Space Quest

"It's amazing how many Riddle grads are here," says Karen Reed, an engineer at United Space Alliance (USA), the prime contractor for NASA's Space Shuttle and International Space Station operations. "When we socialize, people say, 'Look, it's another Riddle reunion.'" Reed, who trains astronauts to use the shuttle's robotic arm to "track and capture" payloads such as a satellite or the Hubble Space Telescope, earned a bachelor's degree in engineering physics (BSEP) in 1996 at the University's Daytona Beach, Fla., campus.

Her company, which has 9,400 employees, is not the only pipeline to space jobs for the University's alumni.

Barrios Technology Corp., a company of 260 employees in Houston, Tex., has hired 18 graduates from Embry-Riddle's Prescott, Ariz., campus in the last three years. "We can't get enough of them. We want more," says Sheila Self, a personnel staffer at the company. Barrios supplies flight control, training, software development, and trajectory design to USA.

And last fall's Industry/Career Expo on the Daytona Beach campus was a "feeding frenzy," according to John Novy, associate professor of aerospace engineering. Most years, students visiting the annual job fair are invited to fly to the company later for interviews, he says, "but this time the reps were hiring right on the spot."

'Every kind of job'

An estimated 2,000 alumni work "in every kind of job in every aerospace company you can name," says Novy, from designers of spacecraft and probe instruments to mission specialists to astronauts. (See article about astronaut Susan Still and astronaut candidate Daniel Burbank, both ERAU alumni.)

What accounts for the University's success in placing its graduates?

The secret, faculty and employers agree, is two space-focused academic programs that blend the fundamental and the practical, foster close collaboration with faculty, and require upper-level design projects.

The two programs, in aerospace engineering and engineering physics, come equipped with a handful of impressive statistics:

Aerospace engineering's enrollment of 942 students on both campuses is the largest in the nation.
The 135-student enrollment in the 10-year-old engineering physics program, offered only on the Daytona Beach campus, is the largest of any such program approved by the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology.
U.S. News & World Report rated Embry-Riddle's engineering program 19th in the nation among universities that do not grant the Ph.D. degree.

Engineering physics is a hybrid engineering program with a focus on the near-Earth space environment. Many of its graduates design spacecraft, scientific instruments, and experiments that go into space.

Aerospace engineering offers optional courses in spacecraft design, which prepare students for engineering positions as designers of space vehicles and their operation. A master's degree in the discipline is also awarded on the Daytona Beach campus.

Performing like graduate students

Embry-Riddle people have been standouts in the aerospace industry for quite a while. John Olivero, a leading expert for 20 years at Penn State on disruptions of the ozone layer, was so taken by what he heard about Embry-Riddle's engineering physics program and the job readiness of its graduates hired by NASA that he moved to Daytona Beach three years ago to chair the physical sciences department that runs it. "Would I ever have loved to walk into a program like this when I was 18 years old!" he says.

Although the University doesn't grant doctoral degrees, "these students get more attention from their Ph.D.-holding professors and in the labs than undergraduate programs elsewhere can afford," says Elliot Palmer, chairman of engineering physics. "As a result, many perform like advanced graduate students."

Asked to identify what best prepared them for success in the aerospace industry, most graduates don't hesitate in naming their senior design courses and their design project, a yearlong labor of learning and love. Aerospace engineering students choose a problem in aircraft or spacecraft design for their effort. Engineering physics students have designed projects to enter in the National Aerospace Spacecraft Design Competition sponsored each year by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics.

An Embry-Riddle team took second place in the contest in 1995-96 for its design of an "Unmanned Mission to Mars for Propellant Manufacture," and another placed fourth in 1992-93 for its plans for an "Orbital Assembly Facility around the Earth."

Groups of up to six students work from fall through spring on their projects, making four presentations about their work before turning in a final report. "It's just like they're on the job, except they don't get paid," says Murali Nair, the associate professor who directs them. He adds that the student reports are reviewed by NASA for ideas that may be useable in the space program.

Design courses ease transition to space jobs

Most who get jobs in the space industry find the transition easy due to the experience they've gained in their upper-level courses at Embry-Riddle.

Chad Salo (BSEP'95) says his senior project was a dry run for his job as an operations programmer and analyst at Research Data Systems Corp. at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. He tests MODIS, a remote sensing instrument which will measure from its orbit earthly phenomena such as chlorophyll in the oceans and changes in plant life and add to our understanding of man's impact on the planet.

He says his senior team, in designing a forest fire detection satellite, "took the same steps as the engineers who designed MODIS, but the engineers were more sophisticated and took longer."

Aaron Rodzinak, who earned a bachelor's in aerospace engineering (BSAR) in 1994, credits the experience of working with his design class teammates with helping to prepare him for his present job at Barrios.

He works with 40 engineers in a flight design and dynamics group that develops plans for guiding the Space Shuttle's descent to Earth in normal and emergency conditions. He performs countless computer simulations using data ranging from the craft's speed and position to shifts in payload and fuel weight. The scenarios he develops also are used to train astronauts.

