Technical quality assurance in student design projects

Through a joint program between the MITRE Corporation and Worcester Polytechnical Institute (WPI), students design, build, test, and prepare experiments for flight aboard NASA´s Space Shuttle. The authors describe the cooperative environment wherein the WPI faculty, MITRE staff engineers and scientists, and WPI graduate and undergraduate students work together toward the development of these experiments. The benefits of this program, particularly the emphasis on state-of-the-art and state-of-the-practice designs, education, and technology are covered