Aero-Astro Student Groups
The MIT Aeronautics and Astronautics Department teams, groups, and clubs offer excellent opportunities for activities with peers who share common interests and enthusiasm. Students are welcome to contact any of the organizations listed below. (Note that some of the groups also welcome department alumni, staff, and faculty.) If you're interested in organizing a new group or club, visit the MIT Association of Student Activities web site. Also, Aero-Astro Student Services Director Barbara Lechner will be glad to assist you.
The MIT AIAA chapter is a student-run organization that coordinates many activities geared towards students majoring in aeronautics and astronautics. These activities include an internship colloquium, research talks, company visits, student-faculty social events, and a paper airplane contest. The AIAA is a national organization with a mission to advance the arts, sciences, and technology of aeronautics and astronautics, and to promote the professionalism of those engaged in these pursuits.
Astropreneurs is an organization for graduate students in Aero-Astro
and Sloan School of Management who are interested in entrepreneurship for space.
The club provides an environment for forming and supporting student venture
teams for national business plan competitions and a forum for discussion
about promising space-related technological developments.
The MIT Flying Club, headquartered in Aero-Astro, seeks to motivate, encourage, and facilitate affordable, hands-on experiences in full-scale flying for the MIT community. It fulfills this mission by offering flight training scholarships to members, hosting helicopter fly-ins to the MIT campus, organizing fly-outs to various New England airports, and holding seminars on a wide range of aviation topics.
GA3 is the Aero-Astro graduate student group. It promotes graduate student well being, advocates student interests, and fosters a sense of community within the department. GA3 sponsors numerous events including lectures and seminars, and social activities.
Aero-Astro is an MIT Intramural Sports affiliate. The department fields teams in soccer, football, hockey, softball, basketball, and other sports. Various sports are played year round, and participation is free. Students, staff, and alumni may participate.
International student collaboration to design, build, and fly a complex research satellite for investigating the effects of Martian gravity levels on mammalian physiology. MIT efforts include systems engineering, payload hardware development, flight science manifest, program management, and educational outreach. Students and community members with all levels of experience are welcome.
The MIT Mars Society pursues the exploration and human settlement of the planet Mars through public outreach, technical projects, and community organization. We aim to accelerate targeted development of space technology and private enterprise by leveraging the resources of MIT and its affiliates.
The MIT Rocket Team formed in 1998 in an effort to become the first student group to launch a rocket into space. Its paramount goal is to make tangible steps toward decreasing the cost of space access while providing a fun, hands-on educational project for students. Those interested in joining should contact the team, and include information pertaining to their experience and what area of the project they would most like to work on.
The MIT Space Elevator Team team is competing in the Climber NASA Centennial Challenge to build a climber that can move up a 100m ribbon at at least 2 m/s using only beamed power.
SEDS, an organization with many chapters nationwide and internationally, promotes space exploration and development through projects, outreach, conferences, and other activities. It was founded at MIT in 1980.
