🔒Space mission: Dozens of Central Mass. firms work with NASA, including WPI, where researchers follow in Goddard’s footsteps

In fiscal 2025, NASA awarded more than $14 million in contracts to Central Massachusetts organizations, ranging from $7.3 million for Mathworks to provide software to $90,000 for the nonprofit Explore Mars to conduct research and development. The biggest award to any university in the region, $606,463, went to Worcester Polytechnic Institute, where the Father of Modern Rocketry himself – Robert Goddard – graduated in 1908 and worked at WPI’s Salisbury Laboratories before moving to the university’s Skull Tomb lab, just off of Institute Road.

“Having that history is like having a grandfather or having a relative, and you're kind of following in their footsteps, which is really special,” said Danielle Cote, endowed associate professor in WPI’s Department of Mechanical & Materials Engineering. Today at WPI, Cote and her colleagues are continuing Goddard’s legacy of innovation through research that advances our presence in space, and attracting talent and bolstering the Central Massachusetts workforce while doing so. “Students love NASA,” she said. “It is very easy to recruit students for these projects, and you can get your pick of the students when it's something that they are passionate about or they're excited about.” This passion and excitement has far-reaching effects, impacting Central Massachusetts as a whole, said Kathie Mahoney, president of the Massachusetts Manufacturing Extension Partnership in Auburn. “The education that we have here in Central Mass, especially at WPI, there's a direct correlation I believe between that and the innovation that's happening both at the companies and the educational institutions,” Mahoney said.

WPI’s space research

Like Goddard, Cote is an alum of WPI, having graduated with her PhD in 2014. She focused on larger-scale metal additive manufacturing, and her first NASA contract came in 2021 when she received a $600,000 Early Career Faculty award for her analysis of shape memory alloys: metals trained through high heat to return to their original forms after being bent or deformed. Cote’s research was for the application of shape memory alloys on rovers – robotic devices that collect images and samples – sent to the Moon and Mars. Her study utilized a cold-spray technology, a technique shooting metal powder at supersonic speeds to a surface, forming a bond without the use of heat. Cote is using that process in her most recent NASA grant that she received on Jan. 26. Traditionally, cold-spray has been mainly used to repair devices, like rockets, and only been in the last few years has the technique been utilized to build space devices from scratch. Cote’s new research aims to use cold-spray technology to make large-scale components out of a new nickel-based alloy created by NASA. Cote’s work is part of a long tradition of WPI’s work on space-related projects with NASA, said Bogdan Vernescu, vice president and vice provost for research and innovation at the university. A considerable amount of WPI’s work aims to understand how different phenomena on Earth are influenced by the lack of gravity in space in order to assist NASA with its space objectives. For example, on Earth, water is used to cool electronics, but water flows differently in space, so WPI is conducting research on how to cool electronics in the absence of gravity. “On the other hand, we are also doing experiments in space that can help us understand what happens on Earth,” said Vernescu. WPI is using the atmosphere of space to study Earth-based wildfires. The challenge with wildfires is they’re very dynamic, with their winds constantly changing direction and at high speeds, which is a very difficult environment to replicate in a lab, Vernescu said. “If we want to mimic something much more dynamic, we have to do it in space where gravity doesn't exist,” he said. NASA has funded WPI experiments on the agency’s International Space Station, located 250 miles above sea level and orbiting Earth 16 times every 24 hours.

Economic impact

NASA grants stand out for institutions like WPI because of the agency’s notoriety, Cote said. WPI collaborates with local companies on many of its NASA contracts, said Cote, and often the funding goes both to the university and local businesses. That funding enables small businesses to grow, hire more talent, and support the next workforce generation.

Furthermore, federal research funding boosts the Massachusetts economy as a whole, said Mahoney. A study published in July by UMass Donahue Institute found for each federal dollar invested in Massachusetts research generates nearly double that amount for the state. In that way, WPI’s ongoing partnerships with NASA, spurred by a century-old Goddard invention, is working to progress the economic vitality of the entire region. “It's just continuing that legacy. That's where I see it as continuing WPI’s legacy of working with Goddard,” said Cote. “And that is special.” Mica Kanner-Mascolo is a staff writer at Worcester Business Journal, who primarily covers the healthcare, manufacturing, and higher education industries.