Alec Auster is a mechanical engineer at Space Tango in Lexington, Kentucky. Before he graduated with a bachelor’s degree in aerospace engineering from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 2023, he already had NASA-level experience. The experience was gained from his involvement on several of NASA’s Revolutionary Aerospace Systems Concepts Academic Linkage projects, or RASC-AL, on which he worked on teams architecting missions for deep space exploration.
Auster recently wrote about how his work with the registered student organization Illinois Space Society prepared him for work in the space industry for a bi-monthly newsletter called The Overview, which granted permission for this reposting.
RASC-AL is a university-level systems design competition for missions to the Moon, Mars, and beyond. Like student rocketry and other design competitions, RASC-AL allows students to see what engineering looks like outside of class. Unlike most student projects, however, is the focus on architecting entire missions—although recently, RASC-AL has also started to encourage prototyping. Basically, RASC-AL is NASA giving the next generation of aerospace engineers, who bring a fresh perspective to the table, a chance to steer the ship for NASA’s multibillion-dollar missions of the future. Oh, and we get to present our work on Cocoa Beach near the Kennedy Space Center to an elite set of judges from NASA and industry.
I joined the Illinois Space Society RASC-AL team at the recommendation of a friend during my sophomore year at U. of I. Four new themes and corresponding RFPs are announced annually for universities to choose from. In 2021, we chose the low mass 30-day lunar habitat and dubbed it Localized Initial Lunar Architecture Complex, LILAC for short. Our project was selected as one of 16 finalists in a pool of 60+ proposals.
Although I only contributed to a small piece of the project, I immediately fell in love with creating revolutionary ideas for future space systems. The coolest part? Our design conformed to similar requirements imposed by the Artemis Foundational Habitat before that habitat even entered public discourse—NASA was tapping into our ideas to improve, or at the very least, validate their systems approach for our first moon base. Let me reframe that: RASC-AL is designing the systems that are 10 or 20 years out, meaning our vision used to steer LILAC was a test run that informed NASA’s decision-making for the real deal.
The following year, I was much more invested. The Mars Ice Thermal Harvesting Rig and In-Situ Resource Utilization Laboratory, MITHRIL for short, is an end-to-end water-based propellant refinery on Mars—Lord of the Rings fans may recognize mithril as the mythical metal that saved Frodo’s life. If you thought designing a moon hab was cool, RASC-AL 2022 stepped it up a notch by requesting a design for a Mars water-based in-situ resource utilization architecture to fuel future Mars systems — think a Martian Starship gas station. After paddling my sophomore year, I became the team lead in my junior year when we proposed MITHRIL. Aside from a few key system requirements from NASA, the onus was on us to figure out what this system looked like in waters that very few have tried to navigate.
Our compass was a set of trade studies. Using the water extraction system as an example, we had to first choose where to get our water from, what architecture we’d use to extract it, and what variants of that architecture are available in the trade space. With limitless options, thorough research was the only way to narrow down our candidates. Even after sifting through hundreds of papers, the novelty of the problem still required qualitative gut checks, something a set of undergraduate students like us didn’t have the experience to do reliably. Although the point behind RASC-AL is to give us newbies a swing at formulating these architectures, there is something to be said about getting the advice of those who have thought about the problem much longer and much harder. To go from rowboat to sailboat, we enlisted the help of numerous academic advisers, NASA advisers, and industry advisers—so many it would fill pages if I listed them all. We now had some experience to check our decision making, boosting the credibility of our design.
Circling back to the actual system, we settled on an architecture centered around a Rodriguez well, or Rodwell, to collect water. In short, a Rodwell is a water well in a glacier. A borehole is drilled to an adequate depth and heat is delivered to melt the ice. This technique has been used for decades in polar regions on Earth, a relevant analogy that boosts the technology readiness level of the system for application on Mars. And in case you were wondering, Mars has plenty of water to go around. Although ice is most accessible at the poles, low visibility due to seasonal carbon dioxide sublimation and long periods of darkness render polar architectures unattractive. Fortunately, remote sensing has revealed massive glaciers under the Martian regolith across the mid-latitudes closer to the equator throughout regions that are more viable for Mars missions. Although it may seem obvious now, it took months of rigorous trade study to confidently select Rodwells, and, in the end, one final gut check from our advisers, especially those from Honeybee Robotics, before we committed to this system.
Water extraction was only half the battle. We also had to figure out how we were going to turn that water into propellant, how to store the propellant, set up the architecture, power the architecture and communicate with the architecture. As with Rodwells, each selection came down to a trade study. Do we go nuclear or solar? How do we move things around? How big do our storage tanks need to be? How do we cram this all into a single Starship? Capturing each intricate detail within a trade space is impossible, so we made assumptions to narrow it down and used our best judgment to make tough decisions where data was lacking. Over time, as systems and subsystems were defined, the vision of what MITHRIL needed to look like came into focus, all thanks to a robust process of research, trade study, and adviser guidance.
…and the people. Although not unique to just RASC-AL, as this remains true for any team, the people make or break the project. You can have the fanciest trade studies and sagest of mentors, but without people you can rely on, it doesn’t matter how well you steer the ship. Each year since, I look back on the MITHRIL team and pinch myself: A majority freshman team going up against upperclassmen and graduate students at a NASA design competition. We were eclipsed in every category except passion and grit, and we proved those two traits can carry you to success. Punching well above our weight, we took home 2nd place overall, the first podium spot for an Illinois team ever, and got published at AIAA Ascend. But those accolades pale in comparison to what really gives me pride—my team. What I would rather put on my resume is that two of my sub team leads went on to become RASC-AL leads—one of whom also become the ISS Technical Director and another who went on to kickstart Illinois’ Human Landing System Challenge team, winning 2nd place. Not to mention the incredible internships they’ve all been landing since—including one at Honeybee Robotics, our industry adviser for MITHRIL. I have a habit of getting sappy when reminiscing about how awesome they are and how proud I am of them, and this last paragraph is a bit of a tangent, so I’ll end with—people come first.
Speaking of two of my sub team leads, they went on to lead Mars Outpost Regenerative Resource Operations Workshop, or MORROW, and Trans-lunar Hub for Exploration, ISRU, and Advancement, or THEIA, projects in response to the Mars Homesteading and Sustained Lunar Evolution RASC-AL themes respectively. Burnt out from MITHRIL and suffering a case of senioritis, I advised MORROW in a limited capacity. The Mars Homesteading theme called for an architecture in between a short surface stay and larger Mars “city,” something NASA has yet not studied thoroughly. THEIA brought us back to the moon, exploring what the lunar marketplace might look like and how it should sustainably evolve. I also served as an adviser for this team, and lucky for me, I got to fly down to Cocoa Beach again to watch them present.
Looking back on this incredible four-year RASC-AL journey, I’ve been a part of, or at least advising, projects for a moon habitat, Mars propellant refinery, Mars habitat, and lunar architecture project. I have also now met NASA officials going all the way up to chief technologist, as well as leads, chief engineers, and CEOs from Northrop Grumman, Honeybee Robotics, Spaceworks, Boeing, Aerojet Rocketdyne, and more. There is almost no other way to get experience like this outside of RASC-AL during undergraduate, and even graduate studies. When you do it right, this is a chief engineer and program management level endeavor—which I can confirm from firsthand experience in the industry.
Prior to Auster’s job at Space Tango, he was a systems engineer for Barrios Technology, LTD. Auster is currently in the online non-thesis master’s degree program in aerospace engineering at Illinois.