A quartet of students from Tulane University is in Cocoa Beach, Florida, to compete in NASA’s RASC-AL forum. Tulane’s Team CERBERUS is one of just 15 finalists invited to present its designs at the competition, with an opportunity for its work to be a part of the 2025 Artemis mission to the moon. Graduate student Brock Headen says he never imagined they would get this far.
“I don’t know if any of us had the thought that our technology could be implemented on the moon,” said Headen. “But now that we’re here, we’re absolutely shooting for it.”
Team CERBERUS will enter the finals as an underdog. Their four-person squad is one of, if not the smallest team in competition and Tulane does not have an aerospace engineering program. Headen says they’ve embraced that role and found their advantages where they could.
“None of us have had formal aerospace engineering training,” he said. “But we’ve had engineering training in various other areas. So we moved to kind of put things together from other perspectives and think outside of what an aerospace engineer would produce.”
Team CERBERUS will share the stage with groups from MIT, the University of Texas, and Michigan among others. Based on what he’s seen of the other submissions, Headen believes that he and his teammates can hold their own.
“Ours looks like something that NASA would produce,” Headen said. “You can see people designing lots of different things that don’t look like something that would appear on the moon. Ours makes sense within that structure.”
Tulane’s group will make their presentation Tuesday with two winners to be announced on Thursday.
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