Sponsor a Senior Design Project
Explore Aerospace Senior Design sponsorship
at CU Boulder.
Our industry sponsors are a critical part of this course. We would not be able to provide students with team experiences, hardware resources, and real-world industry perspectives without your support. Below are details about the course structure and opportunities for industry sponsorship. Please reach out to Industry Relations Manager April Abernethy for more information about industry sponsorship and mentorship!
Course Learning Goals
Senior Projects is a required two-semester capstone design course for aerospace students. The course is intended to help students transition from a “student mindset,” focused on solving well-defined engineering problems for exams, to a “professional engineering” mindset, in which the problem must first be defined, appropriate models and analyses must be selected, and the design must be developed by a team. Students apply the skills learned in their sophomore- and junior-year courses to design an aerospace system, then fabricate, integrate, and test that system to verify that it meets requirements.
Team Structure
This year, we expect an enrollment of approximately 300 students. The course is divided into seven sections, with roughly 45 students per section. In each section, a faculty member develops an aerospace project in their area of expertise and advises the student teams working on it throughout the academic year.
Each section has two teams of students, typically ranging from 20 to 25 students. Each team develops a system design and then fabricates a prototype for verification and validation through analysis, integration, and test. These teams are divided into smaller sub-teams of 3 to 5 students tasked with developing specific subsystems, such as power, structures, thermal, or CDH. A student leadership team, consisting of a program manager and systems engineers, tracks the schedule, requirements, interfaces, and integration.
Senior Design Forms
Industry Sponsorship and Mentorship
Sponsoring aerospace senior projects at CU Boulder is an integral part of building your organization’s talent pipeline and on campus brand! Industry sponsors with annual revenue greater than $1 million contribute $15,000, while industry sponsors with annual revenue of less than $1 million contribute $5,000 to the course. These funds are placed in a central fund that supports all project sections.
Industry sponsors have their organization names listed on the aerospace Senior Projects website, may attend the design reviews of any team, and are invited to the College-wide Engineering Expo in the spring to see the students’ work. Please note that, because our faculty develop the projects, all IP is retained by the university.
Sponsors also have the opportunity to serve as assigned industry mentors to one of our project teams. Industry mentors may meet with project teams throughout the semester, providing guidance on systems engineering, program management, technical challenges, and career pathways. They are also invited to their team’s design reviews to serve as external reviewers, giving students real-world engineering experience.
This mentorship structure allows industry mentors to observe students’ growth over the full academic year, which can be a powerful tool when recruiting students for future positions. In addition, industry mentors are invited to host a seminar in our “Career Pathways” series, where they speak with students across the entire course about their organization’s mission, exciting projects, career opportunities, and general advice for excelling in the field of aerospace engineering. Please reach out to April Abernethy for more information about industry sponsorship and mentorship!
Course Schedule and Assessment
In the fall, student teams flow down requirements, run models, perform trade studies and prototype testing, and develop a detailed design. In the spring, students procure and fabricate hardware, integrate hardware and software, and perform testing to verify that their system design meets requirements.
Student learning is assessed through two design review presentations and a final report each semester. Individual contributions are evaluated through faculty observations and peer assessments.
Projects Expected for Academic Year 26/27
This year we have an exciting breadth of projects for our students. Project descriptions are below. Please reach out to April Abernethy for more information about industry sponsorship and mentorship!
011 Prof. Hayman and Prof. Nabity
Project teams will design, build and test the subsystems for a portable life support system (PLSS) for a Mars surface EVA spacesuit. Teams will be assigned from thermal management, oxygen provision and atmosphere revitalization, water provision, and recycling subsystems.
012 Prof. Li and Prof. Neogi
In this section you will be part of a multidisciplinary engineering team designing a deployable boom system for a small satellite to enable accurate measurements of the ambient magnetic field, which would otherwise be contaminated by spacecraft-generated noise. Students will develop analytical and computational models to guide the design, then fabricate and test a prototype boom and payload system to validate performance against mission requirements
013 and 014 Prof. Rafi
Project teams will design, build, and test prototypes of an autonomous and cooperative vehicle system. The autonomous aspect involves the vehicle making a set of decisions based on inputs from its environment, while the cooperative aspect involves the vehicles working together to complete a predefined mission. Examples of vehicle types may include a UAS and/or a rover. Each team within the section will be assigned a vehicle type and will be tasked to design the vehicle to meet a set of requirements within the context of the Systems Engineering process.
015 Prof. Sternovsky and Prof. Wingate
Students will design an autonomous green house that can germinate and grow QTY (20) crops (crop will be announced in August) Artemis IV landing sites on the lunar south pole. The greenhouse system shall autonomously operate for 5 earth days. The greenhouse system shall send health and science data updates to a ground station system located at a maximum distance of 100 m from the greenhouse site.
016 Prof. Hoke
In this section you will be part of a large team that will develop tools to design and analyze an aircraft to meet specific customer requirements. Students will model and analyze the performance and stability of their designs using analytical tools and also build the aircraft both in the simulation environment and as a flying prototype.
017 Prof. Holzinger and Prof. Matsuo
A piece of space debris smaller than a marble can destroy a satellite. However, we have almost no data on the millions of sub-centimeter debris objects orbiting between 600 and 1,000 km. This 50-person team will design, build, and subsystem-test a science constellation to make the best in situ measurements of this invisible population, directly addressing a NASA Heliophysics priority at the intersection of orbital debris, plasma physics, and space weather.