Dr. Ajay Kothari
Ajay Kothari, PhD is the President, CEO, and Founder of Astrox Corporation, an Aerospace Research and Development company located in suburban Washington, DC. He is a Member of the Technical Advisory Councils for the Institute of Small Satellite and Space Systems (4SI) and the Institute for Space Arts (TISA) at Taksha Institute, and Advisor for the Taksha Sustainable Energy Center (TSEC).
Ajay founded Astrox Corporation in December 1987 as a minority-owned aerospace research firm and has served as its President and Chief Executive Officer ever since. He has been Principal Investigator or Program Manager on more than 30 contracts from the U.S. Air Force, Navy, DARPA, and NASA, focused on rocket and hypersonic vehicle designs, system-level analysis, and access-to-space studies, work that produced an innovative hypersonic vehicle design for the Air Force in collaboration with Boeing.
The company’s product line includes a suite of system design tools — HySIDE, SuperSIDE, and SpaceSIDE — built on its System Integrated Design Environment (SIDE) framework, alongside research in computational fluid dynamics, hypersonic waverider technology, and computational optimization of hypersonic leading edges.
Ajay has been a pioneer in developing Inward Turning Hypersonic Vehicles capable of traveling up to Mach 10, an approach designed to reach Low Earth Orbit more efficiently using his version of the Rocket Based Combined Cycle (RBCC) concept. In December 2000, the United States Patent and Trademarks Office granted him US Patent 6,164,596 — Designs of and methodology for inward or outward, and partially inward or outward turning flow hypersonic air-breathing and rocket-based-combined-cycle vehicles. A second patent application — Rockets Embedded Scramjet Nozzle (USSN 16/361,756, filed March 2019) — is pending.
He is currently working on reusable rocket transportation, nuclear propulsion, and nuclear energy for both off-planet applications and terrestrial climate solutions. Ajay has authored more than 48 professional publications in peer-reviewed AIAA journals — including the Journal of Spacecraft and Rockets, Journal of Propulsion and Power, AIAA Journal, and Journal of Aircraft — and has presented at the AIAA International Spaceplanes and Hypersonic Technologies Conference, JANNAF (Joint Army-Navy-NASA-Air Force) Propulsion Meetings, and CRASTE (Commercial and Government Responsive Access to Space Technology Exchange) conferences for over three decades. He writes commentary on space policy, lunar architectures, and energy policy for The Space Review.
Read Much needed cargo for the Moon,Returning humans to the Moon without SLS and NRHO,Thor the lifesaver?, and The case for scrapping the Space Launch System.
Ajay is a recurring guest on The Space Show hosted by our Dr. David Livingston, where he has discussed lunar mission architectures, thorium molten salt reactors, nuclear propulsion, and the U.S.–China space competition. He has appeared on Hotel Mars with John Batchelor and on The Unknown Quantity, the podcast at the intersection of space and finance, covering the cislunar space economy and his proposals for returning humans to the Moon without SLS or NRHO. He has been a featured speaker at the International Space Development Conference (ISDC) of the National Space Society.
Ajay earned his PhD in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Maryland in August 1979 with the dissertation Navier-Stokes Solutions for Chemical Laser Flows — Steady and Unsteady Flows, with major fields in aerodynamics and propulsion and a minor in physics. He earned his Master’s Degree of Science in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Maryland in August 1975, and his Bachelor’s Degree of Science in Physics from the University of Bombay in June 1971.
From September 1979 to August 1981, he was a Senior Development Engineer in the High Energy Laser group at Bell Aerospace Textron, where he was the Principal Fluid Dynamicist on the Chemical Oxygen-Iodine Laser (COIL) program. From January 1982 to April 1988, he was an Assistant Research Engineer in the Department of Aerospace Engineering at the University of Maryland, serving as Co-Principal Investigator on projects with Pratt & Whitney, Edwards Air Force Base, the Office of Naval Research, the National Aero-Space Plane (NASP) joint program office, and NASA Langley.
Ajay is a Life Member and Associate Fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) and a member of the AIAA Aerospace Power Technical Committee. He served as President of the American Society of Engineers of Indian Origin (ASEI) National Capital Chapter in 2014 and 2015, and on the ASEI Board of Directors between 2010 and 2013. He organized and convened the ASEI national convention in 2013, which drew approximately 400 attendees and featured the then-NASA Administrator as keynote speaker.
He served on the Board of Directors of WHEELS Global Foundation between 2016 and 2017 as Director of the Lifestyles Track, and has served on the Board of Directors of the Asian American Coalition for Education (AACE) since 2017.
Ajay is a recipient of the Government of India National Merit Scholarship, which supported his entire university education in India. He was conferred the ASEI-NCC Emerging Technologist Award in 1997, the Pride of India Gold Award by the International NRI Institute in 2007, the Engineer of the Year award by the American Society of Engineers of Indian Origin in 2011, and the Excellence in Engineering biennial award by the National Federation of Indian-American Associations in 2018. He is profiled as an advisor at Taksha Institute and on Lean SpaceTech.
Beyond aerospace, Ajay is a working artist and actor. He has been a Member of the Screen Actors Guild (SAG/AFTRA) since 1993 — the first Indian-American member for the Washington-Baltimore region — having acted in productions including Law & Order and The Wire for NBC, HBO, and independent film studios. He is a prolific painter whose abstract and impressionist work in oil and acrylic has been exhibited at the Watergate Gallery in Washington, DC, the College Park Art Show, and the International Art Gallery at Baltimore-Washington International Airport, the latter selected by the Office of the Governor of Maryland.
He maintains a Saatchi Art profile and lives in College Park, Maryland.
Visit his LinkedIn profile, the Astrox Corporation homepage, his Taksha Institute advisor page, and his Saatchi Art profile. Follow him on Facebook and X.