Ken Whitehead, a junior in aerospace engineering, has been granted an opportunity few students across the country can dream about. Since the Fall of 2007, Whitehead has spent full semesters working for NASA in Huntsville, Alabama.

Whitehead has been working on the systems engineering side of the Ares V project as an assistant to the chief engineer.

Ares V is part of two main components to America's next outer space excursion. Ares V will act as NASA's primary vessel for the safe delivery of large-scale hardware- from lunar landing crafts to food, fresh water and other requirements for sustaining human life beyond Earth's orbit- to outer space. The other component to the mission, the Ares I vessel actually contains the astronauts going into orbit.

I can actually see myself doing this as a career. I love the systems management side of such a big project as this.-Ken Whitehead, junior in aerospace engineeringWhitehead held several jobs concerning these two projects, one was making sure that each project had set deadlines for the completions of certain components to the projects. 

Of the thousands of deadlines required by NASA for the completion of these projects, 20 of them had to be picked as top priorities. As Whitehead pointed out, not everyone always agreed which requirements should be considered the top 20.

"Sometimes engineers would just yell at each other," Whitehead said. "It could get pretty bad." Whitehead would have to make a maturity scale of how urgently the requirements needed to be completed.

Though having worked mainly with systems engineering while at NASA, Whitehead actually had no intention of pursuing that career. 

Whitehead is one of only five people selected from the country to work on this NASA program.

"I'm actually kind of a guinea pig for the internship project."

Of the students interning at NASA, Whitehead is the only one to work on the systems management side of Ares. Though not expecting the role he ended up having with NASA, Whitehead said, "I can actually see myself doing this as a career. I love the systems management side of such a big project as this."

Whitehead has three more semesters with NASA before completing his degree. NASA hopes to finish the planning and revising of the Ares project by no later than 2014. Whitehead expects the first excursion to be in about 2020.