Skip to content
Apex
All solutions
Solutions · Aerospace

Ascent to signoff, on one model.

Aether covers ascent aerodynamics, structural margin, aeroelasticity, electromagnetic signature, thermal protection and fatigue under a single foundation model. From wing-body cruise polars to hypersonic re-entry to launch-vehicle stage separation — every loadcase your flight-readiness review needs to clear, in one project file. One aerospace prime retired a $1.8M annual CAE renewal across two quarters.

Launch vehicles — ascent CFD
Mach 2.4 · 1.8% drag error vs flight · 18.4 M cells
The AI, working here

What Aether is actually running.

Animated snapshots of the AI work happening in aerospace today. Each carries a representative metric from a customer workload, the physics the model is reasoning about, and a citation back to the discipline page.

  • Launch vehicles — ascent CFD

    Mach 2.4 · 1.8% drag error vs flight · 18.4 M cells

  • Hypersonic re-entry — TPS thermal

    Mach 8 · 3.2 MW/m² stagnation flux · real-gas thermochemistry

  • Spacecraft — thermal & attitude

    Sun-pointing · ±0.04° attitude knowledge · structural under launch

Why now

The thing that changed.

For decades, the slow part of aerospace was the iteration loop — specifying the case, queuing the solve, parsing the result, deciding what to try next. Aether collapses that loop into an autonomous agent flow. The iteration count per quarter is what compounds, not any one solve being faster.

One model, not five

The same foundation model serves docking, structural FEA, RTL signoff and wet-lab campaigns. Specialisation lives in the agents and the workloads — not in different models with different training data and different blind spots.

Autonomy, not assistance

Aether doesn't ask you to drive its solvers. It plans the study, picks the method, runs the agents, validates against measured reality, and writes the memo. The work that took a senior engineer a quarter takes the model an afternoon.

Reality is the regulariser

We train on simulation trajectories, instrument data and design history — the substrate of the physical world. The model gets better the more reality it touches, and reality is what tells it when it's wrong.

Industry

The state of aerospace today.

We work where the work is hard, the data is closed and the renewals are seven-figure. Aerospace is one of those places. Here's how the discipline looks today, what the leaders are doing, and where Aether fits.

Where the work is today

Teams in aerospace run on a stack assembled over thirty years — a CAD core, a meshing tool, a solver, a post-processor, a scheduling layer and a results manager. Each is a separate seven-figure renewal. The hand-offs between them are where time is lost — case setup, queue, re-mesh, comparison, memo.

What the leaders are doing

The leading teams are investing in internal platforms — wrappers around the incumbent tools, glue code, scheduling layers, a Python notebook on top. It works. But it ages badly, ties up senior engineers and doesn't compound. The best teams know they need the next layer; most don't know what it looks like.

Where Aether fits

Aether replaces the spine of that stack with a foundation model trained on simulation, instrument data and design history. The glue layer goes away. Workflows that used to live in a queue and a folder of scripts live in an autonomous agent flow. You keep the niches that work; Aether retires the middle.

What it replaces

The stack today.

The list below is the typical stack in this discipline. Aether replaces the spine. Niches stay where they are; we're not in the business of forcing rip-and-replace on the things that work.

Structural FEA
Computational fluid dynamics
Full-wave electromagnetics
Explicit-dynamics crash codes
Multiphysics solvers
Aeroelastic suites
Outcomes

The numbers customers actually saw.

Drawn from the campaigns we've run in this discipline. Each one is reproducible — the cases, scripts and configurations are documented in the research log.

62%
wall-clock reduction at iso-accuracy
1.8%
drag error vs flight on launcher ascent
$1.8M
annual CAE renewal retired
Workloads

What we cover in aerospace.

Each workload below ships with validated benchmarks, agent traces you can read, and a pilot pattern we've run before. Many per discipline — not a wish-list.

External aerodynamics

RANS / LES / DES across the full speed envelope. Wing-body cruise polars within ≤1.0% deviation; rotorcraft, propellers, hypersonics on the same model.

Launch & re-entry

Ascent CFD with reacting-flow combustion, stage-separation 6-DOF dynamics, TPS thermal under simultaneous heat and chemical flux. Re-entry ablation and recession resolved.

Structural margin & fatigue

Static, modal, nonlinear contact, fracture, XFEM, crash — coupled to fluids where useful. Notched-bar fatigue Pearson 0.92 vs measured life.

Electromagnetics & signature

Antenna, radar cross-section, SI/PI for avionics, EMC. The accuracy of the leading commercial full-wave tools without the licensing.

