Aerospace & Aeronautical Engineering Webinar

Thank you very much, Randy. Well, hello everyone. Thank you for joining us today. It's my pleasure to give you an overview about the aeronautical and aerospace programs Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. I'm going to begin by actually going over what the difference is between aeronautical engineering and aerospace engineering because many people really don't know what the distinction is between those. They may have somewhat of an idea.

So the first thing I'd like to say is an aeronautical engineer and or an aerospace engineer.

Is really nothing more and nothing less than a very highly specialized mechanical engineer. So you take many of the same types of courses and learn many of the same types of equations in physics that a mechanical engineer would use. Or a mechanical engineer may look at machinery and cars and robotic systems and things like that.

We in Aeronautical Aerospace look at how you would use those same physics, those same laws, those same methods to apply them to keeping an aircraft or a spacecraft.

Safely flying in a controlled and safe manner.

So if you look at the slide in front of you, it's got a picture of a helicopter.

A fixed wing aircraft, a rocket and a very large spacecraft, in this case the International Space Station.

These are all examples of systems that I have personally worked on before I became a professor. I was in the aerospace industry for about a dozen years.

I can run up and check on him. We do have Max here.

Should we have?

Maybe Max can field some questions in the meantime.

Alright. Oh, he's back.

It said my browser was blocking you.

So forgive me. When did you lose me?

OK. Well, we'll try again with Slide #2, I'm, I apologize.

So the differences between aeronautical and aerospace engineering. With aeronautical engineering, the emphasis is on aircraft or helicopters that operate in the air. So you have to worry about lift and drag. These are aerodynamic effects and so, as you might expect, you're going to have a course in aerodynamics.

Then you also have to worry about what's called airframe design, the structure of the aircraft or the helicopter. Because you're operating in air, your viewpoint is going to be very different than how you would design the structure for a rocket, a missile, or a spacecraft.

Then you have what's called air vehicle flight mechanics. These are the physics that are associated with keeping an aircraft in the air in a sustained and controlled manner.

Next, there's aircraft propulsion. This is propulsion that exploits the fact or makes use of the fact that you are working in the air. So the propulsion tends to be air based. So think about piston engines that breathe air, jet engines that breathe air.

Propellers that push you through the air. All right. Next when it comes to design philosophy associated with aeronautical engineering.

First and foremost, the concern is safety. Why? Because many of these systems either have people on board or transporting people, or they're operating in places where there's a lot of people around. And so safety is foremost. Next comes cost. Why? Because many of these applications involve businesses, whether it's air transport, air freight, you're trying to make sure that you can turn a profit.

Performance and then finally reliability. So reliability is still very, very, very important because with all of these systems you want them to fly successfully for 10s of thousands of hours.

So that the aircraft very often times have design lights that run well into the decades or multiple decades.

What is the difference with aerospace engineering? Well, with aerospace engineering the focus is on getting something to space.

Or operating, you get up to space and you bring it back down to the ground.

So you're not operating entirely with space and aerospace engineer is someone that is dealing with how do you get something to space or once you're in space, how do you bring it back?

If you're dealing just exclusively with space, that's an astronautical engineer. There's actually relatively few of those because it is a huge problem getting things safely off the launchpad into space, or you have some information or something you've collected in space. How do you get it safely back to the Earth?

So, as I mentioned before, you still have an airframe design, but as you might expect, the problems are very, very different for a rocket or a spacecraft than they are for an aircraft or a helicopter.

Also, you have propulsion, so you can expect that it's going to be a propulsion. Course there is, but rocket propulsion or spacecraft propulsion tends to be very, very different than helicopter propulsion or fixed wing air breathing.

Type propulsion. Also, you've got the whole issue of what the space environment is. The environment that an aircraft sees may be very, very harsh, but it's nothing compared to space space.

The side of the spacecraft that the Sun sees may very easily get up to 100 and 8200°C.

The side that sees deep, deep space, if it's looking at deep space for a long time, sees 3° K very, very cold, very near absolute 0.

It's operating in a vacuum much of the time, which is very, very hard on the system. Also because you're out of the Earth's atmosphere and the protection that that provides you, you have to deal with the sun's radiation, which is also very, very harsh. And so a big problem with aerospace engineering is the space environment is trying to defeat you in every way, shape or form.

Then when you get to the design considerations that you need to consider when actually designing, building a spacecraft or a rocket.

The emphasis is quite different. Here. It is first and foremost on performance, then reliability, then cost, and then safety. OK, why is safety dead last? Well, it's because most aerospace systems don't involve people. It's only a minority. A very small fraction of the things that go into space actually take people into space.

