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Dezell Turner slips on a set of sleek augmented reality goggles in the lobby of the Smead Aerospace Engineering Sciences Building. Behind him stretches a floor-to-ceiling mural of space—a deep blue sky dotted with constellations and the cloudy shape of the Milky Way.

In his Microsoft HoloLens headset, however, Turner is experiencing a different kind of outer space.

Turner, a graduate student in aerospace engineering sciences and Smead Scholar at CU Boulder, waives his hands in front of him and pinches his fingers. Inside the headset, which only he can see, curving red and yellow lines appear. They join two dots, one representing Earth and the other the moon. With a few swipes, the lines shift, transforming from a relatively simple arc to more complicated curls and loop-de-loops.

It looks like a more dizzying version of directions you might follow on your phone during a road trip.

“This is like a holographic Google Maps for planning space missions,” he said.

The new tool, which Turner developed working under advisor Jay McMahon, projects various paths a spacecraft could take to get to the moon through what scientists call “cislunar” space. He named the software ASTROMECH, a nod to a class of droids in the Star Wars franchise.

Turner’s work arrives as the moon is having a moment. NASA’s plans to land humans on the lunar surface sometime this decade. Other entities, including a growing number of private companies, have their eyes set on space. Turner hopes that his AR tool will help some of those groups plan out their missions—picking routes and weighing factors like speed versus fuel cost.

For the budding aerospace engineer, the project is a chance to make the technology from some of his favorite movies a reality. Picture the scene in 2015’s Star Wars: The Force Awakens in which a droid projects a holographic map that will lead the characters to the location of a missing hero.

“When R2D2 projects the map to Luke Skywalker, we’re creating a real-world version of that that’s hopefully just as intuitive to use,” Turner said.

Dezell Turner in the lobby of the Smead Aerospace Engineering Sciences Building. (Credit: Dezell Turner)

According to ASTROMECH, this route from Earth to the moon would take a little over 15 days. The display also includes an estimate for delta-V, essentially how much fuel the spacecraft will need to burn. (Credit: Dezell Turner)

Miniature planetarium

Turner, who’s 24, has loved space for as long as he can remember. When he was 4 years old, his parents bought him a projector that displayed a star map on the ceiling of his bedroom. He spent so long staring at the projection that he memorized many of the constellations.

But space is a lot more complicated than movies or his bedroom planetarium might make it seem. In Star Wars, if Han Solo needs to get somewhere, he just points the Millennium Falcon in the right direction and goes. In reality, spacecraft leaving Earth’s orbit are caught in the push and pull between the planet and its moon.

“Your trajectories aren’t always going to be traditional shapes like ellipses and circles,” Turner said. “Spacecraft may take all sorts of weird paths, and that can become very mathematically complicated.”

In 1969, for example, Apollo 11 took a relatively direct route to the moon, arriving in an orbit close to the lunar surface in about three days. More recently, NASA’s Artemis 1 mission, which launched in 2022 with no humans aboard, made a more circuitous pass. The mission’s Orion space capsule first circled the moon, using its gravity to slingshot roughly 40,000 miles out into space. That trip took five days.

Turner explained that some small aerospace companies may not have employees versed in those kinds of gravitational intricacies. ASTROMECH does the math for them.

“The ways in which Dezell is leveraging AR in designing ASTROMECH has the potential to make cislunar trajectory design much more understandable for most people in the industry,” said McMahon, associate professor in the Ann and H.J. Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences. “This could be hugely beneficial for training new employees and increasing small companies' ability to operate spacecraft in cislunar space.”

Alternate routes available

Back in the aerospace lobby, Turner demonstrates how he can pinch and swipe to compare those different routes.

Currently, the tool only tabulates fairly simple trajectories, similar to the direct path Apollo 11 took to the moon. But Turner would like to eventually add in more complicated routes. They include ones that take advantage of “Lagrange points,” or special spots in space where gravitational forces allow spacecraft to, essentially, park. The tool also includes an estimate for what aerospace engineers call delta-V, a calculation that roughly captures how much fuel a spacecraft will need to burn making maneuvers. Do you want to get to the moon fast and spend a bit more money or take your time and save on fuel?

Turner has a lot more work to do before aerospace companies can begin using ASTROMECH. One day, he envisions laying out trajectories for undertaking journeys even deeper into the solar system.

For now, he’s happy to have space at his fingerprints—just like Rey gazing at R2D2’s map.

“Getting to wear the headset really makes my day, especially when I’ve been fighting bugs in my code,” Turner said. “Getting to play with holograms makes me feel like a little kid.”