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Student built rocket soars to second place finish at 24,000 feet

Jeff Zehnder — Tue, 22 Apr 2025 21:00:31 +0000

Student built rocket soars to second place finish at 24,000 feet Jeff Zehnder Tue, 04/22/2025 - 15:00

Jeff Zehnder

Up, up, and away!

The 12-foot tall rocket soared upward, screaming into the sky as it broke the sound barrier.

The CU in Space Club’s entry to the Argonia Cup rocket competition reached 24,000 feet and earned second place in the tournament.

“The flight was awesome. All the hard work is worth it when you finally see it go up and vanish out of sight in a few seconds,” said Alex Virga, a University of Colorado Boulder aerospace senior and co-leader of the competition team.

Held March 29-30, the competition brought together 20 college teams from across the United States to rural Kansas for a showcase of high-powered rocketry. CU in Space had spent months designing, molding, and shaping fiberglass, carbon fiber and other assorted materials to meet the competition requirement of a two-stage rocket carrying a payload of multiple golf balls that could reach 9,000-40,000 feet in altitude.

Designing a rocket

“We made a python script to map out all the possible rocket configurations we could use and the different scoring metrics to determine the most important considerations for the design,” said Rithul Rengarajan, an aerospace sophomore and competition co-lead.

The requirement of a two-stage rocket presented unique challenges. Many members of the team had taken part in past competitions and amateur rocket building, but had never faced this level of difficulty.

“High powered rocketry can be pretty complex, especially a two-stage rocket. You’re essentially stacking two rockets on top of each other and then you have to figure out how to separate and ignite the second stage safely in midair,” Virga said.

Prototype launch and breakdown

In the months leading up to the competition, they built a prototype vehicle and conducted two test launches. One went well, with both stages of the rocket firing successfully. The second launch, however, was not as positive.

“We had an electronics failure and the rocket went ballistic,” said Leya Shaw, team captain and an aerospace junior.

The team had noticed issues with an onboard computer before the test launch, but did not believe it was a fatal problem. They were wrong, and it led them to take additional precautions with their competition rocket build.

“At Argonia we all had the ability to say I’m not comfortable with the launch. We implemented protocols like NASA does before a launch where everyone has go/no go approval,” Virga said.

Competition time

The night before the competition, three team members pulled an all-nighter to complete integration of their avionics and computer systems into the rocket. The work demonstrated a new problem: one of their altimeters was failing.

Members of the team at the launch pad.

“Thankfully, at an event like this, there are a lot of rocketry vendors there. We ended up buying a new altimeter and were good to go,” Rengarajan said.

Well, mostly good to go.

After squeezing everything into the rocket and carrying it out to the launch pad, something went wrong again.

“The computer was showing an error. We’d already installed the igniters by that point, so it was a very careful dance of disarming the electronics, removing the initiators and making sure the rocket was safe to move and take apart. Luckily just one wire had popped loose from a screw terminal,” Virga said.

After a quick reassembly, the launch went off without a hitch.

Of the 20 teams, just five had their launches recorded for a score, including CU Boulder. Several teams had second stage separation issues or could not find their rockets after landing to recover the onboard computers containing critical altitude data for scoring.

With a second place finish, the team took home a cash prize as well as valuable flight computers and altimeters donated by corporate sponsors for the top finishing teams.

Record of success

It was a stellar result for a team with a history of success. Last year, CU in Space competed in the NASA University Launch Initiative, earning the rookie award, among other honors. In 2023, the team’s predecessor, the American Indian Science and Engineering Society, earned first in all categories at that year’s NASA First Nations Launch competition.

Their eyes are now on 2026 and potentially entering the International Rocket Engineering Competition, which brings in teams from around the world.

“We want to be CU Boulder’s competition rocket team,” Shaw said. “Our motto is learn, burn and earn. For learn, if you have no experience, we’ll give it to you. Burn, we launch a lot. Earn, we want to earn our reputation in the rocketry community.”

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Spring 2025 Graduation Ceremony Information

Anonymous — Tue, 22 Apr 2025 14:09:09 +0000

Spring 2025 Graduation Ceremony Information Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 04/22/2025 - 08:09

Smead Aerospace Engineering Sciences will host a commencement ceremony for all graduating aerospace students on May 8, 2025.

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Two PhD students earn top National Science Foundation fellowship

Jeff Zehnder — Sun, 20 Apr 2025 19:52:39 +0000

Two PhD students earn top National Science Foundation fellowship Jeff Zehnder Sun, 04/20/2025 - 13:52

Jeff Zehnder

Two aerospace graduate students have earned prestigious National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program awards.

