Spacecraft Senior Design

Posted on April 24, 2014 by Jessica Callinan

One of the most exciting yet daunting experiences as an engineer at Purdue is your senior design project. I remember hearing about senior design my freshmen year from older friends, and I was always afraid of the day that I had to do it. 

Most seniors take senior design their graduating semester, and all of last semester I was terrified of the impending doom I expected senior design to be. Upon our first day of class, I realized that I had been terribly mistaken and mislead. 

Every major does senior design differently, but for Aeronautical and Astronautical Engineering, it is split into and aeronautical senior design and an astronautical senior design. Typically, aeronautical does an aircraft project and astronautical does a spacecraft project. I chose the astronautical side, as space has always been my focus and a space project sounded really interesting.

Our professor proposed our project in a very simplistic manner: "I will be treating this class of 40 students as a company and I will be the customer. You will have a team manager and assistant manager, and the rest of the class will be split into technical teams with individual group leaders. You're project is to completely design a mission to inhabit the moon for 4 2/7 years for research purposes to see if inhabiting the Mars is feasible."

He eventually went into more detail and specifics, but the project and class structure was really exciting from the start. It made me want to do this project, and do it well, because it was something I could get passionate about. From talking to people in other disciplines, this feeling is mutual. If you have passion for your project, it makes the work more fun and much less stressful. You get to present something that you are proud of and show off all your hard work.

Our team compiled a 1100+ page report and presented our final presentation this past Thursday. We invited faculty, students, family, and friends to our presentation and had only standing room by the time we were able to start. We also had NASA representative phone conferencing in to listen to our presentation, including an Associate Administrator. Our manager and assistant manager presented our work, and the entire team was present to answer all questions asked. We were featured in the Journal and Courier!. We even got featured on Fox News!

Check our the video of our final design below!

It felt great to present our hard work and complete all the challenges we had faced as a team over the past semester. We had an experience unlike any other we had in college, working in a large team to accomplish a single task. If really showed how important it was to rely on your teammates and how much you can accomplish as an entire team. You can also watch the voice over of the final presentation below!

As scary as senior design sounds and as much work as it is, it is a ton of fun and worth every bit of effort. I wish I could relive the experience now!