Monthly Archives: June 2009

June 30, 2009

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I can hardly believe it is already time for my trip to Europe. Tomorrow I leave for what I hope will be one of the best experiences of my life. It is hard to believe May and June have already passed. I have done so much already this summer, so let me share a few of those things.

After getting back at the end of April, I spent most of the next month working. I got a lot of hours in at the restaurant and made a little bit of money. I also got to spend time with my friends from home on excursions such as camping on a farm and spotting at the St. Louis Airport. As soon as June rolled around, my summer went into hyper drive. My sister got married, my friend Derrick from ERAU came to visit, and I continued my working. I also got to go with my mother, sister, and new brother-in-law for a week to Jamaica. We stayed in Montego Bay and also got to visit Ochos Rios and Negril. I had a lot of fun at all of these things, but June went by way too fast.

When I arrived home from Jamaica I was thrown back into reality. My SS130 Online course (the Co-requisite for the EU Study Abroad) was up and ready to be started. I have not made it very far in the course, but the professor has been very understanding and will not make us do it while traveling abroad. My first impressions of taking a course online are mixed. I like moving at my own pace, but I do not like relying on the cooperation of technology to get it done. I ran into one issue while taking a quiz yesterday, but thankfully my professor is very understanding and the problem was resolved. I am going to have to work really hard when I get home from Europe to be able to catch up on this course.

As I said I leave tomorrow for London. I am meeting two friends in Philadelphia where we will catch our overnight flight to the UK. Here are some bits and pieces of all the exciting things I have planned for the next three weeks:

July 2-5 London
British Science Museum, Imperial War Museum, RAF Museum (including Bomber Command and Battle of Britain Museum), and a full day on our own!

July 6-9 Paris
The Louvre, Musee de l’Air et de l’Espace, Arc de Triomphe, The Aerodrome, and a full day on our own!

July 10-12 Munich
Flugwerft Schleissheim Museum, Duetches Museum, and a full day on our own!

July 13-14 Traben-Trarbach
Mont Royal Airfield for a Glider Flight

After this, we are free to do whatever we wish or to return home. I am certainly going to spend some extra time in Europe and see Stuttgart, Frankfurt, and Milan. I will be officially returning home on July 21. Stay tuned for journals from each part of my journey!!! And as always, if you have any questions let me know by emailing me at meansm@erau.edu. Thanks for reading!

Until Next Time,
Mack

June 2009

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Hello everyone! I hope everyone is having a good summer because I know I am!

This last week has been crazy busy at Ball. We’ve been working on a lot of new proposals and with my BIRST rocket program, there hasn’t been a lot of free time.

Last week my rocket team started to actually construct our payloads that will be put in the rocket. Before I had said we were launching little paratroopers out of the rocket, but we couldn’t find any that were the right size and could get in the time allotted. So small change in plans, we’re now launching little mini aliens out of the rocket, it seems rather appropriate to me! I’m mainly working on the payload which is going to launch out a Ball Aerospace flag but last week I got to help out on another group’s area, the pyrotechnic initiators. For those of you that don’t know what it is, a pyrotechnic initiator is the part of the rocket that sets off the charge to jettison a payload out of the main body. Also if you’ve seen a rocket with multiple stages, a lot of them use the same devices to separate. Two interns from my payload went to work with ULA to learn about how to construct these devices. It was a little intimidating at first to be playing with gun powder but when we got to try one out, it was sooo awesome! Our team is going to test them out on our payloads next weekend!

This last weekend a few interns decided we wanted to take advantage of being in Colorado. We found a place in the mountains we wanted to go and set off on a hike. Longs Peak is one of the taller mountains in Colorado and we knew we didn’t stand a chance to make it all the way up, but about 2/3 of the way is a lake at the base of the peak called Chasm Lake. We had to start pretty early because the afternoons are usually when the storms creep in and being on a mountain with lightning doesn’t sound like fun to me. One of my favorite parts was the snow! At one point we had to climb across an ice shelf that was on a hill. The snow was melting so it was pretty slippery, especially on the way back when the sun was high. It took almost 5 hours to get there and back! I’m hoping to get to climb a lot more before I leave since there aren’t any opportunities back at school.

I’ll keep you updated on my internship and rocket! We launch the end of July so I’ll have exciting things to report!

June 2009

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“Hello, world!” My name is Geoff Bruder, and I am a senior in Aerospace Engineering with an Astronautics concentration at Embry-Riddle’s Daytona Beach campus. Since this is my first post, I’ll give you a little of my background and tell you some of the great things I have been able to do thanks to Embry-Riddle.

I have been interested in space and mechanical things as long as I can remember. My earliest memories are of building cars and airplanes with legos and erector sets. I ended up indulging my mechanical curiosity by working on cars in high school. Since I wasn’t able to go straight to a university after high school I worked, and took classes at night. I worked as an auto mechanic and then, thanks to Broward Community College, an AutoCAD technician. While I was working, my aspirations were growing, and I set my sights on the stars, literally.

