The objective for aircraft tasks varies with the competition each year. The objective for this year is to design, build, and test an airplane to demonstrate Urban Air Mobility (UAM) missions. Flight missions will include delivery of the airplane, medical transport, and urban taxi. Payloads carried by the craft will include pre-fabricated miniature crew members, emergency medical technicians, medical supply cabinet, patient, gurney and passengers.

All systems are “go” for The Department of Aerospace Engineering’s CyLaunch student team in in Huntsville, Alabama, taking part in the NASA Student Launch Competition. The team is part of the department’s Make to Innovate (M:2:I) program.

The objective for aircraft tasks varies with the competition each year. The objective for this year is to design, build, and test an airplane to demonstrate Urban Air Mobility (UAM) missions. Flight missions will include delivery of the airplane, medical transport, and urban taxi. Payloads carried by the craft will include pre-fabricated miniature crew members, emergency medical technicians, medical supply cabinet, patient, gurney and passengers.

The High Altitude Balloon Experiments in Technology course at Iowa State University conducts balloon launches each semester to gather data at the highest reaches of Earth’s atmosphere. They’ll conduct perhaps their most anticipated experiment yet on April 8, when they travel to Illinois to launch a balloon during the total solar eclipse that will cross North America.

The total solar eclipse that will occur over the United States April 8 is an especially rare occurrence and won’t happen again until 2044. Among the many prepared to take advantage of this opportunity is the Iowa State University Make to Innovate (M:2:I) HABET (High-Altitude Balloon Experiments in Technology) team, which is supported in part by the Iowa Space Grant Consortium. They will participate in studying the eclipse as part of the National Eclipse Balloon Project, led by the Montana Space Grant Consortium.

It was a best-ever result for the Department of Aerospace Engineering’s Make To Innovate (M:2:I) Mars Rover Team, “MAVRIC,” in the 2024 University Rover Challenge (URC), the world’s premier robotics competition for college students.

The Make To Innovate (M:2:I) program’s RASC-AL student team was selected as a finalist for the first time in the recent NASA-organized national collegiate competition. A team of 13 undergraduate students from Iowa State University presented their design concept to a panel of NASA judges. RASC-AL (Revolutionary Aerospace Systems Concepts – Academic Linkage) invites teams to develop new and innovative concepts to improve the success rates for future NASA operations on the moon, Mars, and beyond.