KUNINAKA Hitoshi, Director General of the Institute of Space and Astronautical Science (ISAS), JAXA has been elected as an Honorary Fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA).

AIAA is the world's largest aerospace engineering society, and individuals who have contributed to the development of aerospace for a long time and made outstanding achievements are selected as Honorary Fellows.

Director General Kuninaka's comments are as follows.

The AIAA Honorary Fellows is the highest level of the AIAA title, first awarded in 1932 to Orville Wright, the younger brother of the Wright brothers, and since then 238 have been elected through 2023.

As I look at the list of Honorary Fellows, there are many legends of fluid mechanics and aerospace engineering who have been named after NASA field centers and aerospace companies. Also they are familiar to us from textbooks such as,

Joseph S. Ames (1934), Neil A. Armstrong (1971), Richard H. Battin (1990), Donald W. Douglas (1936), Charles Draper (1958), Hugh L. Dryden (1939), Leroy Grumman (1951), George W. Lewis (1940), Glenn L. Martin (1937), James McDonnell (1968), John K. Northrop (1969), Ludwig Prandtl (1933), Wernher von Braun (1970), Theodore von Kármán (1936)
Note: Numbers in parentheses indicate the year of the elected.

Dr. Itiro Tani is the only Japanese recipient of this Honorary Fellow.

With the title of "for development of electric propulsion to acquire the first material from an asteroid and work on high voltage systems in space", I am deeply honored and humbled by this great honor. I would like to express my deepest gratitude to the many friends and colleagues for their tremendous support.

I will continue to devote myself to the promotion of aerospace/space science so that I may live up to the name of this title.

KUNINAKA Hitoshi
Director General of the Institute of Space and Astronautical Science (ISAS), JAXA