Aerospace engineering alum George Harrison designed part of a payload that flew at an altitude of 37,000 feet on Dawn Aerospace’s Aurora Spaceplane on June 24, according to the Dawn Aerospace website.
The Aurora spaceplane has the performance of a rocket with the reusability of a regular airplane, which allows it to go to suborbital space, the website says.
This was the first U.S. student-built system to fly on the Aurora Spaceplane. Taking off from Tāwhaki National Aerospace Centre in New Zealand, this was the first commercial flight for Dawn Aerospace.
“Dawn has a lot of young staff who were recently students, and it is rewarding giving other students the opportunity to build and fly hardware,” said Annelies Powell, brand and spaceplane marketing lead for Dawn Aerospace.
Harrison worked with Kurt Colvin, a retired professor of industrial engineering, on this project. A payload is an object, like a data acquisition system, camera or satellite, that is placed on the aircraft to carry out a goal for the mission, according to Harrison. They used a data acquisition system as their payload.
The system collected air data on where the plane is flying, how it’s flying and what the behavior is to help them construct the flight path, according to Harrison. The project involved helping the off-the-shelf data acquisition system manufacturer, called Bolder Flight Systems, fix the software system so that it would withstand the environment.
The project tested if an off-the-shelf system would perform similarly enough to an expensive system, designed by Dawn Aerospace, to see if it’s worth it for companies to build an expensive system. Off-the-shelf systems are commercially available and ready for use and are cheaper than designing a custom system, Harrison said.
The project started in September 2024 and they finished around March 2025.
They put the payload in the payload bay aboard Aurora. Colvin worked with the manufacturer to tell them the conditions the payload would be exposed to to figure out how to reach the levels that they needed to collect the data.
“This payload was going onto an aircraft that will be facing a lot of extreme conditions that most off-the-shelf payloads are limited to in collecting data at,” Harrison said.
The results of the data will help Dawn Aerospace look at the environment payloads in the bay are exposed to through another source, Powell said.
“We can compare against our own sensors and validate accuracy. We will also be able to correlate the position, velocity and acceleration with the Mk-II [Aurora] sensors to again check for accuracy,” Powell said.
Once the data acquisition system was ready to go on the mission, Harrison designed an aluminum plate to attach to the data acquisition system, so that the system could be integrated in the payload bay.
This experience taught Dawn Aerospace how to work with different levels of engineers.
“This flight helped teach us that we need to adapt our ways of working to each customer based on their level of experience and ways of working,” Powell said.
Powell said Harrison was great in the discussions he had with Dawn Aerospace, and he was adaptable and responsive to Dawn’s Aerospace’s requirements.
“Cal Poly was designing the payload at the same time we were designing the payload bay – so flexibility was essential, and the Cal Poly team provided lots of it,” Powell said.
In reflecting on his experience, Harrison said it was awesome working with Dawn Aerospace.
“When I learned more about them, I became really passionate about it and working with them,” Harrison said. “I think what they are doing is amazing and really cool. I mean it’s a space plane. How much cooler can it get.”