Kyle K
- Research Program Mentor
MS at Purdue University
Expertise
Mechanical Engineering, Aerospace Engineering, Space Travel
Bio
Hi, I'm Kyle and depending on what you're into, I might be a great fit as a mentor. When I was young, I lived close to an active railroad which made me fascinated by the fact that humans could build and operate such machines. As I grew older, this fascination expanded into more fields as I went from wanting to be a locomotive engineer to an aerospace engineer, and now more generally to a mechanical engineer. I find it hard to go a day without questioning how things are designed and made and tracing the long paths that lead to produce things in our lives from the mundane to the extreme. As a mentor, I hope to foster the same kind of wonder and excitement of discovering how and why things are designed the way they are and through this, inspire others to discover and design new things, or at least improve what is already there. Adjacent to my love of engineering is my love of space exploration and colonization. As an avid futurist, I see no possibility other than for humanity to expand into space to ensure our survival, take advantage of the national resources, and to simply fulfil a basic human desire, the desire to explore the unknown. My personal, less-academic interests are broad. I love learning in general, especially anything related to science. I'm personally interested in learning more about machine learning and artificial intelligence as I think that field will affect our lives in vast ways in the coming decades. I'm also interested in topics related to personal finance, such as financial independence and various investments. As far as my hobbies, I'm an avid gamer, far preferring the medium to books, TV, or movies. I play quite a few table top role playing games (TTRPGs) and regularly run a few games as a GM. Additionally, I design new TTRPGs and hope to start publishing them one day. Cool facts: I'm from a very small town in Indiana called Marengo, less than 1,000 people live there. I graduated with 92 people from my town and several neighboring towns within about a 30 minute driving radius. After graduating from college, I drove 2,300 miles from my hometown to move to Seattle WA, stopping along the way to see many great sights like Mt. Rushmore and Yellowstone. My first job was a tour guide in a cave in my hometown (I still love spelunking, but I don't get to do it as often as I want). I've experienced nearly several minutes of zero-gravity flying on NASA's vomit comet through their RGSFOP (now microgravity university). I spent the last 5 years at Blue Origin working on the New Glenn rocket program, which when completed will be nearly as large as the Saturn V rocket. I'm currently slow traveling through Europe and have stayed for a month each in the UK, France, Italy, and currently (as of January 2023) am in Malta.Project ideas
Research Paper - A Mission to Explore Europa
One of the largest and most interesting objects in the solar system, Jupiter's moon, Europa, may have the best chance for harboring life other than Earth. The moon is covered in ice with chaotic cracks strewn on the surface and evidence of a liquid water sea that lies below this outer shell, kept warm by the immense tidal forces from Jupiter and its other moons. This project would take on an aspect of designing an autonomous exploration mission to the moon. Depending on the scope and depth a student would like to explore, there are many possible topics worth considering such as research on the implications of an earth-made object entering Europa's potential biosphere (astrobiology), design of the probe that will land on the moon (mechanical engineering), design of the probe's path through the solar system when to launch and how much fuel it may take (astronautical engineering), the potential impacts of discovery of life existing on another world (sociology), etc. The deliverable for this project would be a paper focusing on the chosen aspect of the mission. My expertise is primarily scientific writing and aerospace engineering. This project is very similar to my final research project for finishing my undergraduate degree and while it isn't possible to go as in-depth of that project, aspects of it can stand-alone as worthwhile research projects in their own merit. If designing the lander is the chosen topic, I also have extensive computer aided design (CAD) experience which is useful for creating a virtual mock-up.
