I'd be interested to know what the material differences are between the US DoD standards and FAA/ICAO standards (the article hints that there are) - and also what the difference is between these and a "landing zone" where I imagine it's a grass strip somewhere distant. That's a scenario that naïvely to be seems to be more likely to be temporarily made and therefore in need of standards documents...
there are various earlier, and perhaps current designs for grass strips, where differnt species mixes, and work are prescribed for different zones, as the ends of the runnways where landings occur can be reenforced, but taxi and take off runns can be less heavy duty.
agricultural colleges were(are?) tasked with this sort of thing.
we have a very large formerly paved airport localy, that has gone back to grass all by itself, and is now mowed, but it generaly only sees light planes, but the underlying gravel bed and drainage systems are still intact, and so could be used for landing a heavy jet in an emergency, but with a number of 9000' paved runways quite close, that has not happened yet.
in any case,the load bearing capacity of different soils and terains is quite well understood, and heavy jets have emergency landed in crop fields unharmed, and then been flown out after some modest preperations
On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
This is very interesting - engineering is tackling problems others have had to tackle before. With anything from drone economy to personal aircraft coming to life in the near future, to new gear being designed, somebody on HN is working on it.