With the final space shuttle and NASA's budget falling down to earth, students at UF are trying to keep their hopes skyward.
The House Appropriations Committee recently cut NASA's budget to $16.8 billion in 2012. That's $1.6 billion in potential funds taken from NASA and UF engineering students hoping to work for the agency in internships during school and careers after graduation.
Zaid Syed-Ali, 19, a mechanical engineering student at UF, said he is optimistic NASA will rebound despite the budget cuts, and he's confident private companies will pick up the slack in the meantime.
But, he said, there's an ideology that gets lost in the process.
"NASA's kind of like the dream job for aerospace engineers," he said.
Rachel Kraft, a NASA spokeswoman, wants them to know opportunities to work with NASA will continue to exist like the use of the "Weightless Wonder," an airplane that allows microgravity experiments by flying in high, up-down patterns to simulate the affects of space travel.
The plane was recently used by a seven-person team from UF, led by engineering student Jenni Stone, to research the effects of reduced gravity on fluids used in space travel, Stone said.
