‘Vanderbilt Aerospace Club’
Institute of Aeronautics names Anilkumar 2016 Faculty Advisor of the Year
Feb. 2, 2016—Amrutur Anilkumar, professor of the practice of aerospace and mechanical engineering, has been named the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics 2016 Faculty Advisor of the year. Anilkumar received the award at a banquet Jan. 7 during the annual AIAA SciTech Forum and Exhibition held in San Diego. Anilkumar is the Vanderbilt AIAA chapter faculty...
Alum who’s developing smart, sustainable community is back to discuss the challenges
Oct. 15, 2015—A recent alumnus who distinguished himself in the aerospace field returns this week to talk about his latest big challenge — launching a 20-year, 12,050-unit sustainable community just south of Denver. Brock Smethills (BE’13) is chief operating officer of Sterling Ranch, a development so state-of-the-art that it prompted changes to Colorado law to accommodate its...
Q&A: Top Boeing engineer, Vandy alum lauds aerospace club for wins
May. 15, 2015—Paul Turczynski graduated Vanderbilt University in 1990 with dual undergraduate degrees in electrical and biomedical engineering and a plan to go to medical school. Today, he’s the director for The Boeing Company’s Solution Architectures Group with the Electronics & Information Solutions unit. That path wasn’t as winding as one might think. The cross-disciplinary problem-solving skills...
Aerospace Club wins NASA’s Student Launch Challenge for third year in row
May. 13, 2015—(L-R standing) Chris Lyne, Dexter Watkins, Fred Folz, Cameron Ridgewell, Ben Gasser, Robin Midgett, Andrew Voss, Brian Lawson, Alex Goodman (L-R sitting) Jacob Moore, Pranav Kumar, Mitchell Masia, William Emfinger and Conner Caldwell. (Courtesy of the Aerospace Club) For the third year in a row, the Vanderbilt Aerospace Club has won NASA’s eight-month long rocketry...
Vanderbilt Aerospace Club grabs top honors in rocket competition for third straight year
Apr. 12, 2015— Vanderbilt rocketeers continued their winning ways in this year’s NASA Student Launch competition, taking first place for the third consecutive year. Vanderbilt’s Aerospace Club was one of 31 university teams that competed April 11 at Bragg Farms in Toney, Alabama, near NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville. The club learned of its...
Mars rocket demo wows at Nashville school’s assembly
Mar. 19, 2015—A robotic arm moves directly over a Vanderbilt Aerospace Club rocket. In the arm’s grippers is a white capsule the size of a hotdog bun. “The arm moves nice and slow and safe like NASA likes it because failure is not an option,” said William Emfinger, graduate student mentor to the Aerospace Club. When the...
Aerospace Club works on simulated Mars sample recovery vehicle for NASA competition
Dec. 4, 2014—The Vanderbilt Aerospace Club, defending champions in the NASA Student Launch (NASA SL) Challenge for the past two years, is tackling the agency’s all-new 2014-15 design challenge. The rocket team is working on an earth-simulated Mars Sample Recovery Vehicle, which includes an Automated Ground Support Equipment Robot (AGSE) that autonomously places an encapsulated soil sample...
Rocketeers win NASA Student Launch Competition — again
Jun. 6, 2014—On Saturday morning, May 17, on the storied Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah, the 10-foot, black-and-gold StarCRAFT rocket blasted into the still blue sky in a flawless flight that reached an altitude of 4,850 feet before popping its parachute and drifting serenely back down to earth. The students from Vanderbilt’s Aerospace Club who created and built the...