Last Sunday, the Yale Undergraduate Aerospace Association held a meeting to introduce new members to this year’s projects. More than 50 students came to hear about the organization and learn about how they could get involved. We started the meeting with introductions from each of the project leaders, who spoke briefly about their project goals to give the newcomers an idea of which team they would want to join.

The projects included a rocket competition, a multi-stage rocket, a radio telescope, and an advanced project.

The rocket competition team, led by Lucia Korpas, will design a payload with a scientific or engineering application and build both the payload and a high power rocket in which to launch it for a national rocketry competition.

Warren Zhang will lead the multi-stage rocket project, whose goal is to design and build a rocket with two or more stages that will eventually be launched and recovered.

The radio telescope project, which is completely new to YUAA, will be led by Devin Cody. This team will involve many different types of engineering, and ultimately produce a fully steerable radio satellite dish with a collection of signal processing hardware and software.

The advanced project team, led by Thomas Ryan, will design and build an autonomous aircraft, building on the idea of last year’s unmanned aerial vehicle project.

After project introductions, everyone gathered outside for an icebreaker, after which the members would decide which group they wanted to join. The teams then split up, the the team leaders presented more information about their projects to interested members and began making plans for the semester. We’re very excited to welcome the new members and to introduce them to aerospace engineering at Yale!