Annalise Cabra and Asa O'Neal are 2025 recipients of the NSF GRFP awards, which recognize and support outstanding grad students from across the country in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields who are pursuing research-based master’s or doctoral degree.

Awardees receive a $37,000 annual stipend and cost of education allowance for the next three years as well as professional development opportunities.

Find out about their research below:

Annalise Cabra

Advisors: Jim Nabity and Xu Wang
Labs: Bioastronautics Laboratory and the Institute for Modeling Plasmas, Atmospheres, and Cosmic Dust (IMPACT)

Undergraduate Major: Physics, University of Colorado Boulder

My research will focus on the handling of lunar dust to support space exploration, specifically methods for dust mitigation and/or in-situ resource utilization. The dust on the lunar surface gets electrically charged from the solar wind and will mobilize or be lofted, causing it to adhere to various materials like spacesuits or spacecrafts with instruments, solar panels, etc. This then becomes a hazard when trying to carry out space exploration. I will focus on strategies to mitigate this.

I am also interested in in-situ resource utilization and the extraction of local resources on the moon. These steps are crucial for making long-duration space missions more sustainable and affordable by minimizing the need to transport materials from Earth. I will focus on advancing methods for extracting volatiles from the lunar regolith like oxygen to produce materials like propellant or habitats.

Asa O'Neal

Advisor: Iain Boyd
Lab: Nonequilibrium Gas & Plasma Dynamics Laboratory

Undergraduate Major: Mechanical Engineering & Physics, University of Kentucky

My research will focus on modeling air-breathing electric propulsion (ABEP) systems for spacecraft operating in very low Earth orbit (VLEO). This research will support the development of sustainable, long-duration VLEO missions by enabling in-situ propellant collection and reducing reliance on onboard fuel.

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Flickr Gallery: 2025 Senior and Graduate Design Symposium

Jeff Zehnder — Fri, 18 Apr 2025 20:16:59 +0000

Flickr Gallery: 2025 Senior and Graduate Design Symposium Jeff Zehnder Fri, 04/18/2025 - 14:16

Smead Aerospace held the 2025 Senior & Graduate Projects Symposium on April 18, 2025 at the Aerospace Building on campus.

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Engineering advice from the President of BAE Systems, Space & Mission Systems

Jeff Zehnder — Thu, 17 Apr 2025 17:40:23 +0000

Engineering advice from the President of BAE Systems, Space & Mission Systems Jeff Zehnder Thu, 04/17/2025 - 11:40

Jeff Zehnder

Dave Kaufman is offering advice on career paths to aspiring engineers as the President of BAE Systems, Space & Mission Systems.

Kaufman began his 30-year career in industry as a thermal engineer. He gradually took on new roles and opportunities, managing larger and larger teams until he became president of BAE Systems’ Space & Mission Systems sector, previously known as Ball Aerospace.

A year after Ball Aerospace’s acquisition by BAE Systems, Inc., Kaufman shared insights with students in a special seminar April 10 hosted by Mark Sirangelo in the Ann and H.J. Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder.

If you were studying engineering today, where would you focus?

If you read career guidebooks, they say you’ve got to have a plan. You have to know what your next step is and where you’re going, or you’ll never get there. That’s not true. I never knew where I was going. I was doing a job, and I found it exciting.

Quantum and AI are important, but truly, study what you love. If it’s interesting to you, you’ll keep going. It was that excitement that kept me going. The things we do are hard. If you don’t love it, it’s going to be a grind.

It might not be the subject, but it might be who you’re studying under. All of us have had a couple of teachers who changed our direction. Being open to that is important.

You worked at Hughes, Boeing and then Ball Aerospace in frontline engineering positions for 10 years before making the leap to leadership. What led to that change?

I wanted to solve challenges and achieve missions. I was fortunate because I was selected to lead a little team as the thermal lead. In that role, I coached and helped out, which exposed me to people leadership. That felt like me.

My leadership opportunities started as a lot of chance. I did it because it needed to be done, and I liked it and was invested. I’m always learning something. I moved from engineering jobs and program engineering jobs to proposals and portfolios. As I went on, every step I led more people, focused a little less on the technology and moved a little closer to the customer. The journey was just so exciting.

What was the transition to leadership like?

You have choices along the way. You can be a SME – a subject matter expert – basically a really hardcore engineer or scientist. Or you can lead a function. I took the project path. Those aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive, but at some point, you make a choice. I’m glad that I picked what I did, but I’m so appreciative of people who picked differently.

As I moved away from the work and moved toward management, my value as an employee changed. I didn’t design, but I influenced projects and made contributions through all these people.

The other piece of it was that I had to give up doing the job I used to do, and that was difficult. Letting go is so important. I needed to let the new person do that job, even though there were things they were going to do that I wouldn’t do that way. But there are some parts of that job they will do better than I would ever imagine.

