Undergraduate Program

The Department of Aerospace Engineering & Engineering Mechanics offers two design tracks:

Atmospheric Flight

This design track (also called Aeronautics) provides the student with a well-rounded program of study emphasizing the major disciplines of aerodynamics, propulsion, structures, design, performance, and control of aircraft. These subjects are treated at a fundamental level that lays a foundation for work in a broad variety of specialties in the aircraft industry. This option is intended primarily for the undergraduate student whose primary interest is aircraft.  Coursework includes: Applied Aerodynamics, High-Speed Aerodynamics Laboratory, Aircraft Design I and Aircraft Design II.

Space Flight

This design track (also called Astronautics) provides the student with a well-rounded program of study which provides a background in the traditional areas of fluid mechanics, materials, structures, propulsion, controls, and flight mechanics, while also offering the student a chance to learn about the space environment, mission design, and spacecraft systems/design. These subjects are treated at a fundamental level that lays a foundation for work in a broad variety of specialties in space-related industries. This option is intended primarily for the undergraduate student whose primary interest is space and spacecraft. Coursework includes Space Systems Engineering Design, Space Applications Laboratory, and Spacecraft/Mission Design.

Flow Chart for Design Track Options

Check out the classes involved with each design track in addition to the list of pre-approved Aerospace Elective options. 

Cockrell School of Engineering Scholarship Office

Students are strongly encouraged to apply for scholarships through the Cockrell School of Engineering Scholarship Office located in EJC 2.106; (512) 475-6830. Contact the UT Austin Student Financial Aid Office for additional sources of financial assistance.

The Engineering Career Assistance Center (ECAC)

The Engineering Career Assistance Center provides engineering students with a wide variety of workshops and job placement services. Call (512) 471-1915 or stop by ECJ 2.400 for additional information.

Cooperative Engineering Program

The Cooperative Engineering Program permits undergraduate students to obtain one year of full-time work experience directly related to their field of study. After completing three semesters of work, alternating semesters of on-campus study at UT, students receive 3 hours of technical elective credit. The Co-op office is a division of ECAC in ECJ 2.400; (512) 471-5954.

Engineering Student Services Office

The Cockrell School of Engineering Student Services Office oversees student records, academic policies and regulations, and student counseling. The office is located in ESS; (512) 471-4321.

All undergraduate students in aerospace engineering and computational engineering are expected to have a laptop at their disposal. Laptops are being increasingly integrated into the classroom experience and the Cockrell School of Engineering is moving toward a model where the departments provide space for students to work but we do not necessarily provide the computers to do the work. Most of the work that you will do on a computer will be on your own laptop and so we strongly encourage you to have a system with the recommended specs and software.

Laptop Specifications

It is recommended that existing laptops or new laptop purchases meet the minimum specifications.

The Campus Computer Store has several laptop models available that meet these recommendations. Purchasing Safeware Coverage can extend a one year manufacture's warranty with an optional accidental damage protection. AppleCare is three year warranty extension for Apple MacBooks.

Recommended Software

All computers must have an active antivirus software installed before being connected to the campus network. Systems running Windows 8 or 10 have the builtin Windows Defender. UT recommended anti-virus solutions are listed on the ISO Anti-Virus page. 

Although most of the engineering software packages in the ASE Computing Center are available via remote access through the vLRC (aka AppD) service, the following applications are recommended for local installation on your laptop. 

Additionally the Cockrell School of Engineering provides access to various products through the Microsoft Azure Dev Tools program program and to National Instruments' LabVIEW.

Virtualization Tools

Some engineering software packages require Microsoft Windows. Virtualization tools allow MacBooks to run Windows as a guest operating system inside a virtual machine. The two recommended virtualization tool options are:

      - Virtual Box
      - VMware Fusion

The department has a subscription to the VMware Academic Program (VMAP) which includes VMware Fusion and VMware Workstation Player. Submit a request form to get access to the VMAP subscription.

Backup and Encryption

A backup strategy is important for data protection and using a cloud data sync service is one option. The UTBox service provides unlimited cloud data storage at no cost. 

Although not required for general purpose use, it is recommended that your laptop be encrypted using your operating systems native encryption utility (e.g. BitLocker or FileVault 2). The encryption method chosen may depend on the hardware and operating system supported by the encryption utility. Note: BitLocker requires a Trusted Platform Module (TPM) and Windows 7 Enterprise/Ultimate, Windows 8.1 Pro/Enterprise, or Windows 10 Pro/Enterprise/Education. FileVault 2 requires MacOS 10.7 or later.

