Aurelia Academy launches with Microgravity Project Design
The Aurelia team reached a big milestone at the end of May: we completed the first full run of our Microgravity Project Design class! This course is a pilot for Aurelia Academy – our education and outreach arm – and brought students through a rigorous, hands-on training process to design, build, and test for microgravity in preparation for our next zero-g flight in fall 2023.
Horizon zero gravity flight 2022. © Steve Boxall / Zero Gravity Corporation
Aurelia launched its Education and Outreach arm last year with Horizon 2022, our first zero gravity flight. Twenty-five people, representing global organizations and fellowships dedicated to expanding access to STEM and space opportunities, joined our chartered flight aboard ZeroG Corp’s G-Force One. (Read all about it.)
The Aurelia team led the Horizon 2022 cohort through flight integration and other vital preparation skills for microgravity, drawing on expertise from our team’s track record at the MIT Space Exploration Initiative (leading and supporting 10 zero-g flights in just 6 years). That initial run taught us so much about what our Horizon fliers most need and want to know, and how to design a course to prepare fliers in a meaningful way. Motivated by these lessons, we designed accessible course materials for our first official Aurelia Academy course this past January to May.
© Steve Boxall / Zero Gravity Corporation
This spring’s course covered research, operations, design, and storytelling in addition to traditional aerospace approaches in science and engineering. The goal is for Microgravity Project Design to help students bridge the gap between good ideas and the reality of space project development and funding cycles. The course contributes to an informed and empowered future space workforce who can share their work across communities for an engaged public.
Leading the course were Dr. Danielle DeLatte, Aurelia COO; Dr. Ariel Ekblaw, Aurelia CEO; and Sean Auffinger, Mission Integrator. Over four months, they took students from all over the world on a journey that started with ideation and brainstorming projects and helped them focus those ideas around three themes: use the microgravity environment for a research or storytelling project, have an impact beyond the flight, and produce novel ideas. By the end of the course, students had workshopped their ideas through the guided exercises and weekly office hours, gotten feedback from industry experts, and built prototypes. Their ideas were stress-tested through realistic aerospace industry reviews like Preliminary & Critical Design Review, and will be deployed later this year during live microgravity operations.
Lectures included both engineering cornerstones like mechanical engineering for microgravity, and arts and storytelling in the space environment. The course also included special guest interactions with two astronauts — Dr. Cady Coleman and Dr. Jeffrey Hoffman — and a past fliers panel, where the previous Horizon cohort shared their own experiences and answered students’ questions.
Selected students from the first Microgravity Project Design cohort will fly on our Horizon 2023 zero gravity flight later this year, which also includes research fliers selected by our outreach partners and startups. This interdisciplinary cohort maximizes innovation and knowledge transfer of microgravity project design and operations. Stay tuned!
Special thanks to our Horizon 2023 sponsors: Autodesk, the Aerospace Corporation, Teague, and Voyager Space.
Looking Forward
Inspired by Starfleet Academy, we take a holistic vision of the many job types that will be needed to create a life worth living in space. Aurelia Academy is our effort to prototype the programs and educational opportunities to realize that future.
Aurelia Academy will offer Microgravity Project Design annually, and will soon launch additional course offerings in space architecture, mission integration, and more.
Aurelia Academy offers a series of courses, flight experiences, consulting, external university course mentoring, and community building – all with the aim to build an empowered, principled, and inclusive space workforce needed for the next generation of spacefaring challenges.
Interested in signing up for an Aurelia Academy course? Sign up to indicate interest here, and we’ll be back in touch when registration opens!
Interested in sponsoring the Horizon program or joining our research fliers on Horizon 2023 to help us share the magic of zero-g with the public? Reach out to our flight team!