<p>I am interested in aerospace engineering and I am look for aerospace graduate programs, with an emphasis on space systems (satellites, spacecrafts) or space exploration, not the aircrafts..</p>
<p>So I was wandering which graduate colleges are strong in space research?</p>
<p>I’d go with Purdue. It’s hard to compete with their history in space exploration and turning out astronauts as well as engineers. Heck, their brand new engineering building is named after Neil Armstrong and is designed to look like a plane…</p>
<p>It is difficult to pick out best “space” programs for graduate school because it is too broad of a category. Different schools have different strengths depending on the expertise of their faculty. You are better off looking through the relevant journals to what you wish to study and looking at which schools tend to publish a lot in those research areas.</p>
<p>Check out University of Colorado-Boulder. They are highly ranked and have a lot of contacts with NASA. Also about 16-18 astronauts have graduated from there. My son is a senior there majoring in aerospace engineering.</p>
<p>You could try USC as well. They have a prime location in Los Angeles, since many major aerospace and defense companies are located there, and the professors tend to be well-connected. Many JPL employees use the engineering and science graduate school there to attain a master’s or doctorate degree while working. The graduate engineering school has one of the best distance education programs in America for this reason, since much of the school’s purpose is to grant local aerospace industry employees a graduate education while they continue to work. Not all of these aerospace companies are NASA or “public space” exploration, since Los Angeles includes places like the Boeing satellite plant, various Northrop Grumman space launch control rooms (like Azusa), space non-profits like the Aerospace Corporation, and of course SpaceX-type space startups. I believe they just started an Astronautical graduate program there, which was recently accredited.</p>
<p>Neil Armstrong and a bunch of other astronauts went to USC.</p>