Profile: Aerospace President and CEO
William F. Ballhaus Jr.
A New CEO for a New Era
by Donna J. Born
(Reprinted from Crosslink, Summer 2001)
The Aerospace Corporation last year celebrated 40 years of successful contributions to the national space effort and aerospace technology. Guiding the company into its next 40 years will be William F. Ballhaus Jr., the corporation's new president and CEO. Ballhaus comes to Aerospace particularly suited to lead this corporation as it meets the challenges of national security space in the new millennium. He brings insight gained from extensive research and management experience in government and industry.
Experience, Ballhaus believes, is his greatest asset: "Experience develops intuition and prepares leaders for the most important thing they do—make decisions and make them correctly and quickly." He has published numerous influential articles on computational aerodynamics and related technology, served as director of NASA's Ames Research Center, and oversaw the engineering and technology functions of the aerospace defense contractor Lockheed Martin. His many awards for research and management testify to the quality and importance of his work.
The new CEO assumes leadership of the organization at a time when the government is proposing major changes in the structure and administration of the nation's space and defense programs. The new direction will have a direct impact on Aerospace, whose primary customers are the Air Force Space and Missile Systems Center, Air Force Space Command, and the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO). The proposed changes will create a more integrated national security space infrastructure that aligns the Air Force and NRO programs for best use of resources and clearer lines of authority and accountability.
The challenge to Aerospace, according to Ballhaus, will be determining how the company can best serve the needs of these customers. "Aerospace will play a major role supporting national security space. We have very experienced people in key positions who really understand national security space and the capabilities that support it," Ballhaus said. "Our job is to provide sound technical advice in systems development and acquisition support, launch certification, system-of-systems engineering, process implementation, and technology application. And I think we do all that very well. We continually need to improve our tools to enhance the value we bring to our customers."
Technology investment is one way the corporation provides better tools and better processes for helping customers, Ballhaus said. Some portions of technology investment go to research and development, which he considers to be very important. Ballhaus believes that successful researchers know what to work on to make the greatest contribution; they see a market. "Our market is the NRO, Air Force, and other defense customers. What do they need? What's missing? How can the technology enhance their ability to perform their mission?"
The corporation's value to its customers depends profoundly on the quality of the workforce, Ballhaus said: "The key ingredient of a successful company is its people." He came to Aerospace in part because of the high quality of its technical staff. Attracting talented people, however, is another challenge for the company because today's graduates have many competing career opportunities. "Talented people are attracted to our industry by the excitement of our mission, the opportunity to work on very exciting programs. Aerospace is a tremendous place to work."
He holds high standards of excellence for the workforce, prompted by the company's commitment to bringing value to customers by "solving their seemingly unsolvable problems." People should be technically competent and focused on customer needs and mission success. They should have integrity ("do the right thing when no one will know if you didn't do it"), high ethical standards, and courage of their convictions. They must be accountable.
Although as president and CEO of Aerospace, Ballhaus is now most interested in setting the direction for the corporation to best serve its customers, he clearly found great satisfaction from his early research and continues to take pleasure in sharing it with others. He once tried to explain to a curious passenger sitting beside him on an airplane a sketch he was drawing of a pattern on the wing formed by the sun shining through shock waves as the plane moved at transonic speed and the airflow over the wing reached supersonic speed. After receiving his Ph.D. in engineering in 1971 from the University of California, Berkeley, Ballhaus spent the first eight years of his career as a research scientist in computational aerodynamics with the U.S. Army Air Mobility Research and Development Laboratory and Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, California.
Ballhaus explained that the transonic speed regime is important because it is where aircraft generally optimize cruise and maneuver performance. However, to achieve the performance potential requires proper aerodynamic shaping of the aircraft configuration. The ability to effectively analyze transonic flows about wings of a given shape had been intractable because the governing partial differential equations were nonlinear, even in their simple approximate forms. A major breakthrough was the invention, by Ballhaus and his colleagues at Ames, of finite-difference methodology that solved these complex fluid flow equations on digital computers. Designers then could analyze the flow about a wing design and optimize its performance prior to wind tunnel or flight tests.
Ballhaus wrote computer codes for designing wings of aircraft based on finite-difference mathematics technology that he developed. The codes provide information such as shock formations and other flow characteristics and phenomena that determine aerodynamic performance. "Basically with finite-difference methods, we divided the whole flow field surrounding the wing into small cells, literally millions, and wrote equations for each cell that expressed conservation of mass, momentum, and energy in the cell. We then used relaxation techniques to solve the resulting large number of algebraic (matrix) equations to determine the flow field variables, for example, velocity, pressure, etc. Relaxation is a technique used to solve large matrix equations by starting with an initial guess of the solution and continuously refining it until an acceptable level of accuracy is achieved."