So if it's manned flight, a much greater emphasis is placed on safety. But most aerospace applications are unmanned flight, so the greatest emphasis is placed on performance because it is so hard to get payloads into space, it is so expensive. Next comes reliability, because you want reliability still be quite good, but with most rockets they're only used once.

Sometimes a rocket may be used twice 3 * 10 times.

But not hundreds or thousands of times like an aircraft is. So again very different design consideration with liability and also when it comes to designing the structure.

With an aircraft, you tend to worry about not just strength, but what's called the strength to weight ratio. It needs to be very, very strong, but very lightweight. It has to be very, very strong so that it can fly for 10s of thousands of hours.

With the spacecraft.

If you can just get the spacecraft to survive launch, half the battle is over.

And so it's a very different design philosophy. So strength isn't the driving factor, but actually stiffness and its natural frequencies. And this is something you would learn about as you got further into your courses.

OK, so.

Let's talk about fixed wing aircraft a little bit. So fixed wing aircraft, we've probably had a lot of exposure to them, airliners.

Remote drones, fighter aircraft, these are all great examples of very, very different applications, and these fall in the realm of aeronautical engineering.

Next we have Roto craft and multi rotor aircraft. So here we've got a conventional helicopter, a hex drone and also it is now one of the more new tilt rotor aircrafts which are being used more and more all the time because once you get.

The helicopter or rotorcraft in the air. It can generally function much more efficiently if it's acting more like a propeller driven aircraft than a helicopter.

And so.

Tilt rotor aircraft, though they're considered rotorcraft.

Depending on which regime you're in, take off and landing, they're more like a helicopter. Once they're flying in the air, they're more like an air a conventional propeller driven aircraft.

We also have rockets and missile systems. These are just a couple of examples.

We have spacecraft. These are all spacecraft that I've personally worked on. They go from very large to not so large.

Other missile systems that are not designed to go into orbit.

So let's talk about different aerospace engineering applications.

So much of the time, I would even say most of the time when one is dealing with an aerospace system or an aeronautical system, the emphasis is on some form of transportation. You're trying to get something from point A to point B, whether it's a pilot, whether it's a crew, whether it's passengers, whether it's cargo.

In the case of fixed wing aircraft, yes, it's transportation, but we would say we refer to it as aerodynamic transportation. What keeps the aircraft in the air is lift. You get off the wings when you've got some sort of propulsion that's moving the aircraft forward.

Next, another thing that applies to most aerospace and aeronautical systems. It's information.

Maybe one of the reasons you're putting a spacecraft up into space or an aircraft in the air is to collect data. Why? Because when a spacecraft is in space or an aircraft is in the air, you can see many things. You can hear many things. So maybe it's scientific. Maybe you are spying. Maybe you're trying to collect weather data. Maybe you're trying to transmit signals from point A to B.

So a huge part of both aeronautical engineering and aerospace engineering.

Is information of some form.

OK, back to aerospace. We've got transportation again, But in the case of spacecraft or rockets, it's not aerodynamic transport. It's what's called ballistic transport. And that means that you are not relying on Lyft to get you from point A to point B. You're generally relying on a huge amount of thrust from your rockets. the Rockets actually operate for a surprisingly short period of time.

And most of your transit time is what's called ballistic transit, where you rely on the laws of physics to get you from point A to point B.

Consequently, this actually makes.

Rocket transport pretty tough. Much, much harder than you might expect when you see how successful we've been over the last 60 years.

So these systems can be very, very, very large. So here's an example of the International Space Station biggest thing in space right now.

I've personally worked on the space station for years. Other things I've worked on. Another example of a very large.

Aerospace system is the James Webb Space Telescope, which is working very, very well now.

They can also be very, very small. Here is an example of a cube sat. It's a completely different type of spacecraft. A1 unit cube sat is 10cm by 10 centimeters by 10 centimeters, or about four inches by 4 inches by 4 inches.

A2 unit cubesat would be 4 by 4 by 8 inches.

A three unit cube set would be about four inches by 4 inches by 12 inches. Still very very very small, but comparatively cheap. So you can build Cubesats for 10s of thousands of dollars, where the spacecraft that I've been showing you previously would probably cost you hundreds of millions or multiple billions.

Of dollars. So when you get into aerospace systems, things tend to get really expensive really, really fast. And as such, you have to do an awful lot of computer modeling and computer simulation to be sure that you get the design and the analysis mostly right before you even start building the thing, because the cost of building and testing these is so incredibly.

