Chris Prainito watched from NASA’s Operational Support Building 2 at Cape Canaveral as the Harvard Undergraduate Aerospace Collective (HUAC) made history. A senior mechanical engineering and physics concentrator at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), Prainito had spent the last four years taking the club’s cube-shaped satellite (CubeSat) from a grant proposal to a machine that was actually going to space – the first student-built satellite to do so in Harvard’s history. He’d gone from a general member to head of the payload subteam to chief engineer. Prainito and his fellow HUAC leaders watched the CubeSat launch from a vantage point two miles away, where they felt the sonic boom seconds after seeing the rocket break the sound barrier. As livestreams from the International Space Station showed the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket docking and astronauts bringing the satellite aboard, it finally sank in: this club of undergraduate engineers and computer scientists had really done it.
Members of the Harvard Undergraduate Aerospace Collective at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. From left are Christopher Prainito, Grace Kim (S.B. '23), Madison Davis, Kyra Mo (A.B. '25), Katelyn Miller, Sophia Gocan, Milligan Grinstead and Camryn Neches. (Harvard Undergraduate Aerospace Collective)
