MECH&AE 161C
Spacecraft Design
Description: Lecture, four hours; outside study, eight hours. Enforced requisite: course 161B. Preliminary design and analysis by students of Earth-orbiting or interplanetary space missions and spacecraft. Students work in groups of three or four, with each student responsible primarily for one subsystem and for integration with whole. Letter grading.
Units: 4.0
Units: 4.0
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Most Helpful Review
Spring 2023 - You will be on a ~10 person team (chosen by you or randomly assigned if you don’t know 9 other people). You will be told a space mission that professor wants you to plan out in detail (i.e. get to mars and bring a sample back). Each member of the team will have a specific role, which will be a spacecraft subsystem or something like systems engineer, mission planner, etc. Then you are essentially let loose an entire quarter to figure it all out. The lectures are just guest lectures for the most part, which do not necessarily help you with your role. If you are ever stuck, or want to validate your work, just go to office hours or email the professor. He is incredibly knowledgeable and very helpful. If you run something by him and he confirms it, you know you are okay. Your final grade will essentially just be his validation of your work, so getting a head start on that is a relief. You will not be able to finish everything without asking him at least some questions, since there is knowledge he has that is very useful that you need to ask the right questions to get. If you attend office hours even slightly regularly, you will get an A in the class, and you will also be learning a lot from an expert in his field, win-win.
Spring 2023 - You will be on a ~10 person team (chosen by you or randomly assigned if you don’t know 9 other people). You will be told a space mission that professor wants you to plan out in detail (i.e. get to mars and bring a sample back). Each member of the team will have a specific role, which will be a spacecraft subsystem or something like systems engineer, mission planner, etc. Then you are essentially let loose an entire quarter to figure it all out. The lectures are just guest lectures for the most part, which do not necessarily help you with your role. If you are ever stuck, or want to validate your work, just go to office hours or email the professor. He is incredibly knowledgeable and very helpful. If you run something by him and he confirms it, you know you are okay. Your final grade will essentially just be his validation of your work, so getting a head start on that is a relief. You will not be able to finish everything without asking him at least some questions, since there is knowledge he has that is very useful that you need to ask the right questions to get. If you attend office hours even slightly regularly, you will get an A in the class, and you will also be learning a lot from an expert in his field, win-win.
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