Expensive.

So here is an example of some of the things that are out there. You know, example of yesterday's heavy lift vehicles, the space shuttle.

So you probably all remember when the space shuttle was flying. It's been decommissioned, but it was, you know, the backbone of our heavy lift vehicles for years and years and years and years and as impressive as the space shuttle was.

When you compare it to other vehicles, it was really rather small.

So none of you are old enough probably to remember the flights of the Saturn 5. But for decades the Saturn Five was the largest, most powerful rocket successful rocket that had flown. And so here is a graphic that shows the Space Shuttle, the Saturn 5 and.

The Statue of Liberty for scale.

Well, nowadays we have two different rockets that are both larger and more powerful than the the Saturn 5. We'll be talking more about those in a couple of minutes, but those are the Space Launch System, which is going to be carrying our crew to the moon.

Is part of the Artemis 2, or are the Artemis missions and the space line are being produced by SpaceX, which we'll talk about a little bit more?

So these are examples of the current heavy lift rockets that are out there. You need to take that with a grain of salt. The first one is the Atlas Five. It's soon to be replaced by the Vulcan.

The Deltas have.

Just been decommissioned, the last Delta ever launched this early this month or the end of last month and the Aryan is still around.

Other ones that have come online is Spacex's Falcon 9, and there is the Space Launch System block one.

The Block 2 is what is going to be carrying the astronauts. I believe is part in the Block 3 is part of the Artemis mission.

And the Vulcan is just coming online right now, the next generation of heavy launch systems. And to put it all into perspective, you can sort of get a size of how large things are. So you can see the space shuttle there that you might remember the Falcon nines, which have gotten a lot of press because they are to a significant degree reusable and have been reused at least a few times successfully.

You've got the Glenn Series, which will be coming online shortly.

The Saturn 5 just for reference.

The Space Launch System and then the different versions of.

The space liner that is being produced by SpaceX, which.

Has had two totally unsuccessful launches and one launch a third launch which was relatively successful.

The re-entry portion was not successful.

So if you were to become an aerospace engineer, what are the types of things that you need to consider when it comes to designing these systems? I like to take a minute and talk about those.

So there's the whole reason that you go into space.

This would largely be the payload. Maybe the payload is the astronauts, maybe the payload is scientific equipment, maybe the payload is transmission equipment or GPS systems. So the nature of the payload very much depends on the mission, but it is the reason for the mission. Having said that, 95% of the spacecraft of the rocket system is built around getting that payload to where it needs to be, getting it power, and being sure that that payload can do the job that it was intended to do.

Next very, very important is the structures, whether that's the structure of the rocket or the structure of the spacecraft, because it's that structure that houses the payload, supports the solar arrays, supports the propulsion system.

So you can imagine that you can have a course in pretty much each one of these. You've got command and Control.

All modern spacecraft are robotic systems. So even though you may talk to the spacecraft relatively often, most of the time the spacecraft is not listening to you. It's doing its own thing on its own, collecting data. And then a few times a day, or maybe twice a day, if it downloads that data to the Earth and then receives additional information from Earth and how, maybe it'll change its mission.

All of these systems require electric power. So electric power, that's power collection or production, that's power storage. Think batteries, that's power management. How do you distribute that power to all of the equipment on board the spacecraft of the rocket? Very, very important.

Huge, hugely important is thermal management.

Goldilocks would hate space and rockets because space you're generally way too hot or way too cold. Things are seldom just right, and so you need to place.

All sorts of engineering systems into your rocket or your spacecraft, or heat things up when things are getting too cold, or cool things off when things are getting too warm. And it's not so easy to cool things off in space because you can't just open a window.

So thermal management is huge propulsion, very, very important. It's very difficult getting spacecraft from point A to point B. Flight mechanics, well, there's the flight mechanics that's associated with flying an aircraft, which is tough enough.

In space, a lot of flight mechanics is counterintuitive. It certainly isn't as they would have you believe in the movies. So indeed, when you get to RPI or wherever you go, if you're studying aerospace systems, you will have a flight mechanics course.

Attitude, determination and control very, very, very important. Because when you're in space.

Well, even when you're in an aircraft.

Sometimes you can't see the horizon, so in an aircraft, Most modern aircraft have an artificial horizon which the pilot can look at and determine what his orientation is, even when he can't see anything out through the cockpit. Same thing in space, if you're far enough away from the Earth, you just see stars.

