Space Mission Design Simulator With Generated Timelines and Risk Reports
Space mission design is normally locked inside agencies and aerospace firms, where teams of specialists iterate on timelines, mass budgets, and risk registers for months. Students and researchers who want to learn the discipline have almost no tools that let them experiment with realistic mission trade-offs on their own.
The intern builds an educational platform where generative AI does the specialist heavy lifting. Users define mission parameters such as destination, payload, budget class, and whether the mission is crewed or robotic, and the AI generates candidate mission plans: phased timelines, resource allocations, launch windows, and risk assessments with mitigations. A Python backend orchestrates generation and validates outputs for internal consistency, PostgreSQL stores missions, revisions, and shared plans, and a React interface lets teams customize parameters, compare scenarios side by side, and collaborate on refinements. Secure authentication supports classroom use, and completed plans export as detailed reports.
The project teaches structured generative AI design, turning open-ended generation into consistent, schema-conformant plans, plus the modular full-stack architecture that keeps an ambitious domain tool maintainable.