Aeroelasticity

Flutter, divergence, gust response, limit-cycle oscillation — coupled fluid-structure on one mesh. Certification-grade margins by construction.

Hypersonics

Real-gas thermochemistry, shock-boundary-layer interaction, transition prediction. Mach 5–25 with the same foundation model that handles subsonic cruise.

Everything the platform does

The full capability map.

The depth behind the six workloads above. Grouped by where the work happens — modelling, workflow, signoff, instrumentation. Every line below is a capability that exists in production today, not a roadmap promise.

Modelling
  • Compressible CFD

    RANS, DDES, LES across subsonic to hypersonic regimes with real-gas thermochemistry.

  • Incompressible CFD

    Free-surface, multiphase, combustion, reacting flows, turbomachinery.

  • Structural FEA

    Linear static, modal, transient, geometric and material nonlinearity, contact, plasticity, hyperelasticity.

  • Electromagnetics

    Full-wave FEM, FDTD, MoM. Antennas, SI/PI, EMC, radar cross-section, mm-wave.

  • Multiphysics

    Fluid-structure, thermo-mechanical, magneto-fluid, electrochemical, piezoelectric — one mesh, one solve.

  • Acoustics

    Modal, harmonic, random, NVH, vibroacoustic, room and underwater.

  • Fatigue & fracture

    High- and low-cycle, strain-life, crack growth, J-integral, XFEM.

  • Additive & manufacturing

    Process-structure-property for SLM, DED, FDM. Residual stress and distortion.

Workflow
  • Topology & shape optimisation

    Gradient-based and surrogate-assisted across geometry, material and load space.

  • DOE & uncertainty

    Latin-hypercube, Sobol, polynomial-chaos UQ, robust-design under aleatory and epistemic uncertainty.

  • Inverse design

    From performance targets to a feasible geometry — under your manufacturing constraints.

  • Auto-meshing

    Tetrahedral, hexahedral, polyhedral, boundary-layer-aware, anisotropic, adaptive.

Agents at play

The specialists in the mix.

Aether coordinates these specialised agents for the workloads above. Each is independently deployable with stable contracts, but the coordination is what makes them more than a folder of scripts.

meshingturbulencestructuralfatigueEMthermalFSIcrashablationtrajectory
AI scientists, not chatbots

Aether does the aerospace work.

We aren't building a chat surface over your existing tools. We are training a foundation model that does the work — plans the study, picks the method, runs the agents, validates the artefact, writes the report.

  • 01

    Plans the study

    Decomposes a one-sentence brief into a DAG of agent calls and posts the plan for your approval before any compute runs.

  • 02

    Picks the right method

    Knows when one solver suffices and when a more expensive one is required. The judgement of a senior practitioner, encoded.

  • 03

    Runs the work

    Dozens of specialised agents execute the plan in parallel. Long runs check-point. Reversible patch sets if anything has to be undone.

  • 04

    Validates against reality

    Cross-checks every artefact against the regression suite for that discipline: published benchmarks, your historical data, customer-validated studies.

  • 05

    Writes the report

    Signed memos with figures, tables and the model-version hash. Ready for design review without rebuilding the deck.

  • 06

    Improves itself

    Failed cases enter the eval corpus. Successful pilots become regression tests. The model your next study uses is better than the one this study used.

Already shipped

The things Aether has already done here.

Not a roadmap. Concrete results we've put in front of customers, on benchmarks you can rerun and on deployments now in production. Each one names the work, the number and where the receipts live.

  • 01

    Beat the commercial CFD baseline

    Cooper impinging-jet: 3.6% mean Nusselt error vs 7.8% on the leading commercial RANS baseline. Setup and extraction scripts open.

  • 02

    Wing-body lift/drag

    Cruise polar within ≤1.0% deviation on the public benchmark wing-body case, across angle-of-attack.

  • 03

    Heat-pipe correlation

    Wall ΔT within 2.4% on the published Frigus benchmark — the case that historically beat surrogate models.

  • 04

    Retired a $1.8M CAE renewal

    Aerospace-prime pilot replaced the incumbent CAE seat across two quarters.

  • 05

    62% wall-clock reduction

    Median across customer pilots versus the prior production CAE flow on equivalent loadcases.

  • 06

    Sovereign deployment shipped

    Air-gapped, ITAR-clean Aether deployment with a national-lab consortium.

How a pilot works

Eight weeks from scope to signal.

We pilot first, always. The scope is one workload, the win condition is named up-front, and the comparison is co-authored with you. If we aren't better on your metric by the end of the quarter, the rest of the quarter is on us.

