I worked on the team responsible for Starship's thermal protection hardware at the Cape. Day to day was a balance between development work, meaning research, design, planning, and building out project proposals, and the production floor, where I worked with technicians to integrate equipment or run down root causes when something failed. Much of it was taking requirements that were undefined or still moving and turning them into proposals, engineering models, drawings, and hardware, then validating how they actually held up during integration and testing.

Two areas took most of my time. The first was inspection and test: developing clearer verification methods for heatshield components, from the first step through integration on the vehicle, including physical testing on T1 flight hardware. The second was equipment engineering: running trade studies, specifying cells, and staying with them through procurement, installation, and the first weeks on the floor. My largest project was an automated bonding cell for Starship V3, designed from the start around the rate the program needs. In July, when the thermal protection system, still the most critical system on the vehicle, had flight-blocking needs in Texas, I surged from the Cape to the Starfactory at Starbase to help on site.

I was a propulsion design engineering intern at a hybrid rocket startup in Addison, Texas. Day to day was a balance between design work in Creo Parametric 9, structural analysis, and tooling development, and hands-on work on the floor.

My main project was FDM tooling for fuel grain production: one-time-use molds with O-ring glands and vacuum-capable iterations. Testing validated seal integrity, bond-layer uniformity, and cure, for a projected 360% gain in production capacity. I also spent real time in the lab formulating adhesives and iterating fuel grain geometry, which fed straight back into the same bottleneck my tooling was built to fix.

I'd call this my first real engineering job. SRT made regolith simulant for aerospace customers, and the process ran almost entirely on tribal knowledge.

I spent my days watching where waste was produced, working out how to fix it, and then working entire shifts on the line myself with the operators to make sure the fix actually held. I tracked units per day, batch time, labor, faults, and downtime across hundreds of runs before changing anything.

Then I reorganized the production cells around Lean Six Sigma, integrated the equipment, and wrote the SOPs. Same-batch processing went from four weeks to six hours, and the lead manufacturing engineer adopted the flow.

My first internship, at a company that reverse engineers and manufactures replacement parts for industrial gas turbines.

Most of my time went into learning Siemens NX and redesigning several turbine fixtures and parts, then blue-light scanning the real parts on an ATOS ScanBox and comparing them to my models in GOM Inspect. That comparison is where tolerances, manufacturing defects, and what machining actually does to a design first made sense to me.

I worked through my assignments quickly enough to ask for more, so I researched hydrogen as a fuel for gas turbines, what it takes to produce, store, and use it responsibly, and presented what I found to the engineering team. It was the first time I saw how engineering actually gets done, and it's a large part of why I chose aerospace.