So how do you determine what your orientation is? And how do you get yourself reoriented so that you're pointed where you need to be? Whether you're pointed in a particular direction so that you can collect data or you can communicate with the Earth and then all modern spacecraft or robotic systems. So robotics is a huge part of modern spacecraft.

This is sort of an example of how things all fit together, at least with regard to aerospace. So in the yellow box at the bottom, these are all the aspects that I just talked about that have to do with the spacecraft. But if you notice in the red box at the top, there are many, many other things that are very, very important to many aerospace applications, many aeronautical applications, but they don't actually have to do with the spacecraft of the aircraft itself. So these, so these are other things you'd have to become familiar with.

In the case of a spacecraft, you also have the launch system. Think of the rocket.

So the rocket is built by 1 manufacturer, think SpaceX or United Launch Alliance. The spacecraft may be built by somebody totally different. Think JPL, think Boeing, think Lockheed, think Northrop. Also, you've got ground stations tracking and data. So there's a network of ground stations around the Earth for receiving signals from aircraft or from spacecraft. It's particularly important for spacecraft.

Because generally, to listen to spacecraft, at least spacecraft that are a long ways from the Earth, you need very very very special antennas that are actually pointing at the spacecraft, otherwise you can't hear them.

And then a huge part of most aerospace applications is something that's called mission OPS, mission operations, incredibly important, but not actually flying with the spacecraft. They're the people that are involved with controlling the spacecraft, adjusting the mission, collecting the data once it gets home.

So.

Other examples, As I said, here's a large important systems, James Webb Space Telescope, and next to it is the Hubble Space Telescope. Very interesting missions. Another mission called Ulysses had very complex Space Flight mechanics. I'd like to talk about this one for a little bit. They want to put it in an orbit over the Sun's poles to collect information about the behavior of the Sun. It is impossible for us on the Earth to build a rocket.

Big enough and powerful enough to put a spacecraft in that orbit.

So we had to take our understanding of Newton's laws of motion to send the spacecraft all the way out to Jupiter, where now it gets a gravity assist from Jupiter not to accelerate it, but to turn the trajectory of the spacecraft now that it flies over the sun.

And is now flying over the poles really interesting mission. Same thing with Galileo.

Galileo was originally designed to fly directly to Jupiter. It was to go up on the space shuttle immediately following the Challenger. Unfortunately, the Challenger accident or incident occurred and so the way that they were going to originally launch Galileo was deemed too dangerous. So we had to change the mission and use four different gravity assists. It was called the Vega gravity assist. Vega stood for Venus, Earth, Earth.

Gaspara.

Gravity assist trajectory incredibly complex. But NASA has gotten so good at this that most people think that it's easy. I'll tell you it's not.

Another huge part of aerospace is propulsion. So in this slide, just examples of the different things that are out there. Over on the left we have one of the big Rocketdyne Aerojet F ones that was used to power the Saturn 5 each Saturn five had five of these, each one of these.

Generated 1,000,000 1/2 lbs of thrust.

And would drink about 3200 liters of rocket fuel and propellant every second.

Next to that on the right and you can somewhat see the silhouette of a man for scale. So you can see that this BE 5 is a very large engine, but not nearly as large as the big F ones. These are actually being generated by Blue Origin. They're going to be powering all the Glen rockets and the Vulcan rockets and in the upper right hand corner, that's the future, that is electric propulsion.

Electric propulsion doesn't work very well when one wants to get off the surface of the Earth. When one wants to get off the surface of the Earth and get into initial orbit, you pretty much have to use chemical propellants.

But once you're in orbit, it can be shown that there are other forms of advanced propulsion, often electric, some nuclear propulsion, which are very, very, very much more efficient than chemical propellants. And so again, these are things that you would learn about if you come and you study aeronautical and aerospace engineering here. So just a couple of more slides left.

So one thing I want to convey is don't think that if you want to work on helicopters or aircraft or spacecraft or rockets, that you must become an aeronautical engineer or an aerospace engineer. If you want to work on rockets, helicopters, aircraft, spacecraft. It's a great field for you to study and I hope you'll join us, but.

Having come from industry, I've personally seen that actually the majority of people that work on rockets or spacecraft or aircraft or actually from mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, biomedical engineering, even civil engineering. So here is an example, This is a picture of an F22 Raptor and so yes.

The people that work on this are aerospace engineers or aeronautical engineers. You need aeronautical engineers that understand aerospace structures, they understand aerodynamics, they understand aerospace propulsion.

And they're the ones that are needed to make sure it all fits together in an optimal manner. So yes, generally the arrows are in charge.

