Hi! Friendly reminder that tomorrow from 2-3pm, we will be hosting a virtual Cargo Connect Experts Panel for FLL Teams, featuring two aerospace engineers who are on the forefront of aerospace transportation research! FLL teams will get to ask questions and hear their ideas about the future of transportation and what it’s like to work in their field! (and maybe get some feedback about their innovation projects!)

To register, please fill out this brief form: https://tinyurl.com/ccep2021

We want to hear your questions! If you’d like to submit any in advance, please include them on the registration form or email them to [log in to unmask] Of course, we will also welcome questions if you think of them on the day of! 

Meet our speakers: Alex Kaplan and Greg Mekkes. 

Alexander Kaplan, Spacecraft Secondary Structures Engineer at Firefly Aerospace
Alex Kaplan started his FIRST journey in 4th grade when he joined the Short Pump Elementary FLL Team in 2004. He went on to compete in FTC in middle school and joined the Deep Run High School FRC Team 1086 Blue Cheese. He received his Bachelor of Science in Aerospace Engineering at Virginia Tech and his Masters Degree from Stanford University. He currently works for Firefly Aerospace in Texas. He worked on their Alpha rocket payload segment and is now working on the Blue Ghost lunar lander. Alex will talk about the challenges of getting cargo into space. 

Greg Mekkes, Aerospace Engineer and Test Director for NASA’s 8-Foot High Temperature Tunnel
Greg Mekkes went to school at Purdue University and then came to work at NASA Langley Research Center. He worked within a Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) applications group in support of the National Aero-Space Plane program and then the Hyper-X program. Following a project to analyze Shuttle retro rocket rendezvous loads on the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) for a Shuttle-HST servicing mission, he went to work as a Test Engineer at the 16-Foot Transonic wind tunnel and is now serving as a Test Director at the 8-Foot High Temperature Tunnel.

We hope to see you all then! Please don’t hesitate to reach out at [log in to unmask] with any questions or concerns. 

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