History
The 1964 annual review of NASA's structural dynamics research program revealed that the research centers were separately developing structural analysis software that was specific to their own needs. The review recommended that a single generic software program should be used instead. In response, an ad hoc committee was formed. The committee determined that no existing software could meet their requirements. They suggested establishing a cooperative project to develop this software and created a specification that outlined the capabilities for the software.
A contract was awarded to Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC) to develop the software. The first name used for the program during its development in the 1960s was GPSA an acronym for General Purpose Structural Analysis. The eventual formal name approved by NASA for the program, NASTRAN, is an acronym formed from NASA Structural Analysis. The NASTRAN system was released to NASA in 1968. In the late 1960s, the MacNeal-Schwendler Corporation (MSC) started to market and support its own version of NASTRAN, called MSC/NASTRAN (which eventually became MSC.Nastran). The original software architecture was developed by Joe Mule (NASA), Gerald Sandler (NASA), and Stephen J. Burns (University of Rochester).
NASTRAN software application was written to help design more efficient space vehicles such as the Space Shuttle. NASTRAN was released to the public in 1971 by NASA’s Office of Technology Utilization. The commercial use of NASTRAN has helped to analyze the behavior of elastic structures of any size, shape, or purpose. For example, the automotive industry uses the program to design front suspension systems and steering linkages. It is also used in designing railroad tracks and cars, bridges, power plants, skyscrapers, and aircraft. The program alone was estimated to have returned $701 million in cost savings from 1971 to 1984. NASTRAN was inducted into the U.S. Space Foundation’s Space Technology Hall of Fame in 1988, one of the first technologies to receive this prestigious honor.
The NASTRAN program has evolved over many versions. Each new version contains enhancements in analysis capability and numerical performance. In addition, many errors from previous versions are corrected. In one notorious case, an internal error in NASTRAN was identified as responsible for the 1991 collapse of the Sleipner A offshore platform. Today, NASTRAN is widely used throughout the world in the aerospace, automotive and maritime industries. It has been claimed that NASTRAN is the industry standard for basic types of analysis for aerospace structures, e.g. linear elastic static and dynamic analyses.
In November 2002 MSC Software reached a final agreement with the FTC to resolve an antitrust case against the company in connection with two acquisitions of rival CAE vendors, Universal Analytics, Inc. (UAI) and Computerized Structural Analysis & Research Corp. (CSAR). The FTC had alleged the acquisitions represented anticompetitive activities. Under the terms of the settlement, MSC divested a clone copy of its current Nastran software. The divestiture was through royalty-free, perpetual, non-exclusive licenses to UGS Corporation. UGS Corporation was acquired by Siemens in 2007.
Commercial versions of NASTRAN are currently available from MSC Software, NEi Software (NEi Nastran) and Siemens PLM Software (NX Nastran). Siemens AG purchased the former UGS Corporation from private equity concerns and their rights to the commercial version of NX NASTRAN in 2006.
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