2006 Lemelson-MIT Student Prize Winner

Carl Dietrich traces his earliest design innovations to elaborate spaceships he built from Fisher-Price® Construx building sets and tree forts in his parents' yard. He credits his father's penchant for model planes as the inspiration for his passion for aeronautics and aerospace. By high school, Dietrich's inventive drive produced remote-controlled airplanes and designs for a hydrogen-powered aircraft.

Today, Dietrich, 28, is pursuing his Aeronautics and Astronautics Ph. D. at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He also earned his Bachelor of Science (1999) and Master of Science (2003) in Aeronautics and Astronautics from MIT.

For his doctoral work, Dietrich is researching inertial electrostatic confinement fusion for spacecraft power and propulsion under Dr. Raymond J. Sedwick, a principal research scientist at MIT's Space Systems Lab. This opportunity stemmed from an efficiency improvement design Dietrich patented for a desktop-sized Penning Fusion Reactor following a research internship at Los Alamos National Laboratory in 2002. Dietrich credits this internship with sparking his initial curiosity about a distributed network of reactors that could potentially supplant the United States' strained power grid system.

"MIT is so supportive," says Dietrich. As an undergraduate senior, he met with the head of MIT's aeronautics and astronautics department to present an idea he had to build a suborbital rocket engine. Afterward, he was given $10,000 to build it. The challenging environment of MIT has pushed Dietrich to work harder, which has been more rewarding to him than doing things the easy way.

Dietrich is co-founder of the MIT Rocket Team, formed in 1998 to become the first student group to launch a rocket into space. He holds a patent for his Centrifugal Direct Injection Engine (CDIE), a low-cost, high-performance rocket propulsion engine. CDIE operates without a conventional turbopump pressurization system, which greatly reduces its complexity and cost.

Dietrich has also invented the PickProd—a blast-safe demining pick for safer removal of anti-personnel landmines in environments with hard-packed earth, such as Afghanistan. This deliberately unpatented invention is now being tested by a United Nations demining specialist.

Most recently, Dietrich and four MIT colleagues and fellow pilots launched a start-up company called Terrafugia to create the "Transition," a Personal Air Vehicle concept. The Transition will exploit the nation's thousands of underutilized public-access airports by providing a practical transportation alternative to travelers whose trips range between 100 and 500 miles. The vehicle can be driven on any surface road, requires only a sport pilot's license to fly and operates on premium-unleaded gasoline. According to Dietrich, it's not a flying car; it's a roadable aircraft.

Dietrich's four patents pending for the Transition include: overall configuration, deformable aerodynamic bumpers, embedded lights and license plate holder, and an RFID system for rapid access to local airports.

Dietrich was a recipient of the $3000 International Technology Prize in the 2003 MIT IDEAS Competition and the Gelb Fellowship in 2002. In 2000, Dietrich became the youngest recipient of the Sixteen XVI Award given to only 16 MIT Aero/Astro alumni under the age of 35 "for demonstrating extraordinary accomplishment early in their career."

"The best way to think of an invention, I think, is to think of a need," says Dietrich, a native of Sausalito, Calif. He adds, "Make every mistake that you can."

Current Update:
Dietrich has established a prototype development facility for his company, terrafugia, in Woburn, Mass., where he and his team are busy engineering the Transition design.

Web Links:
Terrafugia