News: MAE

Savransky selected for NASA Early Career Faculty Award

University campuses are bursting with ideas for novel space technologies, and NASA takes note. Through the agency’s Space Technology Research Grants program, NASA has selected nine university-led research proposals to study early-stage technologies. The grants allow untenured, assistant professors early in their careers to lend their expertise and help identify and mature capabilities of interest to NASA. "New space technologies aren’t developed in a bubble – we engage the best and brightest across all sectors, including academia,” said Prasun Desai, deputy associate administrator of NASA’s... Read more

depiction of lunasat on the lunar surface

Students from 193 countries to send 500 spacecraft to the moon

Teams of high-school and college students from all 193 countries of the United Nations will send 500 miniature spacecraft to the surface of the moon as part of the Great Lunar Expedition for Everyone (GLEE). The mission is being led by NASA’s New York and Colorado Space Grant Consortia, and the palm-sized spacecraft, called LunaSats, are based on technology developed at Cornell University by Mason Peck, professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering and director of the New York Space Grant Consortium. Earlier this year, Peck and his collaborators at Stanford and NASA deployed into space... Read more

Lake Compounce's Phobia Phear roller coaster, which was design ed Cornell alum Jim Seay

Sibley School alum Jim Seay creates some of the world's most thrilling roller coasters

By: Kelly DiNardo

The first roller coaster Jim Seay rode was the wooden Cyclone at Coney Island when he was 9 or 10 years old. He admits being “pretty scared.” Today, Mr. Seay, 59, is behind award-winning, heart-in-throat thrill rides around the world. After graduating from Cornell University with a mechanical engineering degree, Mr. Seay worked at the Hughes Aircraft Company in California in the company’s aerospace department. In the late 1980s, as military spending dropped, Mr. Seay shifted into entertainment, working for Six Flags before opening Premier Rides, based in Baltimore, which designs, constructs... Read more