By: Megan Sanders, April 29, 2025
Cal Poly Pomona’s aerospace engineering team has become a top-12 finalist in NASA’s 2025 Human Lander Challenge, and it secured a stipend to advance its Thermal Exchange Reduction Mechanism project.
The Human Lander Challenge presents students with the opportunity to create systems for storing and transferring cryogenic propellants, which is important for further space exploration.
CPP’s team of five has been working on this project for several months, and the team is now in the project’s second stage, when it revises calculations after receiving feedback from judges and industry professionals.
After securing a spot in the top 12, CPP’s team was rewarded with $9,250 to use on travel fees and to help advance students’ concepts for the project.
Mechanical engineering student Caroline Herrera, who is the first leader of the team, said it’s been difficult not knowing if the team is correct when making calculations, but it was really rewarding for the team to get in the top 12.
“In our classes, we can just look things up and check everything pretty much, but here, there is no right or wrong answer,” Herrera said. “You don’t know, really, if you’re correct.”
NASA gave schools several prompts to choose from, and CPP chose to design a structural support that would reduce heat transfer into cryogenic tanks.
The team has a technical paper that is due May 28. After this step, they will travel to Huntsville, Alabama, in June for an in-person forum, where the 12 teams will present their final concepts to a panel of NASA judges and other professional judges.
The team’s professor and advisor Frank Chandler said this trip will be a great opportunity for students to network with professionals and could bring in more attention to CPP’s engineering department with further success in the competition.
“I really like that these students are showcasing their really good ideas, and they’re getting in front of the managers that are hiring,” Chandler said. “That makes me excited.”
According to Chandler, the team has been working on special mounts with mechanical accommodations to allow propellant to remain in the cryogenic tanks longer.
The 12 schools that were selected as finalists are CPP, Colorado School of Mines, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, Jacksonville University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Old Dominion University, Texas A&M University, The College of New Jersey, The Ohio State University, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and Washington State University.
Mechanical engineering student Charles Johnson, the team’s second leader, said it has been a lot of work in a compressed timeline in addition to other classwork and his senior project. “Gaining an appreciation for how you got to put in tons and tons of work, just to get a very, very small improvement,” Johnson said as he is grateful for being selected as a finalist.
According to Herrera and Johnson, this competition has been challenging, because they haven’t worked on a project focusing on this exact concept before, but they have been able to connect certain elements that they have learned in classes and implement them in their work.
Once the team makes the trip to present their final concepts, they will have a chance to earn an additional $18,000 stipend if they make it to a top-three spot in the competition.
Feature image courtesy of Megan Sanders