I did all my research and loved the fact that Embry-Riddle is a dedicated Aerospace university, where you can be immersed in the industry and culture. All of the course training and projects I have worked on here have led me to my current position. I am currently writing from Cleveland, Ohio where I work for NASA Glenn Research Center (GRC) as an Aerospace Engineering intern.

Prior to this position, I worked at Kennedy Space Center with the Undergraduate Student Research Program (USRP), then at GRC as a USRP intern. Being accepted into the NASA co-op program means I am now a federal employee, and will hopefully be able to transition to be a full time employee with NASA after graduation.

I work with the Thermal Energy Conversion Branch researching, analyzing, and testing Stirling power and cooling systems for spacecraft. My primary focus here has been on hardware for a robotic surface mission to Venus. In subsequent posts I will fill you in on all the gory details. Thanks for your attention, more to come in a couple weeks.

Geoff

June 2009

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Hello,
My name is Albane Flamant, I’m an international student from Mons, Belgium and will be starting next fall my senior year. In a little more than a week, I’ll be starting my internship back home in a local newspaper. I’m really excited about it: Even though I’m only a communication student without much experience, I’ll get to write small articles that will be published in a recognized newspaper. I’ve always had a passion for writing but I’ve only tried journalism recently. Last Spring, I spent a lot of my time working for the Avion, the university’s newspaper, as a reporter and an editor. Writing has always been a passion, and I love writing for the Avion. Despite the fact that I’m spending my summer back home in Belgium, I’m currently writing an article about campus for next week’s issue. This internship will hopefully better my writing. Here in Europe, the news writing style is a little different in terms of punctuation and paragraph structure. This will give me the opportunity to experience the European newsroom. It has taken me a while to get through the paperwork because of the language barrier and the cultural difference between the ERAU’s career services and the company hiring me for the summer, but I finally made it. Despite the fact I love writing, I will not probably end up being a journalist after I graduate. However, this will be a great work experience for me and it will enrich my resume and my portfolio. All fields I’m interested in require strong writing skills, and the articles I will write during my internship will be good samples to show potential employers.

So that’s it for this week… I’ll keep you posted on what happens on my first day. I should be running around the city with a notepad, a voice recorder and a camera. It should be interesting. Have a great week!

June 2009

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TGIF! One week into my internship and I am so ready for a weekend!

Just to recap, I’m working in the new business department of systems engineering at Ball Aerospace in Boulder, CO. It’s not what I expected (but then again I really had no idea what to expect) but it’s pretty sweet.

My department has a lot of engineers, even though it’s a little more business related, because of all the technical portions in potential contracts the company is bidding on. So basically when a company or the government wants something made they send out a bunch of information about what they need, all the requirements it needs to have, and the process to get it. It’s my department’s job to take all that info, ensure that we are able to competitively fulfill all that’s required, properly format it and ultimately send it back and wait to see if Ball gets the contract.

I’m learning this new program that is unlike anything I’ve ever worked with. It’s project management software; you can input information and manipulate it in a million ways to get the style of output you want. I’ve done some programming before so I’ve been able to develop some short cuts to make their process a little simpler since they do it over and over again.

I have to learn a new programming language because DOORS (the program) has its own language. It’s a little bit odd, one of the engineers I asked for help told me it was created in Europe and was designed for use in the European Space Agency. His theory is that the programmers were a little drunk while creating it because there are a lot of weird quirks about it and a lot of people have trouble with it, which made me feel better because it’s a steep learning curve!

Since I’ve been working, the Human Resources people have been awesome about scheduling tours for all the interns at various Ball facilities. We were able to look around the clean room a few days ago; inside I saw the WorldView-2 satellite under construction. I’m sure most of you have played around on Google maps at some point? Well WorldView-1 was created at Ball and it took most of the pictures for Google! Hurray for upgrades, who knows what this one will be capable of? We also had an intern picnic where they gave us free food, hurray! About half the interns are from Colorado schools, some are from Arizona and the rest are scattered. It’s nice to have a variety so no one really knows each other so we are all bonding pretty well.

Ball is teaming up with United Launch Alliance (ULA) in Denver and their interns are going to be building a rocket and the Ball interns are going to be building payloads for it! The rocket is supposed to go up at least 5000ft! The payload I’m working on isn’t going to be ejected from the body of the rocket and has over 5 cubic feet of room to work with, so brainstorming was difficult. Instead of trying to make some technological breakthrough (we only have 5 weeks to create the entire thing!) we decided to have some fun with it. I don’t know if anyone remembers those little green paratroopers that you would drop off staircases or balconies and the parachutes would deploy when you were a kid? Well my team is going to launch a ton of them out of the rocket as it descends after launch. We’re also working on dropping some modified smoke bombs out to help ULA with the wind directions to find the rocket after it lands. I’ll keep you updated on my team’s progress! We launch the end of July! There’s so much to get done before then!