Financial Aid

Students receiving aid and that are loan eligible may contact The Office of Student Financial Services to have their aid adjusted to include the cost of their laptop. Students not eligible for aid can apply for alternative or short-term loans through The Office of Student Financial Services

American Institute of Aeronautics & Astronautics (AIAA)

The UT Austin chapter of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics is a student organization for people with an interest in aviation and space. The AIAA itself is a worldwide organization of over 31,000 members and is the largest professional organization devoted to the progress of aviation and space science technology.

Association of Computational Engineers (ACE)

The Association of Computational Engineers is a networking and social organization for students interested in computational science and engineering. ACE hosts talks by industry representatives, socials, and volunteer opportunities with the goal of providing a community for computational engineering students and anyone interested in COE.

LUNAR Council

The LUNAR Council represents all student groups and organizations within the department by serving through Leadership, Undergraduate Networking And Recruitment. As an advisory council, it is a means for current undergraduates to provide continuous feedback to the department. 

The Senior Capstone Design Program in the Department of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics serves as the final step for aerospace and computational engineering students as they prepare to leave the Forty Acres and enter the workforce.

The program:

• provides students with the opportunity to work on real-world projects and gain valuable experience in their field of study.
• allows students to collaborate with industry professionals and apply the knowledge and skills they have learned in the classroom to a practical problem.
• offers sponsors a unique opportunity to propose project topics that are of particular relevance to their industry and workforce needs, shaping the educational experiences of aerospace and computational engineering senior students.
• ensures that the Senior Capstone Design projects align with industry priorities, preparing students to enter the workforce with the tools to tackle problems head-on.

Sponsorship

Sponsorship supports all student material costs, lab upkeep fees, and project technical support. It allows students to do what they do best — learn and innovate — without worrying about the financial burden of their projects.

Sponsorship also empowers industry to shape the direction of students’ projects, preparing them to join the workforce as industry leaders.

Your Impact

Your company’s support enables future engineers to pursue their dream careers — like designing the next generation of space vehicles, tracking climate change from space, becoming industry leaders and more.

Your support also directly impacts project direction, offering students hands-on experience in areas your company sees as the greatest need for the future.

Students work in teams to apply engineering design methodology, analytical thinking and creative problem solving to design a solution to a wide variety of space related challenges. This undergraduate research experience is intended to convey the Systems Engineering approach to solving complex problems in teams over the course of two semesters. See below for a list of the 11 teams of seniors in UT Aerospace and a brief description of their projects.

Jump To:

Glacies Nova: The Space Cowboys

Ali Attarwala, Alex Chiu, Kelly Heilman, Katie Layton, Sam Luttrull, Kalman Mahlich, Michael Martinets, Kristen Pallesen, Streetja Pampati

The Glacies Nova team was tasked with designing a Mars sample return mission to compete in the AIAA Undergraduate Space Design Contest. The requirements are described in a Request for Proposal (RFP) on the AIAA website and include returning 2.5 kgs (5.5 lbs) of sample material from the surface of Mars to the surface of the Earth. The sample material must include water ice and must remain frozen throughout the entire journey.

Texas Microgreens: TMAPP (Texas Microgreens Automated Planter and Processor)

Gilberto Briscoe-Martinez, Anthony Doe, Eli Granoff, Johan Gonzalez, Viennie Lee, Antonio Macias, Ethan Marcom, Keagan Ngo, Sierra Obermoeller-Gilmer, Axel Streit

The TX Microgreens team is competing in the Deep Space Food Challenge, a NASA sponsored competition in which teams design a food growing, handling, and preparation payload for deep space travel. Teams must design the payload, per competition guidelines, and also analyze which crops would be best suited for the application. Their innovative design also includes a sealed composting unit for recycling unused organic matter to generate new growth medium.

The TEXAN Lander (The Topographic & Extreme Atmospheric Environment Lander)

Maxwell Carlile, Robert Keh, Austin Uresti

The TEXAN Lander team competed in the NASA Glenn Research Center University Student Design Challenge (USDC5) Space Challenge II: Long-Duration Venus Explorer. The challenge was to design a lander capable of surviving for 90 Earth days in the extremely hot and dense environment on the surface of Venus. The TEXAN Lander deploys a cluster of small gliders (LEAVES) during descent to take measurements of the atmosphere.