What skills are more important today for students than when you were in college?

Don’t shirk your writing skills. Students coming out of pure engineering schools sometimes don’t have the writing skills. It’s not fun, but the most brilliant analysis in the world is only your own. You’ve got to tell somebody about it. That communication in written form or in presentations is so important. I really see it as the difference between someone staying at the lower level and moving up.

Ball Aerospace has been a part of Boulder for decades. How have things changed since BAE Systems acquired the company?

BAE Systems, Inc. is the U.S. subsidiary of BAE Systems plc, a global aerospace, defense, and security company. The Inc. business is based in Falls Church, Virginia, and operates independently through a Special Security Agreement between the U.S. Government, BAE Systems, Inc. and BAE Systems plc.

When Ball Aerospace was acquired, we became a new sector called Space & Mission Systems. Our team of more than 5,200 colleagues were welcomed to BAE Systems, where together we continue to share our values of mission-driven innovation and operational excellence.

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Morton GPS research spotlighted in Science News Explores

Jeff Zehnder — Tue, 01 Apr 2025 16:10:04 +0000

Morton GPS research spotlighted in Science News Explores Jeff Zehnder Tue, 04/01/2025 - 10:10

Jade Morton was interviewed by Science News Explores in a new piece about research conducted with engineers at Google.

The team used the GPS sensors that come standard in every smartphone to collect data on how Earth’s atmosphere warped signals coming from satellites. In the process, they were able to view phenomena in the atmosphere, such as blobs high above the planet known as “plasma bubbles,” in never-before-seen detail.

Morton is a professor in the Ann and H.J. Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder and an expert on GNSS remote sensing.

The original research was published in fall 2024 in the journal Nature.

Read the full article at Science News Explores...

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Missile developments in the AI era

Jeff Zehnder — Mon, 24 Mar 2025 14:17:56 +0000

Missile developments in the AI era Jeff Zehnder Mon, 03/24/2025 - 08:17

Iain Boyd was interviewed for a new feature in Army Technology.

The business-to-business publication is spotlighting use of artificial intelligence in the military.

Boyd, a professor in the Ann and H.J. Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences, is a national security expert and also the director of the CU Boulder Center for National Security Initiatives.

Read the full article at Army-Technology.com...

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Adding AI in the aerospace classroom

Jeff Zehnder — Tue, 18 Mar 2025 14:39:21 +0000

Adding AI in the aerospace classroom Jeff Zehnder Tue, 03/18/2025 - 08:39

Jeff Zehnder

Bobby Hodgkinson is exploring the pluses – and minuses – of generative AI in academia.

An associate teaching professor in the Ann and H.J. Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder, Hodgkinson is working to steer positive AI adoption in education.

“People are starting to feel the effects of AI in business,” Hodgkinson said. “How can we train people to work alongside these tools and position themselves? We owe it to our students to explore what these tools can do well.”

Those efforts are taking multiple forms. Hodgkinson is working to roll out AI tutors for assignments, grading assistance, and data analysis. As AI is still in a state of rapid evolution, some initiatives have gone better than others.

“Accuracy isn’t to the level that we need AI to be, but it’s about 80% and this is the worst it’s going to be. I’ve said to students, ‘I want to expose you to this because you’re going to be entering this new society and I want you to know what it’s good at and where it struggles’,” Hodgkinson said.

He sees particular potential for AI to improve personalization of learning.

“In class, the intent of a test is for me to understand where you are in the learning process. If you give me an incorrect answer I know something is up, but I don’t know what it is. If I can add a box for you to explain your thinking in your own words, I can get a much better idea of where you are, but that is very hard to administer at scale to 100-plus students. An AI can analyze those responses and I can start directing my intervention,” Hodgkinson said.

He is already putting it into practice with student lab reports.

“Instead of a grader having a 25 page lab report they have to review 50 times for 50 different groups, the AI tells the grader this is where you should focus your attention,” he said.

He is currently finishing up work on a paper, to be published by the American Society for Engineering Education, evaluating a class project that incorporated an AI component. Hodgkinson has also led seminars for other aerospace faculty on applications of AI in education.

A major concern with AI systems has been student cheating, but Hodgkinson has an unusually positive attitude.

“If we’re just asking students to do something a machine today can do, I’m cheating them out of an experience. AI is amazing at writing computer code. The expectation of an entry level engineer to only write a few hundred lines of code a week are gone. But AI is not good at creating the architecture for these applications – what does the client want and how do we turn that into tangible tasks,” Hodgkinson said.

