STARKVILLE — Composite materials from Aurora Flight Sciences are finding new life at Mississippi State University’s Advanced Composites Institute, where they’re being used to train potential future employees, along with giving the Space Cowboys rocketry team a competitive advantage.
Over the past eight months, Aurora has donated more than $1 million worth of composite materials to ACI, including resins, paints, and Kevlar, to be repurposed for training and research. It’s a full circle moment for Aurora, Vice President of Manufacturing Luke Colville told The Dispatch.
“The really cool thing is when they can use materials that we donate to them for training and development for either future employees for us or engineers that are going to Mississippi State,” he said. “We’re still getting value out of product that we can’t use at our manufacturing base.”
Specializing in designing, testing and producing unmanned aircraft systems, Aurora Flight Sciences opened at the Lowndes County Industrial Park in 2005. The company was acquired by Boeing in 2017.
While the donated materials are no longer suitable for manufacturing at Aurora, they can still be of use at ACI, which focuses on research and training in advanced materials and manufacturing techniques.
“The materials can’t be used on commercial aircraft or spacecraft anymore because they’re past their shelf life date,” said Cody Hardin, senior research engineer and lead trainer at ACI. “But that doesn’t mean the material doesn’t work. It just can’t be guaranteed to work like the manufacturer says it does. We can do a lot of different things with it.”
Hardin said ACI often uses the donated materials for general research, like determining how to best recycle different materials. Professors throughout the engineering department can also use them for their own research, he said.
The donations also help further ACI’s K-12 outreach efforts, including Camp ACI, where students get hands-on experience learning about the development of composite materials and how they are used across different industries.
“A lot of this material is used to teach the middle schoolers about composites, how the material works on a basic level and how it can be used in things from baseball bats and spotting goods and mountain bikes, all the way up to (Formula 1) cars and aircrafts,” Hardin said.
The materials come in handy for MSU student projects too, Hardin said, like the Space Cowboys rocketry team. Consisting of five subteams, the team designs, builds and launches a rocket each year at national competitions.
Kylan Anderson, sophomore aerospace major and Space Cowboys president, said having the materials on-hand and the offer of Aurora’s expertise gives the team a competitive edge.
“At the start, we didn’t exactly know what we were doing, just trying things out,” he told The Dispatch. “Now we’ve gotten to a point where we operate like a manufacturing team because the people at ACI and Aurora give us all their tips and tricks.”
While most teams buy their parts commercially, the MSU team manufactures nearly the entire airframe of the competition rocket in house with the help of Aurora and ACI, Anderson said. Aurora gives the team time to use its autoclave (a high-pressure oven) to cure parts for the rocket and is currently helping the team manufacture a nosecone for its next rocket.
The help paid off this summer, when the team won the highest placement in its category at the Spaceport America Cup competition in June.
Training the next generation
Aside from helping the team sweep their competition, Anderson said working with Aurora and ACI helps to prepare him and other students for their future careers.
“I get to see the real-world processes of composite manufacturing,” he said. “Then we get to apply them in Space Cowboys. It’s a completely different perspective to the aerospace industry, and the advice and experience (Aurora and ACI) share is extremely valuable.”
Sheryas Narsipur, faculty sponsor for the team, said the donated materials give students a chance to work with industry-relevant technologies while gaining manufacturing knowledge they may only experience if they enter the industry.
“This allows the students to not only relate their in-class learning to real-world situations but also better prepares them to enter the aerospace workforce,” he wrote in an email to The Dispatch.
Aurora and the ACI work closely on developing the next generation of the aerospace workforce, with the company often providing tours of its manufacturing facility or sending employees to speak to classes. The partnership makes both parties better, Hardin said.
“They get better by getting access to research, engineering and the advantages that Mississippi State can provide,” he said. “We get the benefit of working with a company like Boeing (which owns Aurora) and are able to have access to their projects and the technology that they have.”
It’s a benefit for Aurora, Colville said, because ACI can develop a curriculum specific to the company’s needs, ensuring potential employees are prepared for the job by the time they graduate.
“We’ve hired engineers within our manufacturing engineering team that were … getting their degree while working at the ACI, and then have come here to work for us,” he said.
McRae is a general assignment and education reporter for The Dispatch.
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