Student-built Payload Hitches a Ride on a Space Plane
On a sunny day in late June, a payload built by Cal Poly students took a historic ride on Dawn Aerospace’s Aurora spaceplane. The flight from Tāwhaki National Aerospace Centre near Christchurch, New Zealand, carried the company’s first U.S. student-built experiment to an altitude of 37,000 feet and speeds of Mach 0.79.
“This mission is putting student-built hardware on the front lines of aerospace innovation,” said Kurt Colvin, retired professor and payload advisor. “Working with a next-gen spaceplane like Aurora gave our team firsthand experience integrating a payload for a reusable commercial spaceplane — a paradigm shift from traditional expendable rocket launches.”
Students designed the payload to test whether an off-the-shelf data acquisition system could withstand the rigors of high-altitude, spaceflight-like environments with similar performance to a custom system. Colvin tapped George Harrison (Aerospace Engineering ’25) to lead the project engineering after seeing his work on a navigation system in AERO 568: Aerospace Research and Development. Sam Ricafrente (Statistics ’24, M.S. Business Analytics ’25) and Bella McCarty (Statistics ’24, M.S. Business Analytics ’25) brought data analysis expertise to the team.
Harrison began working on the payload in the fall of 2024 with flight tracking hardware from Bolder Flight Systems that could gather metrics to reconstruct the flight path. He spent months configuring the hardware to tolerate flight conditions and fit the spaceplane’s payload bay. The team also gained experience communicating with engineers at Dawn Aerospace through development and the final handoff of the payload in March of 2025.
“Being able to design and have ownership in your design is really cool,” said Harrison, who now works as an engineering integration contractor with the U.S. Air Force. “And then to see it go on a space plane and know that the thing that you designed is 37,000 feet up in the sky is just incredible. There's nothing that could beat that feeling.”
A press release from Dawn Aerospace also noted that the mission laid the groundwork for future Cal Poly launches from the upcoming Paso Robles Space Innovation and Technology Park.
“Flying on Aurora is of serious strategic importance,” said Colvin. “It’s hands-on access to the future of commercial spaceflight.”
A spaceplane’s horizontal launch architecture — taking off and landing like a conventional aircraft — has the potential to make launches more cost effective by quickly reusing equipment from mission to mission.
“Aurora is the perfect tool for students to not only learn the theories of aerospace, but also design, build, qualify, and operate in the real world,” said James Powell, Dawn Aerospace’s chief spaceplane engineer and co-founder. “Because we recover the payload, customers gain deeper insight into performance and can more easily modify and upgrade for future flights.”
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