Michael Grant graduated first in his class with an aero engineering degree from Purdue in 2005. Now a grad student at Georgia Tech, he focuses on coming up with ways in which a spacecraft can descend more gently once it bursts into a planet's atmosphere.

Purdue University was looking to find the next Neil Armstrong or Buzz Aldrin with the annual Space Day program on campus!

Join us on Thursday, November 12, for a fascinating presentation on the Curtiss-Wright Cadettes, a group of more than 900 women trained as aeronautical engineers at seven different universities from 1943-44. Three hundred of the Cadettes were trained here at Purdue.

Daniel Grebow was selected, as one of only ten graduate students nationwide, as a NASA student representative to the 2009 International Astronautical Congress (IAC) in Daejeon, South Korea.

Purdue alumnus Michael McCulley will speak on campus Nov. 6 about his time as an astronaut. McCulley's 8 p.m. talk in Wetherill Laboratory of Chemistry, Room 200, is free and open to the public but seating is limited. He will also participate in Purdue's annual Space Day on Nov. 7.

Janice Voss and Roy Bridges Jr. will donate personal papers to the Purdue Libraries Division of Archives and Special Collections. The papers will join those of astronaut alumni Neil Armstrong, the first person to walk on the moon, and Eugene Cernan, the most recent person to do so.

James Lovell, commander of the Apollo 13 space mission, will speak at Purdue University on Thursday (Oct. 22). The talk, which is free and open to the public, will begin at 12:30 p.m. in the Electrical Engineering Building, Room 270.

An exhibit featuring mementos, artifacts and personal papers from Neil Armstrong, Eugene Cernan and other Purdue University astronaut alumni has gone digital.

AAE and ME Researchers are developing a new type of rocket propellant made of a frozen mixture of water and "nanoscale aluminum" powder that is more environmentally friendly than conventional propellants and could be manufactured on the moon, Mars and other water-bearing bodies.

They believe that by 2019, Research and Education Mission (REM) applications of next-generation suborbital flight will be as obvious a game-changer as rocket research had become by 1957, barely a decade after the formation of the V-2 panel in 1946.