Intern, R&D Undergraduate Summer - Advanced Concepts Engineering, Onsite

About the Role

We are seeking multiple motivated interns to support advanced concept modeling, simulation, and design across three complementary work areas: RACE hypersonic vehicle design, Ascent guidance/navigation/control and kill-chain modeling, and AFSIM mission/engagement survivability analysis. Interns will help build reusable analysis workflows, model libraries, software hooks, scenario laydowns, data inputs, and automation capabilities that improve the department's ability to rapidly explore advanced aerospace concepts. A major theme across the internship work will be developing sandbox environments that enable AI-assisted hypersonic design, kill-chain analysis, and survivability assessment.

Work Areas

RACE Vehicle Concept Design and AI-Enabled Hypersonic Design Sandbox

Interns supporting RACE will help develop reusable vehicle concept design capabilities, including representative input libraries, data structures, model interfaces, and analysis workflows.

• Outer mold line trade studies
• Trajectory-informed vehicle analysis
• Packaging and mass property evaluation
• Aerodynamic or aerothermal model integration
• Parameter sweeps, visualization, and automation

This work will support development of a vehicle concept sandbox that enables AI/ML methods to configure, evaluate, compare, and iterate on hypersonic vehicle concepts.

Ascent GNC, Trajectory, and Kill-Chain Sandbox Development

Interns supporting Ascent will help develop, modify, clean up, and test reusable guidance, navigation, control, trajectory, and mission-analysis capabilities.

• Implementing closed-loop guidance or navigation algorithms
• Trajectory evaluation routines
• Analysis modules, data processing scripts, and visualization tools

Interns may also support development of a reusable kill-chain sandbox including Ascent-based models, representative inputs, software hooks, and workflows to enable AI/ML-assisted hypersonic system design and analysis.

AFSIM Survivability Analysis and AI-Ready Mission Sandbox

Interns supporting AFSIM will help build and analyze mission and engagement scenarios that assess survivability, attrition, and kill-chain performance for missile, air, space, and unmanned systems.

• Building representative sensor and weapon laydowns
• Modeling communications and command-and-control elements
• Running parameter sweeps, processing simulation outputs, and visualizing survivability drivers (detection, tracking, engagement, probability of mission success)

Interns may also help develop an AFSIM sandbox environment that can be leveraged for future AI-enabled scenario exploration, algorithm evaluation, and automated trade-space analysis.

Daily Activities

On any given day, interns may:

• Develop analysis scripts
• Build model/input libraries
• Automate workflows