In May 2000, I finished 6 years at the University of Michigan's College of Engineering. I graduated in December 1998 with a B.S. in Aerospace engineering. The degree I finished in May 2000 was a Master of Engineering in Space Systems, which they now call a Master of Engineering in Space Engineering.
During my time at U of M I was a member of The Students in Christ, a student organization from The Ann Arbor Church of Christ. In addition I was the treasurer of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) for 2 years, and treasurer for the Students for the Exploration and Development of Space (SEDS). It was also great fun to be a member of Sigma Gamma Tau, The National Aerospace Honor Society, and Tau Beta Pi, the National Engineering Honor Society.
Also during my time at Michigan I had a job in the computer field since I love computers so much, and because I needed the money. I did programming and network administration for CAEN, The Computer Aided Engineering Network, in the Mac-Systems group.
I worked for 9 months in 1999 in the structures team on the Icarus spacecraft project. We were building a satellite that will serve as an endmass to the ProSEDS tether propulsion experiment. NASA's Marshal Space Flight Center is flying ProSEDS to demonstrate that electrodynamic tethers can produce a thrust force on a space vehicle. Our endmass will be at the end of a 15 km tether, and will be instrumented to transmit GPS positional data and magnetometer data to earth. The mission should launch sometime in 2003/04.
For my senior level lab class, I got to work on wind tunnel testing for the NASA X-38 space plane. The idea was to create a vehicle that could serve as a life boat to the space station. I'm not sure if it is still being worked on currently. The vehicle was to detach from the station will all crew aboard and automatically re-enter and land. For testing they would drop a scale model from a B-52 and then deploy a huge parasail which allows it to fly to the ground. When detaching from the B-52 there was way too much instability, so NASA was doing CFD and wind tunnel experiments to find out what the problem was. We were contracted (free labor!) to do some tunnel testing and present the results back to them. They provided a really nice model that they created with stereo lithography. We had to build balances to put in the model to take measurements of the aero forces, and then run the tests. Check out my X-38 page for more detailed info about our experiments.
For a short time I got to work on JAVA software that demonstrates aerospace concepts over the web. The Michigan Aerospace Instructional System (MAIS) project was very cool. Java applets would load an demonstrate in real time fundamental concepts like fluid flow, coordinate transforms, and ballistic reentry.