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Bryson Love didn’t need an invitation to get involved in the activities of the mechanical engineering department at �ձ�av��Ƶ.

Before he even began classes, Love asked about getting involved in NASA projects. By September he was on a team, surrounded by other freshmen and sophomores. By June he was in Cocoa Beach, Florida, with his team as a finalist in a NASA contest, and their entry received the award for building the best prototype.

This school year he and some of the other 2024-25 freshman are now leaders on teams competing in a variety of NASA contests.

Todd Letcher is an associate professor of mechanical engineering. Among the many hats he wears is coordinator of NASA projects at �ձ�av��Ƶ.

Letcher called Love “the kind of person we want to bring here and help succeed. He is probably the biggest reason that we have a blossoming group of younger people working on NASA design challenges. He contacted me a couple of times before he even got to campus as a freshman to talk about getting started designing and building rovers.  

“When he started, we didn't have a freshman group that was participating in these competitions. I basically asked him to help me find a few more people, and all of the sudden we had about 15 to 20 dedicated people working on these projects.”

Love, a native of Charlestown, Indiana, deflects the credit. “Todd did most of the recruiting. … I just told some friends about meeting times.”

A growing field of NASA contest teams

One thing is certain. The number of �ձ�av��Ƶ entries in the NASA design contest is growing. Just having any team is a comparatively new development. Then for a number of years, the vast majority of participants were students completing their senior design project. �ձ�av��Ƶ still fields teams with those students.

However, in 2024-25 the university fielded two teams in RASC-AL (Revolutionary Aerospace Systems Concept-Academic Linkage). Those two �ձ�av��Ƶ teams were among the 14 teams selected nationwide for the NASA space design contest, one being Love’s group of youngsters.

In 2025-26, �ձ�av��Ƶ has two teams competing for finalist honors in the RASC-AL contest plus three teams in the Gateways to Blue Skies competition, one in the Human Exploration Rover Challenge and one in the Human Lander Challenge. In addition, there are two teams competing for the $5,000 prize in the Governor’s Giant Vision contest and one senior design capstone team working on an X-Hab project.

Love’s ethics rubs off on others

The contests provide a forum for students to apply classroom knowledge, solve problems that don’t have a textbook answer and develop leadership skills.

Love adds that the teams build camaraderie. Asked what has been the best part of his 1 ½ years at �ձ�av��Ƶ, he said, “Doing the RASC-AL. It was awesome to do a project, but it was fun just being with the guys. We’ve become buds. On Thursday evening we have NASA meetings and share the interesting things we’ve been doing.”

Letcher noted, “Bryson was the first young person last year that was brave enough to stand up in front of the group and talk about what he had been working on. He's also the most organized of the entire group and tends to keep everyone on track, or ahead of the timeline we need to be on. He's always very professional, very hard working, and those things are rubbing off on everyone else.  

“On top of that, I think all of his peers really enjoy working with him and being around him in general. … Bryson is the glue that holds it together.”

Learning to be a leader

Alexander Diersen, one of the students on Love’s current RASC-AL team, said Love is “always forward thinking and planning for the next step while making sure none of us get lost along the way. His continuous tenacity and vigor towards working on RASC-AL inspires me and the team to have the same mindset of greatness.”

Love doesn’t consider himself to be a natural leader. On the 2024-25 RASC-AL team, his role was strictly as a worker. “I was in charge of a lot of the control systems, vision systems and AI training timeline for NOVA (the name of their project). I picked out algorithms to know how long it would take to complete tasks on the lunar surface.”

���’m learning how to be a leader. That first week, the first meeting, I had no idea what I was doing. I feel like I’ve definitely gotten better with leading projects, constructively critiquing when we need a pivot and offering praise at other times.”

Love also is a small group leader at GracePoint Wesleyan Church with Channing Bloedel, a fellow sophomore who leads another RASC-AL group.

Journey to �ձ�av��Ƶ begins with Black Hills vacation

Love said it is “the grace of God” that brought him to �ձ�av��Ƶ. After all, Brookings is 900 miles from his southern Indiana home. No one else from his 200-student graduating class is at �ձ�av��Ƶ, however, he said he does feel the presence of classmate Kamm VanGilder, who was planning an engineering career but died at age 15.

The popular higher ed choices in Charlestown were the University of Louisville, about 20 miles south of Charlestown, and Purdue, one of the nation’s foremost engineering schools.

Love knew since his elementary school days that he wanted to be an engineer. He figured it would be at one of those two schools.

Early in his high school days, he toured those schools and was turned off by their class sizes and cookie-cutter admission approaches.

A family vacation to the Black Hills in the summer before his sophomore year left him with favorable impression of South Dakota. After crossing Purdue and Louisville off the list, Love briefly considered South Dakota School of Mines. But being 22 hours away from home seemed just too far.

Campus tour for audience of one

In April of his junior year, he planned a visit to �ձ�av��Ƶ on Yellow and Blue Day. It snowed that day, which the southern Indiana native found odd. So was the rest of the day.

Turns out Love was the only engineering student registered for the event. Admissions wanted him to reschedule. Love said he had already purchased his airfare and needed to go ahead with the visit. Admissions relented and made plans for the Lohr College of Engineering to give its recruiting pitch to one student.

So at 8 ’o clock on a Saturday morning, department head Yucheng Liu was giving a presentation to Love on the mechanical engineering department.

“It made me feel special. They didn’t have to do that. They really took time out of their morning.” Love also learned that Liu had previously taught at the University of Louisville, and that common geography helped build a bond. “At that point I thought this might be a school for me,” he said.

Break the Ice rovers seal the deal

Love then attended Youth Engineering Camp, a weeklong summer outreach by the Lohr College of Engineering. 

“The main thing I remember is seeing the Break the Ice rovers in action” at the gravel pit south of Brookings, where Letcher and three �ձ�av��Ƶ students were doing autonomous excavation trials as part of a NASA contest. “I asked Todd if I could do the rovers as a freshman, and he said yes.”

The rest is history, a book which is far from its final chapter.

“Honestly, it’s been the greatest educational decision I could have made,” Love said.

He added, “The biggest thing I’ve really enjoyed about RASC-AL projects was going to the forum as a finalist. You got to see the fruit of your labor. There was a lot of long nights and work to be done for the project. But being in Florida with some of the best students in the country and top engineers at NASA and others in the industry was really special.  

“Seeing the progression of an idea to a working product was so rewarding.”

As an adviser, Letcher also values that aspect of NASA projects. He also relishes the reward of a student who is “all in.”

“I really can't say enough good things about him. I'm just really glad we got him involved from the minute he set foot on campus,” Letcher said.