COLLEGE STATION, Texas — The U.S. Space Force has chosen Texas A&M University's Mechanical Engineering team to lead the Space Strategic Technical Institute for In-Space Operations in a new $37 million, five-year project.
“We had a number of invited talks from Space Force folks here to listen to them understand what their challenges are and we spotted a couple things we could help them with. In one of those, is a series of needs they have in space that we can really go after with robotics,” said Dr. Robert Ambrose, Mechanical Engineering professor and Director for Space and Robotics at Texas A&M University.
More than 50 students and researchers will collaborate to develop new space operations, repairing, updating, and building space crafts and using their robotics systems to make space missions more efficient.
Graduate Assistant, Stephen Hester described his emotions, “I’m very excited to work in it so I’ve been working with one of our engineers Adam Pettinger on the robotic space simulator which is one of the key pieces of that project for the past couple of months, but it’s been a lot of fun working with it to store platforms and learning how they work and trying to program them to do what they want.”
For some grad students, this project is a dream come true, allowing them to see the real-world application of their work.
“I grew up both of my parents worked in different ways on the shuttle program and so we would drive to Florida to watch the launch and things have changed since then, but I’ve always wanted to work with robots and space and so the idea that there’s so many more avenues I think it’ll be really cool for the future,” Anthony Barcio, another graduate research assistant explained.
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