Richard Lugg’s dad — a defense/aerospace manager working in (generally) top-secret projects — made a sizeable imprint on his son. When he was just 5 years old, Richard was building space shuttles out of wood and glue. At the age of 12, he was studying physics, chemistry, biology and astronomy, and going to school seven days a week as an American at a boarding school in England. By the time he was 19, Lugg was back in the United States with some of the world’s largest aerospace and defense contractors, such as General Electric and the U.S. Army, working on the Cold War-era Minuteman ballistic missile defense program and other of this country’s most strategic programs. From there, he began a career working for aerospace engineering, manufacturing and consulting firms finding solutions to really hard problems — like how to produce lighter, stronger advanced materials for hypersonic vehicles that could perform at a Mach 10 speeds.
Richard Lugg’s plans may be ambitious, but he has reasons to be self assured. His CV includes time working on the Space Shuttle and cruise missiles for the US Air Force. He boasts NASA, Lockheed Martin and Boeing as previous clients. He has expertise not only in engine and aircraft design, but also composites, power electronics, alternative energy and nano-scale heating and cooling systems.
‘There wasn’t really anything I wasn’t involved in that’s needed in a mach 4 hypersonic jet. There hasn’t been anything I’ve not done. I’ve been very fortunate ― the timing’s just happened,’ he told The Engineer after a recent trip to the UK, where HyperMach plans to develop the Sonic Star thanks to support from the government.
Although born and raised in Britain, Lugg followed his father into the US aerospace industry, via a detour into medical research that led him to work with NASA on how the impact of deep-space flight could affect the design of ships. But perhaps his most important experience was his involvement in the early stages of the NASA Hyper-X programme in the mid-1990s, which would eventually produce a world-record-beating unmanned aircraft ― the scramjet-powered X-43A ― which flew at almost 10 times the speed of sound for 11 seconds in late 2004.
‘I was quite enamoured by the Hyper-X mach 10 programme,’ he said. ‘The performance and what we were attempting to do was so amazing. If you said mach 10 to someone, they were not going to believe you."
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Arizona State University[/font]
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PhD, Applied Physiology and Clinical Medicine[/font]
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1987 – 1990[/font]
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All course work completed towards the PhD; Dissertation not completed, but started. Focus of study was the cardiovascular physiology of astronauts and long term physiological effocts on human systems function for sustained space flight in micro gravity and szero gravity environments.[/font]
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
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MA, Physiology and Clinical Medicine[/font]
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1984 – 1986[/font]
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Conducted research at Duke University Medical Center for NASA, exploration of the impact of long term micro-gravity environments upon astronauts and humans in extended space flight[/font]
University of Alabama
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MS, Aerospace Engineering[/font]
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1982 – 1984[/font]
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Course work completed for Masters, Thesis needs to be finished; aerospace composite structures focus . Focus and subject specialty on fluid dynamics, aerothermodynamics and composite aerospace structures.[/font]
University of Maine
BA, Mathematics
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1978 – 1982[size=small][/font]