  1. 01Week 0

    Scope

    We sit with your engineers, name the workload that hurts, agree the comparison data, the boundary the model runs inside, and the metric we will be measured on.

  2. 02Weeks 1–2

    Stand up

    Aether deploys into your environment of choice — managed cloud, your VPC, on-prem, or air-gapped. We connect to the data we agreed on; nothing else.

  3. 03Weeks 3–6

    Run side-by-side

    Aether runs the workload in parallel with your incumbent. Every artefact carries the model version that produced it. You see every trace.

  4. 04Weeks 7–8

    Comparison

    We co-author the comparison memo. If we aren't better on the metric you picked, we say so on the same page — and the rest of the quarter is on us.

  5. 05Quarter 2+

    Production

    Production deploy with eval-gated promotion, on-call coverage, change management aligned to your release calendar. The pilot's traces become the regression suite.

Proof

Someone has already done it.

The customer below ran this exact playbook. Their numbers are public; their story is linked.

Aerospace · Aether for engineering
“We're not buying a tool that competes with the incumbent. We're buying a tool that makes the renewal question irrelevant.”
Northwind Aerospace
Headline metric
62%
wall-clock reduction
Compliance & deployment

Built for the regulated parts of the work.

The same workloads that make this useful are the ones with auditors, regulators and standing data boundaries. The platform is designed for that — not retrofitted for it.

  • Deployment

    Managed cloud (SOC 2 Type II), your VPC with private networking, on-prem on your hardware, or air-gapped behind a regulator's boundary. Same runtime, your perimeter.

  • Data residency

    Customer-VPC and on-prem deployments keep training and inference inside the boundary you set. Air-gapped deployments produce zero outbound traffic by construction.

  • Audit

    Immutable per-run traces. GxP / 21 CFR Part 11 / ALCOA+ patterns where the regulation applies. Exportable as OpenTelemetry, SIEM events or JSONL.

  • Provenance

    Every output is signed by the model version that produced it. Promotion through eval gates is recorded; old versions are reproducible by hash.

  • Capability gating

    Every tool call is gated by an explicit capability the model has to request and your policy has to grant. The refusal corpus is versioned alongside the model.

  • Export & IP

    ITAR-clean compartments, export-control gating, separation of duty. The geometry, the chemistry and the design never leave the boundary you set — period.

How Aether ships here

What ships into aerospace.

Aether is the one product Apex ships. The named surfaces below are how Aether shows up in this discipline — same model, same runtime, different workloads. Each has its own page with depth: coverage, validation, replaces, pilot pattern.

  • Product
    Aether
  • Product
    Aether for engineering
FAQ

The questions we get most often.

If yours isn't here, send it to hello@apexworldlabs.com and we'll answer it in plain language — usually same day.

  • What does Aether replace in aerospace?

    The incumbent stack here — Structural FEA, Computational fluid dynamics, Full-wave electromagnetics, Explicit-dynamics crash codes and more. Aether collapses them into one model and one project file, with Aether for engineering doing the work under one safety story.

  • What outcomes should we expect?

    In aerospace: 62% (wall-clock reduction at iso-accuracy); 1.8% (drag error vs flight on launcher ascent); $1.8M (annual CAE renewal retired). Scoped to your workload and measured against your own acceptance criteria, not a public benchmark.

  • How is this different from a copilot?

    A copilot suggests text; Aether does the work. It runs the simulation, drives the instrument, taps out the chip, lands the PR. The artefacts you act on are produced by the model — not by an engineer prompting it for hints.

  • Do you wrap an existing LLM?

    No. Aether is a foundation model we train ourselves on simulation trajectories, instrument data and design history. We don't call third-party chat APIs as part of the product.

  • What does the pilot cost?

    Pilots are scoped to a specific workload and a specific win condition. Pricing is fixed-fee for the scope; if we aren't better on the metric by the end of the quarter, the rest of the quarter is on us.

  • Will it work with our existing data and tools?

    Yes. Aether reads the formats your team already uses, runs alongside your incumbent stack during the pilot, and integrates with the data system you already trust. We don't expect anyone to throw away ten years of tooling on day one.

  • How fast is integration?

    Stand-up is typically two weeks once we've agreed scope, data and boundary. Faster if you're already in our supported deployment topologies; slower for sovereign/air-gapped environments where the security review is the long pole.

Bring Aether into your aerospace workflow.

Send us the workload that hurts. We'll come back with a scoped pilot — three to eight weeks, win condition defined together.