But then you also have electrical, computer and systems engineer and computer scientist. 40% of the cost of a modern, at least military aircraft is avionics, systems, radar and telecom. OK, well that is the realm not of an aerospace engineer, but an electrical engineer, telecommunications engineer, computer and systems engineer, or a computer scientist.

Whoops, back up.

Next we have.

Material science. Material science is huge. Many of the advances that have been made in the last 20 years, both in aeronautical engineering and aerospace engineering.

Occurred because more advanced materials were developed that allowed us to do things that we couldn't do before. So a lot of material scientists work on all of these systems. Over here on the right side, on the bottom, you see civil engineering. Oh my God, when was the last time you saw a building fly? Hopefully not very recently, believe it or not, when I was working on rockets at Space Park, we had a lot of civil engineers.

Why? Because a type of analysis that you did on a rocket during primary boost that's getting it off the launchpad into space is very similar to the type of analysis that's done in modeling a building during an earthquake. And so we had many civil engineers doing base shake analysis, but not on buildings but on our rockets carrying our payloads.

Up next, you've got biomedical engineers. Anytime you've got crew involved, you've got to have biomedical engineers involved because you need to keep the crew or the passengers alive and comfortable, which maybe is actually tougher than you may think. Finally, Mechanical Engineers, they're everywhere. As soon as you drop down to the subsystem level, they're doing the landing gear, they're doing the hydraulics, they're doing a lot of the thermal management, they're doing the radiators.

Mechanical Engineers are everywhere.

Both on aircraft, helicopters and on spacecraft. And then finally you got industrial.

And systems engineers that are getting us all to work together. So if you want to be in charge and you want to understand the whole picture.

Then you pretty much need to be either an aeronautical engineer or an aerospace engineer, depending on whether you want to focus on helicopters and aircraft or you want to focus on rockets and spacecraft.

Having said that, most of the people working on all of these systems are mechanicals, electricals, computing systems.

Biomeds, material scientists, so don't think that the only way to some of these great applications is through aeronautical and aerospace engineering, but it is a very good way. And So what I'd like to do now, that's my last slide. I'm going to put up one more slide that belongs to one of my students, Max Marshall, who.

I will hand the mic over to in just a second. He did his undergraduate work at RPI as graduating as an aerospace engineer, and now he's doing master's level work and he's doing really, really, really great work.

That's associated with the Artemis 2 mission and specifically getting our crew at a rocket safely to the moon. And so with that I will hand things over to Max and at the end I'll answer any questions you might have.

Max.

Can you guys hear? Awesome. Thank you, Kurt.

Yeah, so I'm Max Marshall. I threw together a little slide, just a couple of pictures here. I'm a current RBI student, like Professor Anderson said, studying aeronautical engineering. I've spent the past couple semesters or I've had three internships at NASA over the past two years working on the Artemis One and Artemis 2 missions, specifically working on guidance, navigation, control.

And optical navigation, so you can see a couple pictures there.

Up in the center I have actually what will be the docking camera for one of the future Artemis missions that I got to calibrate, which is pretty neat. I also have there an image of the moon that I actually generated for my work trying to do crater navigation that I'll be doing for my masters and some of my other work there from NASA I have done during my time here at RPI. I'm doing a Co term, I have done a Co-op and so I have a lot of.

Experience with that sort of stuff if you have any questions there.

I think.

Yeah, I think there was a question earlier about how students get their co-ops and internships. Did you want to talk a little bit about how that worked out for you? Sure. So mine was a bit interesting in that NASA puts out applications twice a year for its Pathways internship program. I applied using the Career Center here to help me get my resume in order.

And applied and got in and so that's how it ended up working out for me. I know a lot of other positions vary, but that's that's how it worked for me. Cool. And there was also a question about Co term. So do you want to talk a little bit about that because you are currently doing Co terms. Sure. Coterm is has been pretty neat so far. I'm doing my Masters of Engineering which is project based rather than the Master of Science which is more of a thesis, so sort of more aligned with a PhD.

As I said before, my work focusing on creator navigation.

We're hoping to get to that point where we can try and navigate via creators on the moon, which will be very helpful for future Artemis missions, since that's sort of going to be the goal.

I've also gotten to take a number of more advanced graduate classes to help me in fulfilling all those goals and needs in the hopes that NASA will hire me once I finish. And so you applied for that while you were still an undergrad, right? And right now, maybe Professor Anderson can address this too.

So we have the aerospace that is currently available for students that are going for their bachelor's degree, but right now we just have aeronautical for the masters from the graduate program.

Great.

Yeah. So the the goal is that after this year we are in the process of writing a proposal to the state of New York.

