Aerospace Summer Games 2023

An epic beachfront battle featuring NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, SpaceX, Boeing, and more!

Catherine Rasgaitis
6 min readSep 18, 2023
ASG (Aerospace Summer Games)

This summer, I had the amazing opportunity to intern at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. From Monday to Friday, I would ride a bus from Caltech to the JPL campus before walking to building 301, Project Formulation.

I would spend most of my day there, in the Deep Space Network sector where my office was located. I dedicated my time to reading papers, collaborating with other interns, and pumping out lots of code. (My project was centered around deep reinforcement learning techniques to automate communication scheduling between faraway space satellites and ground stations.)

I often ventured to other parts of the JPL campus for various meetings and events though! In fact, there were lots of seminars to attend and learn from almost every day. Seminars focused on topics like the search for life on Mars, the history of the Cold Atom Lab, and the future of robotics in space exploration.

Besides learning about all the exciting projects being run at JPL, attending these seminars was a great excuse to tour the lab’s facilities. JPL has a similar feel to a college campus, with lots of buildings, greenery, and even a fire station spread across the…

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Catherine Rasgaitis

2x Top Writer — Space & Innovation | Enthusiast of all things tech and science!