're going to join. If you want access to our library of information, you're going to join, and then you're going to get access to that library. And so let's create an easy entry point. Really low barriers to entry, frictionless, as we say. And think of ourselves more as a digital content company, content first, digital first, and put that out and make sure that the ability to come in, that's very easy and frictionless. You can kind of join our community, our large community, and then we'll attract you in as a member because you're going to see the benefits, you're going to see the value proposition and come in the door. So what I'm trying to bring is some of my business acumen and skills from broader into a society and try to think about it a little bit differently. We tend to be very kind of focused on what we're doing and the technical aspects, but not thinking about the bigger picture about how are we communicating with a larger community. So that's a big part of what I'm trying to do. We'll be right back. I noticed you also did went through a big rebrand since you joined as well. Can you talk us a little bit about that and why you decided to make a whole new rebrand of the way people approach? Yeah, so I mean, I've been part of a lot of different corporations that had huge brands, Blue Origin and Orient Space was an iconic brand in Europe. And you have to be very careful when you mess with a brand right now. But I also say that every organization I've been in, they tend to do brand refreshes every five to 10 years. You think about, all right, we're going to tweak the logo, we're going to tweak the tag line, we might change the colors a little bit, or we might make it a little more modern, even fonts that you use evolve over time. And so when I got to AA, I was kind of looking at the logo and I said, as far as I can remember, this is the same logo that's been around and we went back into the history and it was really 1963 that they had put it in place, which is older than me, shockingly enough. And the font had changed a little bit. We had lines running through the A's at one point and then that came out and the slant to it, a little bit different can't to it. But more or less, it was the same color, same, and this is from the merger of the American Rock Society and the Institute of Aeronautical Sciences, I think. So these two organizations, the predecessor organizations that had been around from the 1930s and 1950s that joined the form AIAA. So we looked at it, we looked at the logo, I said, I think we could do a refresh on this or rebrand in a way that would capture more of the spirit of the organization, that would capture a little bit the next generation of folks. And so we started playing around with it. We hired two outside firms, ran a little competition, we have an internal team, design team. So we had three design teams working on it. We tossed around different ideas and we came back with what you see now and it's a bit of a Rorschach test if you want to put it that way, which is if you look at the logo, if you're an aero guy or a member, you see a plane breaking the sound barrier, you see shock waves coming off of the nose of an aircraft, which has inspired the people who did the design by the Bell X-1 and Chuck Yeager breaking the sound barrier. If you're a rocket person, you see a rocket taking off from the planet earth. And so it actually works on both levels between the two organizations, two sides of the organization, aero and astro. And the informal kind of tagline now is breaking barriers. We came up with kind of this, it's an homage to Chuck Yeager, it's homage to the Apollo program in a certain way of departing from planet earth. But so it's, and by the way, if you look at it, it's either the positive or the negative space of how you look at the logo. So we rolled it out, I first rolled it out to the board and then to the council, the AIAWA council, the AIAWA board, then we took it to all of our senior members. We did a town hall because change is hard and changing a logo that's been around for almost 62 years is a hard thing for people to take on. So people got warm to it. We kind of told the story of the creation of the American Rock Society, what those guys did and those guys, I say those guys, the founders of that society did some of the first test flights of liquid fuel vehicles, basically following the footsteps of Robert Goddard. And then they formed the American Rock Society. And then an offshoot of that was a company called Reaction Motors. And that was the motor that powered the Bell X1. So when you tell that story, all of my, you know, the older members like, "Oh, that's lovely. We love the connection back to the kind of the roots of the organization that started there." And it, by the way, it's a rocket powered plane. So it's got both the arrow and the rocketry, right, mixed into the Bell X1 and what Chuck Gager did. So it was really lovely to see them embrace that, to do this relaunch. And the reaction I've had from the students and young professionals has been extraordinary. They love the new logo. I think it's clean and slick. So it gives a little bit of energy to what we're trying to do. It's kind of a, you know, kind of a classic trick of any new executive. You're going to come in there. I'm going to re-energize this organization. And so one of the ways you can do that is visually. So we think that that's a fun thing. And we're doing water bottles here in stickers and we got a big sticker game going now. So it's fun. Always