Narayanan Komerath

Narayanan Menon Komerath
Born	Thrissur City, Kerala
Nationality	United States
Occupation	Professor of aerospace engineering
Known for	Asteroid belt structures

Narayanan Menon Komerath is an Indian-born professor of Aerospace Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology in the United States. He has written numerous articles and books. He is known for his views on ways to build structures in space from asteroid debris, which could be used for a space-based economy, and for his research into microwave power transmission in space.

Komerath continues to take an active interest in Indian affairs. He has defended the US-based India Development and Relief Fund, a charity, from accusations that its funds were being used to foster communal violence in India. He has proposed a break-up of Pakistan to remove its ability to export global terror.

Narayanan Menon Komerath was born in Peringavu, Thrissur, India. He studied at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras, obtaining a BTech in Aeronautical Engineering in 1978. He then went to the Georgia Institute of Technology where he obtained a PhD in Aerospace Engineering (Turbulent Combustion) in 1982. Positions since then have included Fellow of the NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts, Sam Nunn Senior Security Fellow in the School of International Affairs (2004–2006) and Hesburgh Teaching Fellow at the Georgia Institute of Technology (2005). From 2008 to 2009 he was Chair of the Aerospace Division of the American Society for Engineering Education. For 2009/2010 he was Secretary/Treasurer of this division. He is Chairman of Scv Inc. in Alpharetta, Georgia, a manufacturer of analytical instruments founded in 1994.

In May 2003 Popular Mechanics reported that Komerath had found a way to crush the rocks in the asteroid belts using electromagnetic waves and assemble them into radiation shields and structures where humans could live, among other purposes. The idea came to Komerath by analogy with the technique of "acoustic shaping", where sound waves can accurately position small objects such as beads into larger solid objects within a weightless environment. In space, radio waves would take the place of sound waves. Although huge amounts of energy would be needed, solar power could be used and the approach would avoid the requirement to transport material from Earth. Komerath said "You don't go to investors and say 'I want to build a giant spinning cyclinder in space that would house 10,000 people'. You go and say 'I want to build a space-based economy'. It's a business model that will work only if there are a lot of people who will go broke at the same time if it fails".

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