The Learning Grid

Helicopters, aircraft, spacecraft and ground-effect machines are at the cutting edge of technology, with engineering and design, which is used in many other areas of life. Aerospace technology is among the most challenging, because the vehicles involved operate in a hostile environment and have to be efficient, reliable and lightweight.

As well as improving the vehicles we already know about, such as jet fighters and space craft, the future holds exciting new developments – an aerospace engineer could be investigating zero-gravity machines, making high-purity materials and medicines or designing solar-powered satellites.

It brings together physical sciences, maths and computing to design new systems and components, which will give high performance with limited size and weight. The new developments in this area can be applied to less glamorous objects, such as trains and cars, as well as other areas of life – NASA’s work in America on the Hubble space telescope led to better breast cancer screening around the world, and its development of water-purifying systems for spacecraft led to new ways of cleaning swimming pools.

Institution of Mechanical Engineers (IMechE)

Royal Aeronautical Society.