Chile's Atacama Desert makes for great stargazing. The dry air and sparse settlement are a major draw for astronomical observatories—the European Southern Observatory, the Carnegie Institution for Science, and the Llano de Chajnantor Observatory all operate multiple telescope sites on the region's mountaintops.

The desert wind, however, is a problem. The air rushes around and through the enclosures that hold these massive but sensitive, precise instruments. Typically, observatories have responded with heavy mounts and robust structures that keep the mirrors steady amid the turbulence. But brute-force engineering has its limits.

The engineers behind the Giant Magellan Telescope realized as much when they started planning what will be the planet’s largest optical telescope. When it opens at Carnegie’s Las Campanas Observatory in 2022, its seven mirrors will yield a total diameter of 83 feet. That’s enough acreage to provide 10 times the resolving power of the Hubble Space Telescope—and more than enough to catch a passing breeze.

“The building is unprecedentedly large, 22 stories from the ground to the top of the building,” said Patrick McCarthy, the head of operations at the Giant Magellan Telescope Organization. “There’s more volume and thus more air inside. But as a large telescope we have higher and higher expectations for the image quality, and the things that affect it scale as the building gets larger.”

This includes vibration from the wind, but also the thermal properties inside the dome, like the temperature of the mirrors and heat dissipating from sun-warmed steel that’s been in the sun all day—both of which are affected by moving air. “Factoring those into the equation required reaching out to people with specialized skills,” McCarthy says.

So the astronomers called Boeing. In 2015, the Giant Magellan Telescope Organization partnered with the aircraft manufacturer that has just the right experience and technology to manage the airflow around the unconventional building.

Crossing Cultures

Skills and technologies have long criss-crossed between military, scientific, and civilian applications, and the payoff exists not just for the beneficiary clients, but the companies themselves, who see the trend as an opportunity to hone their techniques.

“When we take our toolset and apply it in different ways, we tend to exercise our muscles differently, like with cross-training,” said Bill Norby, a senior manager of aerosciences at Boeing Research & Technology, the division that helped out the astronomers. “Using our strategies in a way that’s not typical, we learn more and build strength and versatility.” In the future, he says, that analytical work could influence how Boeing orients rockets on a launch pad, or influence ground-based optical system designs for the Department of Defense.

Technological crossovers aren't unique to Boeing—rival defense contractor Lockheed developed an underwater turbine for power generation based on the propellers of its C-130J military cargo airplane. Lockheed Martin

Boeing’s rival defense contractors have their own cross-pollination programs. Lockheed Martin engineers used a thermally resistant plastic they developed for the F-35 fighter jet in a communications satellite. They developed an underwater turbine for power generation based on the propellers of the C-130J military cargo airplane. They collaborated with rocket and satellite company SpaceDev to adapt more fighter jet technology in the new Dream Chaser spaceplane being developed to transport astronauts and cargo into low-Earth orbit or to the International Space Station. “Ultimately we want to use our scale to transfer ideas across products and create something new.,” says Keoki Jackson, Lockheed’s chief technology officer. “Take GPS—it began for us a military program but now it touches literally billions of people every day. ”

Know-how doesn’t always go from military to civilian. In one recent project, Lockheed adapted algorithms it created to read hand-printed text for the US Postal Service into a system helicopters use to detect submarine periscopes in the water. Other tech crossovers are more broadly applicable, and imbued with a sense of urgency that makes them seeming no-brainers.