Aerospace Engineering develops aerial and space-based systems for defense, scientific, commercial, civil, and recreational markets and missions. General mission needs within those markets include transportation, earth and space sensing, and communications. Typically, the products are vehicles such as rockets, airplanes, missiles, satellites, and spacecraft, although the product may also include the ground support equipment, or imbedded hardware or software.

What are the detailed design features of the system that best satisfy the stated mission or market requirement? How will we design, build, test, fabricate, and support aerospace vehicles?

Aerospace engineers employ experimental and computational data, legacy designs, regulatory requirements, market studies or mission needs statements.

The conclusion of most aerospace engineering activity is a product ready for delivery to a customer.

These include all those concepts associated with classical physics, with some particular emphases: Newtonian and orbital mechanics, conservation of mass, momentum and energy, low and high speed aerodynamics, material properties and lightweight structures, propulsion technologies.

Assumptions are in part shared by all scientists and engineers. One assumption is that the universe is controlled by pervasive laws that can be expressed in mathematical terms and formulas. Additionally, aerospace engineers assume that an aerospace solution will invariably entail the integration of multiple technological disciplines and the resolution of competing design tensions, including aerodynamics, astrodynamics, stability and control, propulsion, structures, and avionics. Furthermore, the aerospace system will be a system of systems, which must also fit and interface with a larger system (e.g., air cargo airplanes must fit and communicate with the air traffic control structures, missiles must fit with existing launch rails; satellites must fit on independently developed launch vehicles).

Aerospace engineering products and services have wide-ranging implications, linked with global, national, local economics, ethics, defense, security, environmental effects such as noise and pollution, and infrastructure such as airports, any of which may impact the quality of life in communities and regions.

The conceptual mission profile typically provides the organizing frame-work for all design requirements and design decisions. The attempt is to define value principally from the perspective of the organizational leader who is sending the vehicle on some mission flight (and paying for the flight). Other perspectives may also be relevant: pilots, maintainers, manufacturing, and logisticians, as well as technologists (structural engineers, aerodynamicists, controls engineers, propulsion engineers, and relevant others). Politicians will likely be influential in large aerospace programs. Public opinion, concerned with ethical or environmental issues, are often relevant, and if so,
must be considered.