NASA, Texas University Stand Up Digital Engineering Learning Facility

NASA’s Johnson Space Center has partnered with the University of Texas Aerospace Center to establish a new facility that provides NASA’s aerospace workforce the opportunity to learn more about digital engineering and encourages students to become engineers.

The Digital Engineering Design Center allows enrolled individuals to work on in-situ resource utilization-related projects, which are critical to the Artemis mission. Digital engineering enables the development, testing and refinement of aerospace hardware in virtual environments, eliminating the need to manufacture components just for testing. The development process is essential to ISRU projects that seek to enable the production of items using materials from deep space, NASA said.

The space agency has the capability to send items from Earth to lunar orbit to sustain moon missions; however, Artemis includes expeditions beyond the lunar surface that would make delivering cargo challenging.

With digital engineering, NASA expects to enable collaboration on projects with talented people or organizations from other geographic locations, reduce technical risk and accelerate development schedule.

The DEDC began its operations on June 1.