Project Victrix

Grace Calkins, Kaylee Champion, Zoelle Wong, Rujing Zha

The Victrix team designed a Venus lander solution to compete in the NASA Glenn Research Center (USDC5) Space Challenge II: Long-Duration Venus Explorer. This team's approach was to employ a parent lander and three child landers that can communicate with a Venus orbiter and with each other. Any one of them can survive for 90 days on the surface and satisfy the mission goals. One aspect of the design approach is to have some instrumentation designed to be short lived in order to gather data at the start of the mission with certain types of measuring equipment that can't realistically be designed to function at Venus's surface temperature of over 450 degrees C (842 degrees F) and atmospheric pressure that is over 90 times as great as Earth's.

CAMPER - The Crewed Artemis Mission Permanent Exploration Residence

Jordan Landel, Francis Lara, Aaron Light, Remington Linda, Greg Lowry, Gianluca Rizzo, Grant Spradley, Felipe Suarez

The CAMPER lunar habitat is a realistic take on what our first outpost on the Moon will look like and is an entry in the NASA sponsored RASC-AL student design competition. The habitat sits atop a single lander that is representative of current designs for lunar Human Landing Systems with very tight volume and mass constraints. A tiny home on the Moon, the CAMPER habitat is space efficient and strategically laid out to address a number of challenges including abrasive lunar dust and cabin pressurization and depressurization. This concept also focuses on satisfying an anticipated great demand for NASA outreach products and public engagement methods. A docking adapter allows for expansion and connection into a future network of assets near the lunar south pole.

Team MAVerick

Mandar Badithe, Junggeun Cho, Matthew Hawk, Benjamin Miller, Vishnu Selvakumar, Rhythem Sharma, Pranav Sridhar, Kadhir Umasankar

The MAVericks designed a low mass Mars Ascent Vehicle (MAV) to transport two humans from the surface of Mars to low Mars orbit. Competing in the NASA sponsored RASC-AL student design challenge, their approach leverages and enhances the life support systems on board their spacesuits so that the cabin of the MAV doesn't need to be pressurized. Mass savings is an emphasis here and utilizing the space suits to their fullest is this team's approach to accomplishing that goal.

Team Harmonia

Tedham Anderson, Landrey Bobo, Jennifer Byrd, Matthew Clark, William Fife, Morgan Miller, Andres Rojas, Wittiker Schlauch

The Harmonia habitat is designed for a deep space exploration mission that performs a Venus flyby. The system functions as a proving ground for Mars infrastructure and to take advantage of low latency communications with a probe that descends into the Venusian atmosphere. The probe is a flexible balloon that can compress and expand to raise and lower it's altitude via astronaut commands. Cameras relay images from high in the Venusian atmosphere so that astronauts on board can make decisions about which way to fly and instruments can collect data. This project is an entry for Theme 3 of the NASA sponsored RASC-AL student design challenge.

Project MACHO - Mission to Assess Ceres Habitability & Origin

Tirth Bhavsar, Vasara Iyer, Piero L Risi Mortola, Connor A. Rodriguez, James Scales, Ethan Shah, Joshua K. Wheeler

Project MACHO is a vision of the not so distant future; what if we could travel further than Mars and land on a dwarf planet? This mission would launch in 2049 and carry four crew members on a trip to investigate the dwarf planet Ceres. The gravity on the surface is roughly 3% that of Earth so landing would be less energy intensive than Mars but hopping around the surface in a spacesuit would be more of a challenge. The team analyzed the development of advanced propulsion methods that would allow for deep space exploration of an object that is about 80% further from the Sun than Mars. This team competed in the NASA sponsored RASC-AL design challenge and laid out plans for a system that could deliver humans to the surface of Ceres and return to Earth within roughly the same length of time as a Mars mission.

ReVERE - Regolith-Volatile Extraction and Return Expedition

Kiara Alvarez, Kaitlyn Arvesen, Brandon Clarke, Matthew Dean, Rob Fuentes, Jacob Greenly, Asha Jain

Competing in the RASC-AL student design challenge, the ReVERE team was tasked with designing a system architecture that can bring lunar samples from the surface of the Moon to docking at the International Space Station (ISS) for analysis. The mission leverages currently available technology wherever possible, and includes a thorough analysis of all the spacecraft segments that would make this concept achievable.

