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It's a low-budget engineering student club with out-of-this-world aspirations...but, sending nanosatellites in Earth orbit?

That's one of the long-term goals of the Portland State Aerospace Society (PSAS), (psas.pdx.edu) which is taking a series of "one small steps" at a time to reach its lofty goals. PSAS projects meld the skills of students enrolled in several different departments in PSU's College of Engineering and Computer Science, such as Mechanical Engineering, Computer Science and as Electrical and Computer Engineering.

During the last several years, PSAS members have developed and successfully launched three suborbital rockets in the deserts of Central Oregon and Nevada. The most recent launch occurred September 2002, when PSAS' Launch Vehicle No. 2 (LV2) powered its way to an altitude of 18,000 feet at a speed of 900 miles per hour (Mach 1). Students were testing their design for LV2's airframe.

"This year, the club is refining its modular airframes and advanced avionics (flight electronics) to allow the rocket to steer itself. If successful, PSAS will be the first amateur group to achieve computer-controlled "active guidance," says faculty advisor Bart Massey, Ph.D, of the Computer Science Department.

Liftoff of the next-generation LV2 rocket is scheduled for September 19-21, 2003, in Nevada's Black Rock Desert. LV2 is partially funded by a $10,000 grant from NASA's Oregon Space Grant program.

"Free software and open hardware have dramatically changed the capabilities of amateur aerospace clubs like PSAS," the students noted in a paper presented this summer at the USENIX 2003 conference in San Antonio, Texas. The paper was co-authored by PSAS members James Perkins, Andrew Greenberg, Jamey Sharp, Dave Cassard and Bart Massey.

PSAS is one of more than a dozen student clubs in the College of Engineering and Computer Science where faculty members volunteer time to work closely with students who are applying lessons learned in the classroom and the lab.