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CLEARFIELD — When driving through Clearfield on I-15, commuters may have noticed the orange USTAR Innovation Center building at Falcon Hill has received a purple Weber State University facelift.
Orange is still very much a part of the building's focus — now it's just the orange glow of materials approaching the temperature of the sun as they hurtle through the air at hypersonic speeds, instead of the building's exterior color.
The Miller Advanced Research and Solutions Center, or MARS Center, aims to become an advanced manufacturing and research facility for extremely specialized materials.
The field of hypersonics – objects traveling at least five times faster than the speed of sound — requires composites that can withstand temperatures of around 8,000 degrees Fahrenheit.
"These material systems that we're talking about are really hard to make, and they're very challenging. They're a bottleneck in our ability to secure a lot of the defense assets that we have," said Dr. Benjamin Garcia, the director of the center. He already has millions of dollars in grants lined up for research.
Garcia hosted an open house for elected officials, industry partners, academics and the media last week to celebrate the "pretty remarkable journey" since the center's opening in 2022 and to look toward the building's future.
Inside the 20,000-square-foot facility, donated to Weber State University by the state of Utah, students and researchers worked with giant 3D printers and high-end testing equipment, pulling and heating and breaking products to understand their physical properties. A robotic arm wrapped ribbons of carbon fiber around a large plastic nose cone, manufactured in-house.
Tape marked areas where huge furnaces, some of which can reach 4,500 degrees Fahrenheit, are set to be installed by the end of the year. A robotic CT scanner will use X-rays to detect defects in parts. Right now, the building has 500 kilowatts available, but the university is working to increase that power capacity to 2.5 megawatts.
Thomas Lockhart, the director of capability and resource integration for U.S. Space Command, attended the open house remotely. He was former director of engineering and technical management for the Air Force Nuclear Weapons Center at Hill Air Force Base.
"As things go from fighters to cruise missiles to hypersonics, now into space, you are going to have to change the composition of the materials," Lockhart said. He called the ability to manufacture and upscale materials "one of our weaknesses in the Department of Defense, or even in the Space Force. We do one-offs. We do unique. This is where the MARS niche is. They can actually take this material and upscale it for the capabilities that we need for national security."
"This is the right answer. This is where we need to go," he said. With a number of programs at Hill Air Force Base sunsetting — including the A-10, the F-16, Minuteman III, and F-22 missions — hypersonic technology development will help to keep jobs and talent the state.
Four of the five largest prime contractors in northern Utah — Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Boeing and Northrup Grumman —partnered with the center, not just for material projects but for workforce development in current and future Weber State students.
"There's a lot of talent in the space that are retiring, and there's not a lot of backfill," said Garcia. "So there are a lot of itches getting scratched by the center."
Utah House Speaker Mike Schultz agreed, saying Utah needs more facilities similar to MARS.
"This isn't just a classroom; it's a launchpad," Shultz said. "Through hands-on training, real-world projects and direct industry collaboration, Weber State students gain the technical expertise and political experience that they need to step confidently into a high-demand workforce."
Weber State student Tyler Matthews, for example, is already working on a project to chemically recycle carbon fiber, while other student groups are designing modular 3D-printed building materials for a shed on campus — all taking part in the "pipeline to the primes" that the lab creates.
Former USTAR facility
"This started out as a bad idea. This was one of the biggest flubs the state of Utah ever got into," said Sen. Jerry Stevenson, R-Layton.
Funded in March 2006 by the state Legislature, the Utah Science Technology and Research Initiative was started as a copy of a similar Arizona program. USTAR made strategic investments in state universities to recruit researchers, build facilities and connect industry partners.
Three large buildings were constructed through the program: the $60 million USTAR BioInnovations Center at Utah State University, finished in 2010; the $130 million James L. Sorenson Molecular Biotechnology Building at the University of Utah, finished in 2012; and the USTAR Innovation Center at Falcon Hill.
In 2019, USTAR was dissolved by the Legislature, and the ownership of the Falcon Hill facility was transferred to the Military Installation Development Authority, though the ground is owned by the U.S. Air Force. The other buildings and any remaining funds were transferred into the hands of the other universities.
"Within a few years, it was easy to tell we made a big mistake. ... I'm proud to have helped in taking USTAR to pieces, because we would have been in a financial trap with that if we would have stuck it out," Stevenson said, praising Weber State for turning "the proverbial lemons into lemonade."
Weber State President Brad Mortensen said that this facility was borne out of the fight for the university to have a full-fledged engineering degree.
"How many meetings did we sit in, in like 2015, 2016?" he asked, "talking about trying to build up this advanced manufacturing ecosystem here, with some of those USTAR colleagues at the table, which is kind of how this building came to be. But all of that hard work paid off so that we can take advantage of this."
Garcia hopes to continue expanding the facility to become a hypersonic tools manufacturing development center, where best practices, research and technology can be shared nationally.
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