Rodzinak also pinch-hits in Mission Control where, using the latest atmospheric data, he runs computer simulations to see how a mission is likely to fare that day.

Shuttle diplomacy

Sean Fuller (BSEP'96) works on a team at USA that develops flight plans and operation scenarios for the International Space Station, parts of which will start going up in late 1998. In addition to figuring out how the pieces will be assembled in space, his added role of assembling the views of the American, Russian, Japanese, European, and Canadian partners in the project requires skills in negotiation and diplomacy.

"Moving some pieces from the shuttle to the space station will involve a space walk. In planning that, you have to have plenty of time for the astronauts to remove the module, dock, and reconnect it. You'll have an international crew of at least one American and one Russian. Everything that will happen must be agreed upon in advance by all the parties."

"Sean is very outgoing and a good communicator," says his boss, Ramesh Khatri, director of mission operations at NASA's Johnson Space Center. "In his job, you need to be assertive and able to resolve conflicts and explain your viewpoints without alienating others."

Fuller gained many of those skills at Embry-Riddle, reporting on and defending his senior design project. His team designed a lander to Mars that would use reactors to convert Martian carbon dioxide to oxygen and hydrogen for use by a later manned mission as breathable oxygen and fuel for the return to Earth.

Not all students need a course to teach them how to pitch a research idea though. This spring, Brandon Cangiano, Sara Oswald, Dave Swanson, and Robert Ward conducted experiments in microgravity aboard a NASA KC-135 research jet that produces 25 to 40 seconds of weightlessness 35 to 50 times.

The foursome was one of 24 teams whose research proposals were chosen in a national competition by NASA and the Texas Space Grant Consortium. Their project, which tested methods of moving fluids passively through containers in a weightless environment, could help make the fuel and life support systems on spacecraft lighter and more reliable and compact.

From classroom to cafeteria

Because Embry-Riddle's class sizes are small, its opportunities for faculty-student interaction are great.

"At most universities a student can't walk in and spend an hour in the department chairman's office. Students here can, and do," says Richard Felton, chairman of aerospace engineering on the Prescott campus.

L.D. Stevenson, a recruiter for Barrios, says, "When I first went to Prescott to recruit, I was impressed with the interaction between professors and students." He counts this as an important factor in the success of the graduates hired by his company.

John Gewecke, a recruiter for Boeing Rocketdyne who hired more than 50 Prescott campus grads in his previous job at Honeywell agrees. "I've seen professors sitting down at lunch in the cafeteria with students. They take a personal interest in educating these young men and women."

That includes alerting their students about opportunities for summer internships. Palmer says three engineering physics students have landed fellowships at the prestigious National Center for Atmospheric Research, which selects only a few fellows a year. He says others have landed internships at the University of Alaska's Geophysical Institute, the University of Michigan, Utah State, Argonne National Laboratories, and Arecibo Radio Observatory in Puerto Rico.

Faculty research good for students

Ever since former NASA scientist Steven Sliwa became Embry-Riddle's president five years ago, the level of research activity by faculty has been increasing. "The administration understands that if we are to achieve excellence as a university, we must have research," says Yechiel "Joel" Crispin, associate professor of aerospace engineering. "We must contribute to the state of the art, not just teach what others have achieved."

One of his students, Virginie Guerre, recently completed research for her master's degree on ways to minimize the amount of fuel used by spacecraft in their rendezvous with the Space Station.

Crispin and several colleagues are talking with aerospace engineering faculty at the University of Florida about possible research collaborations in dynamics and control of aircraft and spacecraft, aeroacoustics, and composite materials.

As faculty bring in space-related research projects, they also open up opportunities for students. In Prescott, for example, student Jonathan Rustick and Assistant Professor of Aerospace Engineering Ron Madler are evaluating fragments from explosions in a study that may help to protect the Space Station when it's in orbit.

"Human activity in space is creating a belt of debris around the Earth," Madler explains. "We're modeling the environment to find out the characteristics, sizes, and quantity of the debris and the threat they pose to our space craft in orbit." (See story about faculty's space research.)

'I want to be an astronaut'

Guerre is part of a phenomenon that has Olivero "pleased, but puzzled": the unusually large number of women drawn to Embry-Riddle's two space programs. While the campus is 15 percent female, the enrollment of women in engineering physics is 37 percent and in aerospace engineering 17 percent.

"When I ask women who want to get into the engineering physics program,'What attracted you here?' they say, 'I want to be an astronaut,'" Olivero says. "When I tell them there's no guarantee they'll become an astronaut as a result of this program, and that the odds of anyone becoming one are very steep, they nod their head and say, 'That's okay.' They know they have to look for challenges and that we have a tough program."

"A lot of kids who come here want to be astronauts or mission specialists or designers of instruments for the space probes," says Palmer, in engineering physics. "But the physics of near space is the same physics that applies in the rest of the world, so they're not stuck in one channel. They can go in many directions."

No matter which direction Embry-Riddle's "space" students go, their career prospects are out of this world.