• Brooke Owens Fellow, Class of 2023

• San Jose State University, Aerospace Engineering, ‘24

• Host Institution: Ball Aerospace

• Mentor: May Rosekranz

• Brookie Mentor: TBD

Madison Forseth is a Junior studying Aerospace Engineering at San Jose State University. Her dream is to design hardware that allows humans to explore space and establish a presence on other planets. Madison found her love for space exploration through watching NOVA episodes about astronomy on TV with her dad, visiting local science museums like the Chabot Space and Science Center, and looking up at the stars on family camping trips. During her time at Chabot Community College in Hayward, she participated in the NASA Community College Aerospace Scholars program, for which she was sent to the Ames Research Center where she saw the incredible scale of NASA facilities for the first time. This experience, as well as her wonderful STEM instructors at Chabot, further sparked her desire to enable humans to explore the stars. Since then, Madison has happily completed both the L’SPACE NASA Proposal Writing and Reviewing Experience as well as the Mission Concept Academy, and went to the AIAA’s stellar ASCEND 2022 conference after winning a Diversity Scholarship to sponsor her attendance.

Since transferring to SJSU in Fall 2022, Madison has been thrilled to find a community of like minded engineers, and is loving the hands-on experience of conducting both wind tunnel and structural analysis experiments. She has gone further by participating in an ongoing project to build a solar array drive assembly for CubeSats through a collaboration with NASA JPL and a team of students. For this project she has been doing orbital dynamics calculations to define system requirements, and presenting bi-weekly project updates to JPL engineers.

Madison enjoys spending her free time encouraging her classmates, baking for family and friends, hiking, and drawing. She spends most weekends at the family-owned Italian restaurant Acqua e Farina, where she has loved working for the past 3 years.

This Summer, Madison is excited to be at Ball Aerospace in Colorado as a systems engineering intern through the Brooke Owens Fellowship.