Tufts alum Rick Hauck (A '62) is a former astronaut who commanded two space shuttle missions, including the first to return to space after the shuttle Challenger was destroyed in January 1986.
But when Hauck landed at Tufts on Friday afternoon to speak of his experiences as an astronaut, he was honoring a Tufts student.
The lucky senior is Kyle Bradbury, who Hauck presented with a $10,000 scholarship from the Astronaut Scholarship Foundation.
The foundation, comprised of former astronauts and their families, awards scholarships to students to help maintain U.S. science competitiveness.
This is "the largest monetary award in science and technology out there," Hauck told the roughly fifty students, faculty, and staff members gathered in Nelson Auditorium for the event.
The award is "important to this country, to help us maintain leadership technologically," he said.
The foundation recognized Bradbury, an electrical engineering major, for his work at the Lincoln Laboratory at The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) this summer.
Working at the lab with fellow senior Stephanie Mayer, Bradbury researched ways to integrate a single timing generator board into different types of radar systems. "The timing generator controls the transmit and receive cycles for a certain type of radar," he said. "It organizes it in such a way that everything is timed correctly."
"The experience itself at Lincoln Labs was a very positive one," Bradbury said, noting that he learned a great deal from research there. "There's no way you can know everything you need to know without consulting experts in the field."
Bradbury is using his scholarship to help pay for tuition at Tufts, where he is researching binary communications for his senior design project.
The audience also saw a scholarship foundation video that included a statement from former astronaut and Apollo 13 commander James Lovell.
In addition to the scholarship, Bradbury won the opportunity to meet and talk with Hauck and other astronauts about career choices.
As an Astronaut Scholar, he can also choose to attend the U.S. Astronauts Hall of Fame induction ceremony next May, which occurs every year at the Kennedy Space Center near Florida's Cape Canaveral.
It's "amazing to be able to talk to the people who are on the frontiers of space exploration," Bradbury said.
Electrical and Computer Engineering Professor Karen Panetta nominated Bradbury for this award, which is granted to a student at each of eighteen American colleges (including Tufts) each year.
-- Marc Raifman and Julie Schindall
