Victoria Coverstone: A woman of many firsts

When Victoria Coverstone was an undergrad at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in the mid-‘80s, she was usually the only female student in her aerospace engineering classes. Just seven years later, Coverstone found herself teaching those classes. She went on to establish herself in academia with an impressive list of firsts. Recently retired, she’s back working in the Department of Aerospace Engineering part time.

Coverstone and her first husband David Carroll earned their bachelor’s and master’s degrees in aerospace engineering in ’85 and ’86 and immediately took industry jobs in California.

“We both wanted to be astronauts, so we decided we’d better go back and get our PhDs. We had different specialties and applied to other schools, but because we both got assistantships at Illinois, that’s where we went,” Coverstone said.

Just before the start of the fall ’90 semester, Coverstone’s Ph.D. adviser Tom Dwyer died in a car accident. The department needed someone to teach his introductory controls course and asked her to fill in on short notice.

“I had taken the course as an undergrad, but from John Prussing, not Dwyer,” Coverstone said. “I was terrified. I was older than the students, but I had no teaching experience. I didn't have a mentor. It wasn’t a thing back then. I had the syllabus and my lecture notes.”

That sink-or-swim experience convinced her to apply to the department to be an assistant professor after earning her doctorate in 1992.

“I knew I could do the teaching part of it,” she said. “But I had no idea about other aspects of the job like grant writing. But I have to say, Wayne Solomon encouraged me. He was the department head at the time and told me to throw my name into the ring.”

She got the job, becoming the first female faculty member in the aerospace engineering department.

Still hoping to be an astronaut, Coverstone applied to the next cycle and was selected as one of 20 finalists in ’93 to be tested for a mission specialist position. At the end of her week in Houston, she was disqualified because of inadequate depth perception.

“I was devasted. It’s called monovision. I didn’t even know I had it. Being an astronaut was my dream since watching the Moon landing on my family’s black and white TV with my mom. It was such an iconic event. It made me a huge Star Trek fan.”

After recovering from that disappointment, Coverstone continued what would be a total of 26 years teaching in the department. During that time, she championed new programs.

As an instructor for the space section of the senior design course, her students consistently placed first, second, or third in the AIAA national design competition. She said they also began offering a special section to complement whatever projects they were working on in the CubeSat lab.

“It brought in students from electrical and computer engineering as well, because you need more than just aerospace students to pull it off.”

She and Philippe Geubelle also redesigned the department’s introductory course, adding a section on spacecraft design and performance which included a hands-on project.  She created a course called BalloonSat—a helium-filled balloon rose to about 90,000 feet before popping from the pressure. Carried back to Earth via parachute, its onboard radio revealing its location for recovery along with data, images and video.

This was also a time when students interested in space participated in NASA competitions such as Micro-g NEXT and RASC-AL with Coverstone serving as their faculty adviser. With full-circle serendipity, she is serving again as faculty adviser as part of her return to Illinois.

In addition to her role as a professor, Coverstone was the assistant head for graduate students at the department level, then became the associate dean for graduate students and professional programs for the college, where she started the MEng program for a professional master’s degree.

“The computer science department had a very successful online degree program, but the other engineering departments were not fully taking advantage of the technology. Back then, you had to go to a studio to lecture. Smart rooms didn’t exist yet.”

Another first for Coverstone was her creation of the CubeSat program at Illinois. The idea for the program stemmed from her desire to give undergrads more hands-on experience. Although graduated with a strong foundation in theory, she wanted students to build something that goes into space. She used her sabbatical in 2002 to investigate Stanford’s nanosatellite program.

“When I came back from the sabbatical, I talked with Gary Swenson in electrical and Steve Frank in computer science to offer a special topics course, so that’s how it started.”

She said, over time, they acquired some lab space and equipment, including the thermal vacuum and bake-out oven. The Helmholtz cage that was built as one of her master’s degree student’s project.

Illinois Orbiting Nanosatellite, or ION 1, was the first CubeSat from the new program to be launched into space.

“That CubeSat was a hodgepodge. We got a donated computer board and thrusters and designed and built almost everything else.  We sent two students to Russia for the launch. The Russian launch vehicle was the Dnepr with a 97 percent launch success, so we were not expecting for our launch vehicle to fail. Our launch vehicle was terminated by range safety in one large explosion. The students came back with a picture of the crater the explosion created.

“It was traumatic to the whole effort. We had no mentality for failure. We had computers set up for data analysis. We had a ground station on Everitt Lab to track it but there was nothing to track.”

Coverstone said, soon afterwards the group won a grant from the National Science Foundation, and she began growing the program by recruiting grad students and adding even more hands-on space opportunities for students. Today all the top aerospace programs have a small satellite component. In 2002, Illinois was among the few.

As campus director of the NASA Illinois Space Grant Consortium, Coverstone was a co-founder of the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program, initiating the program and securing funding from Boeing, NASA, and other sources, which is now in its 22^nd year.

Having started numerous initiatives and served in many roles as a faculty member and administrator at Illinois, Coverstone was looking for a new challenge. She became a professor and head of the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering in 2017 at the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Florida.

“I liked the job. I had a lot of autonomy. Then COVID hit, everything was online and life changed. My current husband and I have a daughter who was in middle school at the time. Because my two older daughters had good experiences at Urbana schools, we decided moving back to Illinois would be best for everyone.”

Another Urbana connection is a company she co-founded and still works with. In 1999, she and David Carroll teamed up with other Illinois faculty members Rodney Burton, Michael Bragg, Wayne Solomon, and Scott White to form CU Aerospace.

“Having a local aerospace company was beneficial to the department in that we teamed up to win SBIR and STTR awards. Professor Burton and I, along with our graduate students, worked on several solar sailing contracts together. One program resulted in building hardware to demonstrate the deployment of a solar sail between two CubeSats. These projects supported many graduate students and provided relevant research topics.”

Coverstone and Joshua Rovey were recently funded to participate in the Air Force University Nanosatellite Program. The program’s objective is to train the next generation of engineering students by taking a new technology from concept to flight-readiness on a CubeSat. Their project is titled, A Green Multi-Mode Propulsion CubeSat Demonstration Mission for Flexible and Adaptable Orbit Phasing and Attitude Control.

Coverstone received the 2008 Stanley H. Pierce faculty award, The Grainger College of Engineering Teaching Excellence Award and the Everitt Award for Teaching Excellence. Coverstone was also recognized in 2008 with the NASA Space Act Award for technical innovation of the “Ultra-Large Solar Sail Technology.” She served as Chair of the Council of Institutions for the University Space Research Association and was named an AIAA Fellow in 2013.

“I’m grateful to rejoin the faculty and to have the opportunity to work with the outstanding students and faculty here. Like Dorothy said, ‘there’s no place like home.’”