To change the Masters and the PhD from Aeronautical engineering to Aerospace Engineering.

The reason being is an aerospace engineer is understood to have enough aeronautical engineering or enough aeronautical exposure experience that an aerospace engineer can function in society or in industry as an aeronautical engineer, but they also have space experience at the bachelor's level.

An aeronautical engineer implies that you don't have space experience. So because our department is mechanical, aerospace and nuclear engineering, it has was decided this year that we will change.

Master's program and the PhD program to be a Masters of Aerospace and a PhD of Aerospace. Though if you want to do just just aeronautical engineering at the Masters level, you can. Or if you wanted to just aeronautical engineering at the PhD level, you can because it's understood that aerospace engineering in a broad sense encompasses aeronautical engineering.

I know we had some questions earlier about what is the difference between the two and I think we addressed that earlier on. But if you came in a little bit late, if you were to look at the the template that we had for the aeronautical engineering bachelor's degree, which is the last one that we have in a live catalog.

I think somebody had pointed that out and provided the link. So that's great. If you go there, you can see the Aeronautical engineering template in the catalogue and you won't see Aerospace in there yet just because it was just approved this year.

Catalog changes happen over the summer time, so but you do see in the footnotes that we have the three different tracks. So the biggest difference is now that we have aerospace students that want the aerospace engineering degree, we'll just choose those courses that are space related and those are Space Flight mechanics and space vehicle design.

Yeah. So if if you're interested, we've actually been doing everything for an aerospace degree for about 20 years, more than 20 years. It's just we finally decided that the students, many students, wanted to graduate with an aerospace degree rather than an aeronautical degree and then an explicit space track.

So.

We are now offering an aeronautical engineering degree which no longer has a space track and if you're on the space track you are getting the aerospace degree.

And the difference in those two? Or effectively you're mostly Aeronautical engineering, but the aerospace you must have a Space Flight mechanics class, you must have a space vehicle design class and then ideally then you have an aerospace technical elective. So really the difference at the bachelors level between aerospace and aeronautical engineering is 3 courses.

Yeah.

And that's not just here, that's everywhere at the bachelors level when you've got an aerospace degree built off an aeronautical engineering degree, which is.

The majority of cases.

Still, I see a question about clubs and activities outside of the classroom. Max, did you get involved in any while you're here? I was not involved in a ton. Mostly. Most of my time here has been COVID and around COVID, which has been tough, and then co-ops. Everything else I know, design, build, fly is a thing on campus that people get really into. And also the rents of the rocket society is big. They build rockets and do launches and stuff and it seems really cool, so.

Yeah. So let, so let me talk about that. We have over 200 clubs.

And competitions. So there's a lot of stuff out there that you can do that maybe engineering focused as a club or not. It's got loads of things. So you know, if you're into backpacking, skiing, dancing, whatever, we got loads of stuff.

I'll do a shout out for the Rocket club.

We're coming up very quickly on our 200th anniversary. In fact, we are in our 200th year at this point, or will be in November. And so our rocket club is building a multistage rocket which will.

Successful go to well above the von Carmen line, which by definition is the edge of space. The significance of that is there is only one other school ever that may have been successful. Its data was a little bit ambiguous, so if we do it in no uncertain terms, we will be the first school ever, anywhere to have done it in no uncertain terms.

And so we're hoping to do that as part of our 200th anniversary celebration.

So I did see a question about study abroad opportunities.

I can look those up and see if I can provide a link for all of our associated or affiliated programs.

I don't know off the top of my head, but I'll see if I can find that unless Randy has a link to that.

Percent.

There's a bunch of them, so there's there's multiple flavors of this.

So.

We're talking about international exposure.

Yes, there. Yeah, sorry.

We have at one level, we've got.

Schools that were extremely closely tied to, and those are first and foremost Denmark Technical University, Nanyang Technical University and a little bit lesser degree Queensland University of Technology. And with those programs were so tightly coupled that effectively you pay your tuition here, you go there for a term, you take classes and it just completely seamless.

We have then other connections with about 160, maybe 180 other schools around the world where things aren't so well defined that you can go to. We've had other students go to them there. You need to be a little bit more careful with what courses you take. We recommend that if you're interested in those, you would get the courses that you plan on taking at those schools approved in advance. So we're certain that you're taking the right course. So we'll integrate well with the program you're taking here at RPI, whatever program that is.

And then if you're interested in going to a school that's overseas that we've never had one of our students go to, you can still do that, but it's proceed with caution. And then you'd have to work with Karen Dvorak over on our International Students office.

