Hello world! I am Eric Peng, a current Professional Science Master’s student at Rice’s Space Studies program. While taking space related classes (and everything can be connected to space), I am also involved in the OWLSAT cubesat project at Rice trying to get a piece of Rice into space. In addition I am interning part time at Johnson Space Center, contracted through the University of Texas at El Paso, developing digital models for some of their hardware that will be used for in-situ resource utilization (taking moon or Mars stuff and making it useful). I look forward to balancing the digital engineering with physical fabrication!

As a former (but still active at heart) technical theater kid, I’ve done some woodworking in the past. One interesting project was trying to create a set of a house (external walls and a working door) that could easily be disassembled, travel in luggage on a plane, and reassembled quickly on any stage. It took some brainstorming to create a build a design that involved building the set out of many suitcase-sized wooden panels that could hold together with a bunch of hand-tightened clamps and some bolts. We basically made a portable house!

I’d like to learn how to do molding/casting and use precision cutters (plasma, waterjet, vinyl) to make something smooth and precise (instead of only good from afar {theater}). One of my goals is to make something practical that I can use regularly to make something in life a little easier or more comfortable. What that will be remains to be seen.