Commercial Vessel Protection Program: SOS (Satellite Overwatch System)

Aadesh Brahmbhatt, Jash Pujara, Simon Volovnik, James Easton, Naveen Ramachandran

At any given moment there are several piracy events taking place on our oceans; this link displays a live map. The SOS system is a low cost demonstration of Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) equipment onboard a small satellite to attempt the identification of vessel movement via wake detection in near real-time. Proving the concept would encourage creation of a constellation of nano-SARs mounted in small satellites based on the standardized box shaped format of the CubeSat. Anti-piracy and protection against illegal fishing are among the many applications of a system that could quickly relay information about the transit of vessels in predetermined zones of global ocean traffic. This team designed a 12U CubeSat (about the size of a toaster oven) that would use analytic methods to detect and identify the size and direction of moving vessels via their wake signature (Kelvin wakes). They also designated the orbit parameters of a potential constellation of very small satellites that would focus on coverage of global piracy hotspots in a near continuous manner.

Lunar Payload Launch Platform (LPLP)

Drew Davis, Adam Hostak and James Roehm

The Lunar Payload Launch Platform is a design for equipment to be landed on the lunar surface that could launch small payloads of a few dozen grams (a couple ounces or less). These payloads could be delivered to other locations on the Moon, into orbit around the Moon, in orbit around the Earth or ejected from the Earth-Moon system entirely depending on the desired application. The LPLP design incorporates an electromagnetic acceleration mechanism and careful material selection to produce a launch system that could be delivered to the lunar surface in one landing. Potential applications for this system include deploying pico-satellites in constellations, creating networks of tiny seismometers that impact locations around the surface of the Moon, and delivering small amounts of lunar samples to other spacecraft.

Undergraduate students are very active within our department. With such interdisciplinary degrees, our students are allowed many opportunities to have hands-on experiences and join a variety of leadership and networking organizations. We encourage students to get involved and offer an hour of technical elective degree credit for every semester they work in student projects.

Student Project Labs and Organizations

Leadership and Networking Organizations

Student Project Research Labs

Texas Rocket Engineering Lab (TREL)

The Texas Rocket Engineering Lab is an interdisciplinary student project research lab incubating the next generation of innovators and rocketeers at The University of Texas at Austin.

Texas Spacecraft Laboratory (TSL)

In the Texas Spacecraft Laboratory (TSL), undergraduate and graduate students work together to design, fabricate, test, and operate space-based tools. The TSL has traditionally focused on the creation of small satellites, and has seen missions like FASTRAC, Bevo-1, and Bevo-2 launched into Earth orbit.

Student Project Organizations

Texas Flight

UT’s student-run remote-controlled aircraft design team competes in the annual AIAA Design Build Fly (DBF) Competition.

Longhorn Rocketry Association (LRA)

The Longhorn Rocketry Association is a student-run amateur rocketry group at The University of Texas at Austin. The team's mission is to enhance undergraduate education by applying classroom knowledge to design, build, and launch their own rockets.

Women in Aerospace for Leadership and Development (WIALD)

The Women in Aerospace for Leadership and Development seeks to provide confidence and support that will empower all women in the aerospace field of study to successes at any hands-on endeavor.

Texas Aerial Robotics (TAR)

Texas Aerial Robotics was established with the purpose of competing in the International Aerial Robotics Competition (IARC), a highly sophisticated competition requiring teams to learn and apply skills such as computer vision, computational simulation, parallel computing, controls, design, fabrication and corporate interaction.

The Department of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics offers two undergraduate programs – the Aerospace Engineering (ASE) Undergraduate Program and the Computational Engineering (COE) Program.

Aerospace Engineering

The Aerospace Engineering undergraduate program at The University of Texas at Austin is a top-10 nationally ranked program. Students graduating from this program will receive a Bachelor of Science in Aerospace Engineering. Our graduates go on to pursue careers as engineers, scientists, inventors, astronauts, administrators and leaders in the field of aerospace engineering.

Computational Engineering

The Computational Engineering undergraduate program at The University of Texas at Austin is the first of its kind across the nation. This interdisciplinary engineering degree offers the opportunity to work on complex, modern engineering problems within a wide range of real-world applications. Students graduating from this program will receive a Bachelor of Science in Computational Engineering and will be prepared for many kinds of employment opportunities in industry, government and consulting and will also be highly qualified to pursue graduate education in computational engineering.

Undergraduate students have the opportunity to work with innovative professors conducting cutting-edge research. They may earn coursework credit, volunteer their time, or be paid as an Undergraduate Research Assistant (URA).

Interested undergraduates should contact their professor of interest regarding available opportunities.

Current URA Opportunities

Off-Campus Research

Students who are interested in a career in research and development are strongly encouraged to participate in off-campus Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) programs. The National Science Foundation (NSF) lists hundreds of REUs online and students may consider other laboratories such as the Applied Research Laboratories or the Center for Space Research.