So I have statistics on percentages of main students that are aeronautical and aerospace, so I will look that up and report back.

Let's see. Any other questions?

Well in quotes have access to the quantum computer. There's going to be a quantum club. Any faculty member, any student can write a proposal to get time on the quantum computer. The thing that you have to be aware of and this is something that we are actually trying to figure out and will be an Ave. of research with our quantum computer is quantum computers are not expected.

To be better than a standard, more conventional binary computer for all problems. There are certain types of problems that they will be many orders of magnitude better, in fact.

The level of improvement is exponential in form as opposed to algebraic.

Those are very, very, very special problems, and they tend to be problems that deal with probabilities.

And this is a whole area of research. So there's the research. And how do you build a better quantum computer? How do you code for a quantum computer? But then.

2018.

What type of problems will actually be solved more efficiently on a quantum computer? And there certainly we do expect that some types of aeronautical and aerospace and mechanical engineering or engineering problems.

Will lend themselves better to quantum computing.

But not all. And so this is one of those things that we're going to be exploring.

But yes, effectively any student at RPI can request time on the quantum computer.

But you have to write a proposal. You can't just log in and do it. You have to write a proposal to get time on it. And then they say, Yep, that's a great application, We can learn a lot. Everybody could learn, and then you can get time on it.

Randy, did you have any other questions or?

2.

So, so let's talk about that. As I mentioned at the very beginning of the talk, an aeronautical engineer or an aerospace engineer is nothing more, nothing less than a very specialized mechanical engineer.

Consequently, the Arrow Macduel or Aerospace Macduel is one of the duels that makes the most sense.

Because.

Aeronautical or aerospace classes.

Will generally satisfy the mechanical engineering degree requirements, but not vice versa. So if you're interested in Aeromech dual, when you get to RPI, you should tell your advisor, whether it's your hub advisor or your academic advisor, that you're interested in the dual, and they will immediately put you on an arrow template because again, all the courses for your first three years satisfy the mechanical requirements.

There are other duels that also make sense, but a lot of duals do not. So the duals that make sense are Chemical Engineering, Chemistry, Electrical Engineering, Computer and Systems Engineering, Computer and Systems Engineering, Computer Science.

Environmental and civil engineering.

The duels that make sense are the duels where there's so much overlap between the requirements that you can do the dual with little extra work and you can still get out in four, maybe 4 1/2 years even without AP credit.

Other duels are possible, so think electrical engineering.

Chemical engineering or electrical engineering?

Mechanical engineering.

Unfortunately, that will take you about five years.

If that is the case, expect that your advisor or the people in the advising hub will try to talk you out of it. Instead, say, you should consider.

Our accelerated master's program, where now you go directly from a bachelor's and 1° to a master's and that masters can be in the same discipline or another discipline and you do that in five years. Why is that better?

Because if it's going to take you five years to get 2°.

A master's degree is worth very much more than any second bachelor's degree.

Similarly, a mechanical aero dual is popular because it is so easy.

If you want to call yourself a mechanical engineer, you can. If you want to call yourself an aerospace engineer, you can. Do not expect you're going to get a higher salary because of it.

Because generally the companies are going to be hiring you because of 1° or the other, not because of both.

I can talk about that, Kate, Can you talk about that? I'm not sure who would be best.

Well, yeah, I mean, so a student that is coming to RPI should expect that ARCH is going to be part of their experience here. So they, the expectation with arch is that they stay here on campus after their sophomore year and take a normal course load of classes in the summer. And then because they still will only do 2 semesters during what we're calling their junior year and we're calling that junior year starting in that summer, they will only be here in either the spring or the junior.

Sorry, spring or fall or spring semester?

Their junior year the the one that they're not here is what we call their way experience. And so a lot of students, especially in Maine want to do a Co-op or an internship for their away experience. Not all of them do. Some of them do a self designed project that can be related to their major.

Or they'll do research, or they can do study abroad. So there are a lot of options with that away semester.

But if they want to do the coop or the internship and work for NASA or something like that, that's going to take some planning to make sure that they're setting themselves up to be an attractive candidate. So they're going to work with people like the Career Center, their faculty advisor, to make sure you know they're doing everything that those companies are going to want to see. They have a strong DPA, that sort of thing.

And that's that's how.

Arch kind of forces students to get those outside experiences on top of their education here at RPI and without having them stay an extra year. So it's all still done within the four years. It's just shifting that one semester into the summer and then allowing the students to be away for that one semester. So Max, you were here when Arch was required or yes, OK, my Arch was the summer of 2020, so I'm a bad example.

