NASA intern. Astronaut Scholar. Goldwater Scholar. Mechanical engineering undergraduate student Keanu Brayman has humbly earned impressive accolades at UCF, creating a trajectory that will lead him to the career of his dreams: working in the space industry.
His fascination with space began when he was a child. One of his most memorable moments was watching the space shuttle Endeavour take off from a beach in Boca Raton, three hours south of Cape Canaveral. He would later have the opportunity to meet the commander of that mission as an Astronaut Scholar.
“Looking back now and seeing all these different accolades is just, ‘Wow,’” he says. “[I have] UCF to thank for nominating me and giving me all the support and all the opportunities they have given me: the research background, the internships, all of that. Definitely just incredible.”
Building the Future of Space
Brayman is now in his third semester as a NASA Pathways intern at Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, where he has been contributing to several projects leading to a return to the lunar surface and building a moon base.
During his first semester at Marshall, Brayman worked with the guidance, navigation, and mission analysis group, working on obstacle avoidance and trajectory optimization to support the Human Landing System program for NASA’s Artemis missions. He also helped set up a quadcopter hardware lab to test guidance algorithms for flight vehicles.
Last summer, he worked on a space-rated robotic arm equipped with a laser, operated in a vacuum chamber to simulate a space environment, to melt lunar regolith that will be used in additive manufacturing to build structures on the moon. He took the initiative on the robotics aspect of the project, meeting with the equipment manufacturer, setting up the arm, and generating tool path scripts versatile enough to work with different build parameters requested from the team.
“It was an incredible teamwork exercise, an incredible chance to really have ownership over that robotics portion of it,” he says.
Brayman is spending his third semester at Marshall this summer supporting a number of projects, including NASA’s Disk-Shaped Configurable and Modular vAcuum uNit (DISCMAN) that will be deployed to the International Space Station, working on requirements verification using computer vision. He’s also continuing work with a robotic arm for the Lunar Assembly and Servicing by Autonomous Robotics (LASAR) project, this time focusing on laser welding in vacuum, which will be necessary in assembling large structures on the lunar surface.
“What I’m supporting now is largely in space laser welding, [shifting] from 3D printing to actually taking different pieces of large structures and welding them together in orbit or on the moon to build larger structures than you can get out in a single launch.”
Taking the Lead on Robotics
Brayman is an undergraduate researcher in the Astrodynamics, Space and Robotics Laboratory (ASRL) directed by Tarek Elgohary. There, he has been focused on research for the lab’s Rapid Orbit Motion Emulator, or ROME, a holonomic ground vehicle equipped with a six-axis robotic arm. He explains that ROME gives researchers the ability to emulate a spacecraft at the end of the arm, following different orbital paths, as a physical method of conducting hardware-in-the-loop-testing of control algorithms.
His Honors Undergraduate Thesis, Constrained Dynamics of Rapid Orbit Motion Emulator (ROME) Using Udwadia-Kalaba Approach, explores a new, computationally efficient way to derive equations of motion for a dynamical system.
“There’s a lot of benefits to it, and also a lot of potential for this approach to be used on actual spacecraft for what’s called proximity operations, which is when you have two spacecraft close to each other for something like docking, refueling, or debris removal,” Brayman says. “You have this close formation flying or things like that where the mathematics, the dynamics subscribing that are sometimes fairly complex.”
Paving the Way for All Engineers
Brayman has co-founded a new registered student organization, the Society of Innovation and Neurodiversity in Engineering (SINE at UCF). The group supports and advocates for neurodiversity in STEM, offering inclusive resources and activities for all.
“Being neurodivergent and struggling with ADHD and things like that certainly was one reason I doubted whether I could do something like work at NASA one day…[it] frankly was one of the many things that, especially when it came to doing math and stuff, has always made me struggle,” he says.
The club has been up and running for over a year, with a growing membership of students who consistently show up to events and participate in projects. Among their activities is the Accessible STEM Design Challenge, where its members create educational kits geared toward elementary school students. The low-cost kits contain components that can be created with a 3D printer and address accessibility for all students, such as neurodivergent learners or those who are hearing or vision impaired.
Pairing Opportunity with Passion, Drive and Persistence
Brayman says the best advice he can share for students who want to embark on a similar path is to pursue their goals with passion, drive and persistence.
“Just have something that you really enjoy, a field, a discipline, a cause, whatever it is where you can say, ‘Hey, this is something that I really care about that is going to motivate me to really put time into this,’” he says. “If I didn’t care about space exploration and NASA as much as I do, I don’t believe I would have ever come this far.”
He adds that he’s grateful to have Elgohary as an advisor.
“He’s just the most supportive, just incredible professor and mentor that I’ve had at UCF,” Brayman says. “He’s supported me through a lot of personal difficulties and always been there. I mean, it’s amazing that he even took me on in his lab when he was already so busy…he still takes time to meet with me and other students and support me to go to conferences to do this research, do what I’m interested in.”
- Written by Bel Huston