Engineering studios
Design, fabrication, and integration space where a cohort can take a vehicle from sketch to flight test without leaving the building.
Welcome to the institute
The Aerospace Institute is the foundation's next major build: a dedicated home for aerospace education, research, and industry partnership. It has not opened yet. Programme design and partner agreements are the work in front of us now, and the doors will open once the facility and the curriculum are both ready.
When it does open, the institute will run focused pathways for students who want to work in aviation and space technology — rigorous fundamentals, hands-on build-and-test cycles, and the professional habits that transfer to university and the workforce.
We are publishing the plan early on purpose. The schools, universities, and industry partners who join now are the ones who will shape what gets built.
What students will study
Four strands, taught together rather than in sequence — a student should be flying, measuring, and arguing about a design in the same term.
Flight science
Aerodynamics, propulsion, stability, and mission design — the physics a vehicle has to obey before anyone builds one.
Safety & systems
Systems thinking, testing discipline, and operations awareness. How aircraft are certified, maintained, and flown without incident.
Design & fabrication
Drawing, machining, and assembling real parts — materials and structures learned at the bench rather than only on the page.
Data & control
Instrumentation, avionics, and flight data. Reading what a test actually told you and changing the design because of it.
Planned facilities
What we intend to build
Three things the region does not currently have in one place, and the reason the institute is worth building at all.
Research lab
Mentored R&D — unmanned systems, materials, and instrumentation — carried from a question through validation to a paper students can defend.
Partner network
Standing links to universities, aviation firms, and alumni so internships, guest teaching, and equipment are part of the institute, not favours.
The road there
How the institute gets built
Four stages, in order. We will publish an opening date here once the site and the funding for it are both secured — not before.
Underway
Curriculum and partnerships
Designing the pathways with practising engineers, and signing the university and industry partners who will teach, examine, and hire from them.
Next
Site and funding
Securing the land, the workshop and lab build, and the capital behind it. This is the stage donors and sponsors move fastest.
Planned
Pilot cohort
A small first intake run out of partner facilities, so the teaching is tested on real students before the full institute opens.
Planned
The institute opens
Full intake, the research programme running, and placements with the partners built up in stage one.
Help us build it
The institute is not open, so there is nothing to apply to yet — but there is plenty to join. Schools and universities can shape the curriculum, firms can offer equipment, teaching, or placements, and donors can move the site forward.
Want to hear when applications open? Tell us on the contact page and we will write to you first.