a good one. Everyone loves a good bit of merchandise. So obviously you've been brought on to grow the organization. What can we expect from you in the next six months, 12 months and beyond with AIAA? So a few things. So I've laid out a bunch of priorities, which one is to re-engage with students and young professionals. And so that's a huge part of what we're trying to do and coming here to this competition as part of that and the partnership we have with Ezra. The next piece of that is international. And so we really want to grow the organization internationally. And wherever I go around the world, I find engineers that say, "Oh my gosh, I'm a member. We, by the way, have 6,000 international members already of the organization." So I just hired someone in Europe to represent us in Europe. We're going to try to expand into the Eurasia region as well. We're going to be in Australia this fall. So we're looking to grow internationally. And when we say that, so we have tons of, I think there's 30 teams here that are international teams. We did our design build fly. We had 14 international teams. These folks want to come. You know, this is kind of the biggest, not only the biggest market, but the most innovative market in the world. They want to come to the U.S. to learn, to fly, to compete, talking to the students here. They love the fact that they're meeting their cohort, right? They're meeting, their people are here. They're like, "I've never been in a room of this many international aerospace engineers. And I'm meeting people from Brazil and Malaysia and all these places. And so that's the second piece of what I'm trying to do is to grow it internationally." And then the final piece is to be relevant across the career arc. So we have a huge problem with the organization and that students come, they join, they do a competition where they present their first paper at one of our student conferences, and then they leave us. And so we're not very sticky, as we say in the business, right? We're not good at retaining or I should say, we're not good at delivering a value proposition beyond graduation. Why would you want to be a member of ours? Why would you want to stay with the organization? And so that's a huge part of what I'm trying, a puzzle piece I'm trying to solve for is keeping people in the fold, give them a reason. So how do you do that? It's continuing education. It's joining one of our committees. It's getting mentorship. It's engaging in our region's sections around the world. It's coming to our conferences and events and learning. We are really first and foremost, I say content, but really a learning organization work. You come to our events, you're going to get smarter. You're going to do better in your job. You're going to hear about some idea that some other engineers come up with it and you're like, "Oh my God, what could I do with that technology or capability?" So we want to be a learning organization. And one of the speakers this morning talked about being a constant learner, about going to college basically every day, his whole life. And that's exactly what we want to be as an organization that people see us and view us as a place not only where they can network and they can get their start as a student, but they're going to continue to learn over the course of the career. So that's something I got to figure out. So we're going to start with Instagram and Slack. I know that sounds like kind of funny almost, but that's where we're going to bring everybody in. We're going to attract them to all these other products and services. Our online presence is huge. We have the biggest library in the world of peer-reviewed technical journals on aerospace. So it's called ARC and it's digitally online. And it's about 40% of what we are as an organization is these 200,000 books and journal articles that are, and every year we put another 5 or 6,000 new articles into this that are peer-reviewed, highly technical, state-of-the-art. So if you want to learn, that's basically where people come to us and who subscribes. Companies, space agencies, federally funded research development corporations, universities, they all subscribe to this library. And so it is, and now we've got to make that AI searchable by the way, so that if you want to go in and do a query, you're going to get the best results. You're going to get the top four or five articles about what you want to do, whether it's designing a new wingtip for a plane or understanding thermal dynamics or thrust vector control, whatever the technical piece is, you can zero in on what that is. Training a large language model to be able to look at that database and then extract the right, not easy. So we're now trying to figure out how to do that. That's another piece of our digital transformation. Well, it sounds like you've got a lot going on. Thank you so much for talking with us today. It's my pleasure. It's my pleasure. That's it for Team Minus' Deep Space, brought to you by N2K Cyberwire. We'd love to know what you think of this podcast. You can email us at space@n2k.com or submit the survey in the show notes. Your feedback ensures we deliver the information that keeps you a step ahead in the rapidly changing space industry. Our producer is Liz Stokes. We're mixed by Elliot Peltzman and Trey Hester with original music by Elliot Peltzman. Our executive producer is Jennifer Iben. Peter Kilpie is our publisher, and I'm N2K senior producer Alice Carruth. Thanks for listening. [Music] [Music] [Music] [MUSIC]
