I worked on the team responsible for Starship's thermal protection hardware at Cape Canaveral. My days were split between development work and the production floor. Development meant research, design, planning, and building out project proposals. On the floor, I worked with technicians to integrate equipment and run down root causes when something failed. Much of the job was taking requirements that were undefined or still moving and turning them into proposals, engineering models, drawings, and hardware. Then I validated how they actually held up during integration and testing.

Two areas took most of my time. The first was inspection and test. I developed clearer ways to verify heatshield components at every stage, from the first step through integration on the vehicle. That included physical testing on T1 flight hardware. The second was equipment engineering, where I ran trade studies, specified cells, and stayed with them through procurement, installation, and the first weeks on the floor. I also replaced a manned, semi-automatic ink station with an automated laser marking cell that cut marking time per part by more than 80%. I designed it in NX, assembled it alongside technicians, and it ran with near-continuous uptime. My largest project was an automated bonding cell for Starship V3, designed from the start around the rate the program needs. In July, the thermal protection system had flight-blocking needs in Texas. It's still the most critical system on the vehicle, so 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. My days were split between the desk and the floor. At the desk I designed in Creo Parametric 9, ran structural analysis, and developed tooling. The rest was 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. The projected result was a 360% gain in production capacity. I also spent real time in the lab formulating adhesives and iterating fuel grain geometry. That work 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 and working out how to fix it. Then I worked entire shifts on the line myself with the operators to make sure each fix actually held. Before changing anything, I tracked units per day, batch time, labor, faults, and downtime across hundreds of runs.

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. 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 I blue-light scanned the real parts on an ATOS ScanBox and compared 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. I presented what I found to the engineering team. It was the first time I saw how engineering actually gets done. It's a large part of why I chose aerospace.