Niccolo Porcari recently completed his undergraduate studies at Cornell and will be pursuing a Masters of Engineering in Astronautics at Cornell this fall. He hopes in the future to design cheaper, lightweight satellites capable of reaching further orbits than most large-scale satellites. To this end, Niccolo completed an internship at a mechatronics startup in Philadelphia, where he worked as a researcher on USB data protocols. He has also studied Cornell Professor Mason Peck’s work on electrolysis propulsion and believes that it offers an optimal solution to many of the current issues with small-scale craft space exploration. Niccolo’s scholarship will help to fund his graduate studies, allowing him to further explore the possibilities of electrolysis propulsion for Professor Peck’s CubeSat design. His graduate project will be designing a Single Stage To Orbit craft using electrolysis propulsion to open up further orbits and coverage of more distant planets in the solar system. 

Niccolo received the Northeast Chapter Scholarship from the SSPI Northeast Chapter in 2016.

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