Nasa Administrator To Tour CU Boulder's New Aerospace Building

BOULDER, CO — The University of Colorado Boulder will be hosting NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine for the grand opening of the college's new $101 million Aerospace Engineering Sciences Building. Bridenstine will be touring the building on Friday, and the grand opening celebration will be held on Monday.

The 175,000-square-foot building will provide students and researchers with spaces for flight-testing autonomous aircraft and laboratories for the design and construction of small satellites. The building will also offer collaborative spaces that foster interdisciplinary work between the Ann & H.J. Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences’ five research clusters, as well as with programs such as mechanical engineering and computer science.

In addition to machine shops and student project workspaces, Bridenstine is scheduled to tour the following building sectors:

• UAS Fabrication Lab, aka 'Fab Lab,' where drones are designed and built for the Research and Engineering Center for Unmanned Vehicles
• Payload Operations Center, operated by the department’s BioServe Space Technologies research center, where researchers develop payloads and communicate with astronauts on the ISS while they work on our onboard life and physical science experiments
• Bioastronautics High Bay, where habitats, life support systems and other human-machine interaction research occurs in support of human spaceflight

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The building's grand opening celebration will begin at 12:30 p.m. on Monday with a ribbon cutting, speeches by aerospace leaders and faculty, displays, live music, food trucks and lawn games.