Robert Emiliano Rodriguez's Path to the Stars

Become a fighter pilot. Train to be an astronaut. Start an aerospace company. Robert Emiliano Rodriguez ’22 A.S., ’22 A.S., ’22, ’23 MSA, has always had goals as high as the stars he hopes to explore one day.

“The biggest factor for me in choosing a college to help achieve my dreams was my parent giving me their GI Bill, so I needed to find a Yellow Ribbon school,” Rodriguez says. “When I saw that Florida Tech was not only a Yellow Ribbon institution but also a private university with a strong reputation—especially with astronauts among its alumni—it checked every box.”

While he attended Florida Tech, Rodriguez was a research assistant for the College of Aeronautics and completed two internships with NASA.

“My first internship was with NASA’s Micro-g NExT [Neutral Buoyancy Experiment Design Team] program in Houston, Texas, which focused on solving real-world challenges related to lunar missions,” Rodriguez says. “NASA issued a challenge to colleges across the country, and my role was to coordinate with the selected teams, ensuring they had everything they needed when they came to NASA to test their prototypes.”

Through that experience, Rodriguez worked closely with NASA’s public relations and education departments, which led to his second internship in program and partnership management, where he supported NASA’s collaborative initiatives for a full semester.

Now, just three years after graduating from Florida Tech, Rodriguez has supported national defense and space exploration efforts, conducting electronic warfare testing with the U.S. Army and serving as a mission controller on NASA’s Crew Health and Performance Exploration Analog (CHAPEA) mission.

“I knew that if I wanted to be a fighter pilot, the best fighter jets out there are at Lockheed Martin—the F-22, the F-16, the F-35,” Rodriguez says. “So, I applied over 100 times, got one interview and finally got my job where I work now, and that was just persistence.”

Today, Rodriguez is on the ground working as a senior systems engineer at Lockheed Martin on the F-35 program.

“In my role supporting the F-35 program, I focus on developing advanced training systems that replicate the aircraft digitally, what we call a ‘digital twin,’” Rodriguez says. “This allows us to train both pilots and maintainers on how to operate and sustain the jet using realistic, immersive simulations. It’s like giving the aircraft a brain and embedding that intelligence into various training devices.”

Beyond his professional work, Rodriguez serves as the vice president of program management for a nonprofit dedicated to leadership development and has also volunteered with Cochise County Search and Rescue, supporting the sheriff’s office in emergency missions throughout southern Arizona.

“Florida Tech gave me a lot of hands-on experiences while I was a student, and I think that it was those experiences that have helped me continue to be a trailblazer in my field.”