Just because it was, we were pretty locked down from COVID, yeah.

Yep. But yeah, so it's another requirement for graduation. So there's two requirements for Arch. Students have to take a class that helps prepare them for a successful internship job search and that is one of the requirements that they do. And the other one is that they have to do in a way, semester. So so that required course. They don't earn academic credit for it, but it is a requirement for them to graduate.

And it is a helpful class because obviously you're learning those skills to help find those great experiences.

So you will.

You'll get to work.

Hands on experience in in all, all four years that you're here. The thing to keep in mind though, is when it comes to aerospace systems, because they're so large, they're so expensive, they're so dangerous.

That.

You'll see the wind tunnel, but you actually won't be able to maybe do much with the wind tunnel until your your junior year or your senior year.

If you get into undergraduate research, then it's possible for you to get hands on experience almost immediately, particularly if you work with an experimentalist.

If you work with someone who's more theoretical, like me or Professor Singh, you can still join our research group early, but you'll discover that it becomes somewhat hard to talk to us because you haven't had enough math or physics to even understand the lingo or what we're talking about. But we do. I I guess what I would say that we do very, very well here at RPI is making the connection between the theory and the application and wherever possible.

You get hands on experience, and particularly if you're interested in the hands on experience, I would highly recommend you get involved with the various.

Competitions or the the various clubs like the rocket club where you're actually building a multi stage rocket, Not only are they designing the rocket, they're designing the engine, they've even designed the propellant that's being used. So they're not going out and buying somebody else's rocket engine. No, they've designed the propellant, they've designed the engine, they've designed everything.

And you could start working on that as a freshman.

Or the design build fly competition. So it is the hands on is absolutely there and there early if the student is willing to take a little bit of initiative if the student is just waiting to see what they see in class.

Then it might be, at least in the Arrow curriculum, their junior year before they get much hands on.

The quality of our faculty. We're a research institution, research one institution. There aren't that many research one institution. So every faculty member is doing research, and we tend to bring the research into the classroom. I know every class that I teach, I tend to talk about what is being done in my research group or how what I'm teaching applies to real spacecraft that I've personally worked on. So you can you can see the direct connection between the theory and the application.

And another nice thing about that is you're not just seeing what is being built today, but you are seeing the future because much of the things that I'm doing my research on probably won't fly for 20 years.

Even though aerospace tends to move along quite quickly compared to some of the other disciplines.

The things we're doing is actually are very, very, very advanced. And so one of the things that I think is very special about an RPI education is the quality of the faculty, the quality of our research, and the research that we do here is integral to our teaching. Another thing which is very special is if you go to most universities.

And you take aerospace there you will have a fixed wing flight mechanic, or fixed wing capstone, or maybe a roto craft capstone. There's actually not that many roto craft capstone culminating design courses.

Or aerospace. But the design team you're on will be made entirely of aerospace engineers.

Unfortunately, this is not reality. That reality is If you were to be an industry, the design team would have a number of aerospace engineers, but then you would also have Mechanical Engineers, electrical engineers, computer and systems engineers, and material scientists.

This is what we tend to do at RPI on my design teams we're going to have.

Yes, aerospace engineers and aeronautical engineers. But also mechanicals, electricals, maybe material science. I can tell you positively this is not done at 90% of the other schools. Last week I was a judge at a competing school for their culminating design experience classes and their mechanical capstones only had mechanical students. Their civils only had civils. Their arrows only had arrows.

2 BHK.

And the number one complaint that students voiced to me as a judge was that they could have done a better job if they had an electrical or a mechanical or a material scientist on their team. Well, you come to RPI, that is what you're going to find.

Another argument is if you look at what is required for the culminating design experiences and what is being followed at most other schools, that model was developed at RPI or Stanford about 40 years ago. And you know, I couldn't be happier than everybody else is doing what we were doing 40 years ago. We've moved on.

So I will also tell you, I think our design experience is better than most other schools and I'm speaking as an accreditation evaluator.

Did you want to see anything from your experiences? Sure. So my experience with Take Professor Anderson's Capstone was tremendous. I feel like it prepared me really well for the stuff that I've gone on to do at NASA, as well as the reputation of NASA. Or, excuse me, of RPI. Sorry, of RPI outside of RPI.

Is really good. In my experience, it's not. Doesn't seem to be as well known as some of the other schools that were mentioned, but.

The quality of our engineers.

People hold in very high regard and I'm doing what I can to keep it that way.

All right, and.

Thank you. Bye.