Aerospace Engineering · CU Boulder · BS May 2027
Alessandro Valente
I build liquid rocket engines, spacecraft GNC, and the simulations that tell you whether either of them is going to work. Two of those simulations are on this site and you can run them yourself.
Interactive
Simulations you can run in the browser
Both tools support the same vehicle: a nitrous oxide and ethanol liquid sounding rocket. Neither is a demo. They are the analysis my design team actually uses.
Propulsion
Hot-Fire Simulator
Blowdown feed dynamics, combustion product thermodynamics and nozzle performance, re-solved live as you change the engine. Ported from MATLAB, and rebuilt around a combustion solver that actually conserves atoms.
Flight dynamics
6-DOF Flight Simulator
Full six-degree-of-freedom trajectory integration with Monte Carlo dispersions, impact footprint contours at 1σ through 3σ, stability margin history and sensitivity ranking.
Research and design
Current work
Reinforcement learning
Differential Games
Teaching multiple agents to find Nash equilibria in continuous-time games, and building an exact linear-quadratic solver so the learner has something rigorous to be measured against.
Bioastronautics
Spatial Disorientation
Detecting when a lunar landing pilot is disoriented, in real time, and triggering a flight display at that moment. Boundary violations went to zero. I ran subject testing and part of the analysis.
Capstone
Debris Detection Satellite
An event-camera payload for measuring the sub-centimetre debris population that no ground asset can see. I am the Electronics Lead, where the power budget constrains what the spacecraft is allowed to observe.
Background
I founded the Engineering Connections Design Team and lead it as chief engineer, where twenty of us are building a nitrous oxide and ethanol liquid sounding rocket. I have been on CU’s Formula SAE aerodynamics team since 2023, leading sidepod development, and I teach maths to high school students alongside the engineering work. I graduate in May 2027 and I am looking at roles in propulsion, GNC, flight software, astrodynamics and space life sciences.
I have been building simulations for a while. The first one was a Formula 1 race simulator I wrote in Python at fifteen, deriving car performance from real telemetry.