Purdue 1 to Carry Past and Present Boilermakers on a Virgin Galactic Suborbital Spaceflight

An all-Boilermaker team, comprising a university engineering professor, a graduate student, and other alumni, will be making its way to space on the Purdue 1 Virgin Galactic mission in 2027. This further establishes Purdue’s aerospace prestige, with its alumni playing a role in every era of human spaceflight.

The crew is expected to include aerospace engineering professor Steven Collicott, graduate student Abigail Mizzi, and alumnus Jason Williamson, along with two other alumni yet to be announced. Mizzi was chosen by a faculty committee to fly with her own research payload, while Williamson, a civil engineering graduate and senior vice president at Dunaway, will join as a paying passenger. One alumni seat has already been filled, and the other remains open to interested participants.

“This is a culmination of the skills and knowledge that I learned in the past four years and now get to apply it in the unique and complex environment of space,” said Mizzi. “This is exactly why I want to go to space, to gather real data and add to this body of knowledge that researchers, designers and engineers can use on future spacecraft and their engine designs.”

Collicott’s work focuses on how liquids spread and oscillate in zero gravity, data that will aid in spacecraft design and fuel management. Mizzi’s project builds on NASA experiments that Collicott flew in 2024, studying how fluids slosh during spacecraft maneuvers. Allowing the pair to observe and alter their work is “putting the brain power up there” with the experiment, Collicott noted.

Virgin Galactic will modify its six-passenger spacecraft for the flight by removing one seat to make room for a payload rack. The suborbital mission will provide minutes of sustained weightlessness; significantly more than the 20-second parabolic flights Collicott has used in his teaching. Purdue officials say this will allow more meaningful scientific data to be collected while also giving students direct exposure to space-based research.

Purdue has long been a breeding ground for aerospace professionals, with the university counting 30 alumni who have flown in space (or gotten close), including the first and last astronauts to walk on the moon, Neil Armstrong and Eugene Cernan. If successful, Purdue 1 will mark the first time a university has sent an all-affiliated team into space to carry out real-time experiments, reinforcing the university’s legendary connection to spaceflight.

FMI: www.purdue.edu