The codes that Ballhaus wrote were applied, for example, to the HiMAT (an experimental, uninhabited aircraft specifically designed for flight tests of high-maneuverability test concepts) to improve maneuverability while meeting requirements for cruise performance and supersonic acceleration capability. The HiMAT and an interview with Ballhaus are on display at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. Later use of the codes in aircraft design, including the Sabreliner Mark 5, the Lear Allegro, and the B-2 stealth bomber, established Ballhaus's reputation in applied computational fluid dynamics (CFD). He became chief of the applied computational aerodynamics branch at Ames in 1979. A year later, he became director of astronautics.
Ballhaus by that time had become interested in "solving more complete configurations, like a full aircraft shape instead of just a wing, and how you would improve the physical simulation to include viscosity, turbulent flows, and separation." When he became Ames director in 1984, he focused his efforts on setting a direction for Ames to achieve those and other research objectives, putting teams in place, providing facilities, and keeping the funding coming in—Ames saw rapid increases in its budget during the late 1980s. From February 1988 through March 1989, Ballhaus was acting associate administrator for aeronautics and space technology at NASA headquarters in Washington, D.C. In this position, he directed NASA's aeronautics and space technology programs as well as the Ames, Langley, and Lewis research centers. In 1988 and 1989, he also served as president of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics and was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1988 for his research in CFD.
His work in CFD and his contributions to Ames earned him a place among the first inductees to the Ames Hall of Fame, created in 1999 to recognize those who had made outstanding contributions to science, technology, and the Ames Center. The Hall of Fame citation recognized Ballhaus as one of the "leading lights" in early phases of the development of CFD, "one of Ames' most valuable contributions to aeronautical research." It recognized him for his effort to establish the Ames Numerical Aerodynamic Simulator facility (NAS), which used the first Cray 2 supercomputers to model the complex flow fields about sophisticated aircraft. The CFD techniques developed by research scientists using NAS are used by designers throughout the world.
Ballhaus left Ames in 1989 to begin his career in the private sector with Martin Marietta Astronautics Group in Denver, where he served as vice president of research and development and later vice president and director of the Titan IV Centaur program. He rose over the next several years to higher-level positions in management and administration, including president of Civil Space and Communications from 1990 to 1993 and president of Aero and Naval Systems from 1993 to 1994. In 1995 he became Science and Engineering vice president at corporate headquarters of what had now become Lockheed Martin Corporation. He served as an officer of that corporation until he joined Aerospace in September 2000.
The defense industry consolidated in the 1990s as a result of a substantial decline in Department of Defense procurement budgets. Ballhaus was involved in due diligence and transition activities associated with the Martin Marietta acquisition of General Electric Aerospace, the Lockheed–Martin Marietta merger, Lockheed Martin's acquisition of Loral's defense electronics and information businesses, and Lockheed Martin's attempted acquisition of Northrop Grumman.
At Lockheed Martin corporate headquarters, Ballhaus emphasized engineering process improvement. During that period, Lockheed Martin business units substantially advanced the maturity of their software and systems engineering processes. He also focused on enhancing technology synergy across Lockheed Martin's many business units. From 1998 to 1999, following a series of launch vehicle failures, Ballhaus helped organize and served on Lockheed Martin's Independent Assessment Team on Mission Success. He also was the Lockheed Martin representative to the government's Launch Broad Area Review. During these reviews, he had the opportunity to help determine the factors contributing to lapses in mission success and to recommend corrective action.
Working in the private sector taught Ballhaus to respect the dictates of the marketplace and the mandate to increase shareholder value. At Aerospace, he equates increasing shareholder value with "delivering maximum value to our customers at minimum appropriate cost." A key part of that value is the unique broad perspective Aerospace brings to its customers, he said: "We're the repository for lessons learned in the space business and we understand all of the systems that make up the national security space infrastructure."
Ballhaus's standards for himself as leader of the corporation are uncompromising. He regularly asks himself how he can add the most value every single day. He would like to be thought of as an ethical person with integrity, one who is reliable ("will get things done when I say I will"), has high standards of excellence, and treats all people with respect. "Managers should remove obstacles to achievement," he said, "and create opportunities for others."
When former Aerospace president and CEO E. C. Aldridge Jr. announced Ballhaus's appointment in July 2000 as president of the corporation, he named Ballhaus's experience and his "integrity, expertise, and vision" as attributes that would serve him well in carrying the corporation "proudly into the future." Ballhaus is optimistic about Aerospace's future, seeing great opportunities for the company as a result of the potential increases in national space activities; the implementation of the recommendations of the Commission to Assess United States National Security Space Management and Organization, chaired by Donald Rumsfeld, the recently appointed Secretary of Defense; and the increasing numbers of civil space customers. Mission success and space stewardship, said Ballhaus, are the two goals that will guide the company's path as it embarks on the next 40 years as a "trusted agent" of the federal government, serving the nation's needs for national security space.
To Spring 2005 Table of Contents
