I am Brian Glassman, and I attend the University of Colorado Boulder where I am studying to earn my master’s degree in computer science. This summer, I was an intern with the FreeFlyer® development team. I am thrilled to have gained experience working in the space industry and first-hand knowledge of the astrodynamics software market. It has been a good opportunity to “look behind the curtain” of activities I have been doing in class.

My main task this year was to expand our two-body Keplerian propagator to handle hyperbolic orbits. The Runge Kutta (RK89) propagator can already be used for this, but because the two-body propagator is analytic rather than iterative, it is faster and more precise. It is a cool thing to say, “I made that,” and I am looking forward to other university students who use FreeFlyer having the opportunity to use my work in the future. In addition to this project, I worked on software quality assurance and created a demo mission plan. The development team made me feel like I was part of the team. Everyone is very friendly and casual, with humor and tangents as we go about our workday. Overall, interning at a.i. solutions was extremely enjoyable.