As AI tools have advanced, Hodgkinson has found them to be tremendously beneficial in his professional and personal life – helping to write emails and summarize complex concepts, improving his efficiency and allowing exploration of ideas he previously did not have the bandwidth to tackle.

“While I’m walking my dog I’ll be chatting with ChatGPT through my headphones, reasoning through an idea I have,” he said. “I could have that discussion with another person, but when you talk to a person, you’re always thinking about how you will be perceived. Interacting with a machine removes that.”

Hodgkinson is an active member of the Rocky Mountain AI Interest Group, a community hoping to advance uses of “AI for good.” It has helped him connect with other university faculty and K-12 educators who are also experimenting with AI.

“The goal is education focused more on the individual student,” he said. “Where are you today, where do you need to be tomorrow, and how do I help get you there. We didn’t have the resources to do that before; there’s not enough hours in the day. Now if I can build a tool, I can do something about it.”

Bobby Hodgkinson is exploring the pluses – and minuses – of generative AI in academia. An associate teaching professor in the...

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Palo interviewed on satellite constellations

Jeff Zehnder — Wed, 12 Mar 2025 20:56:24 +0000

Palo interviewed on satellite constellations Jeff Zehnder Wed, 03/12/2025 - 14:56

Scott Palo is highlighted in a new article discussing Amazon's Kuiper satellite internet service.

The IEEE Spectrum article outlines the company's effort to build out a competitor to SpaceX's Starlink and concerns about the rapidly expanding number of satellites in low earth orbit.

Palo, a professor in the Ann and H.J. Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences, is an expert on the design, construction, deployment and operation of small satellite systems.

In the article he discusses the unique challenges of maintaining optical connections between orbiting satellites moving at high speeds.

"Consider standing at opposite ends of a football field with a friend. You and your friend each have a laser pointer and are looking at each other through a straw.”

Read the full article at IEEE Spectrum...

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Aerospace undergrads teaching high school students about rocketry

Jeff Zehnder — Tue, 11 Mar 2025 17:17:05 +0000

Aerospace undergrads teaching high school students about rocketry Jeff Zehnder Tue, 03/11/2025 - 11:17

Jeff Zehnder

Sebastian Grabowski and a team of aerospace undergrads are taking on their toughest challenge yet: going back to high school.

A sophomore in the Ann and H.J. Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder, Grabowski is an active member of the Sounding Rocket Laboratory, a student club that boasts more than 250 members.

Their primary focus is designing and building rockets that can soar into the stratosphere, but this semester they stretched their abilities in a new way, building an outreach program to inspire the next generation of budding aerospace engineers.

The team worked with the Integrated Teaching & Learning Program (ITLP) on campus to develop a multi-week aerospace and rocketry curriculum for students at Centaurus High School in Lafayette, Colorado.

“It was really exciting. I love the impact we can make on the students and seeing their eyes light up about the topics we covered,” Grabowski said.

Throughout the month of January, teams of SRL students visited Centaurus 3-4 days each week to lead instruction on propulsion, materials, stability and control. In addition to academic instruction, the high school students worked in pairs to build their own model rocket and compete against peers to see who could notch the highest altitude on launch.

“They had two weeks to build the rocket and all of them worked differently. They had to use CAD software and 3D print or laser cut their own components. They were testing drag caused by the fins and nose cones,” Grabowski said.

Centaurus is an engineering-oriented high school, and students have access to makerspace equipment, like 3D printers, not available to many teens. However, when it came to classroom instruction, they were still a tough audience for SRL.

“You ask a question in class and no one raises their hands,” Grabowski said. “They’re just silent. It took a lot of trial and error, but I have a bunch of rocket explosion videos on my phone and that got people engaged. ‘What went wrong here? This failure was as simple as forgetting to put a screw in one location.’ You start talking about the explosion and you can get in on a foundational level.”

As part of the curriculum, the team hosted an industry panel with invited guests discussing career goals, internships, and how to choose a college.

“We were scheduled to meet with just one class, but a second teacher stopped by and saw what all we had put into the presentation and asked us to talk to their students too,” Grabowski.

When launch day arrived, the 16 teams of Centaurus students were ready with their rockets. For the event, ITLP supplied SRL with a cache of tiny altimeter sensors that would fit on each rocket to measure their maximum elevation.

“A few of the rockets didn’t come back down where they were supposed to, or the parachute didn’t deploy correctly, but that’s part of the design, build, and test process. The highest rockets got up to 200-300 feet in altitude. I really think it was a success,” Grabowski said.

Sebastian Grabowski and a team of aerospace undergrads are taking on their toughest challenge yet: going back to high school. A sophomore, Grabowski is an active member of the Sounding Rocket Laboratory, a student club that boasts more than...

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