You will be on a ~10 person team (chosen by you or randomly assigned if you don’t know 9 other people). You will be told a space mission that professor wants you to plan out in detail (i.e. get to mars and bring a sample back). Each member of the team will have a specific role, which will be a spacecraft subsystem or something like systems engineer, mission planner, etc. Then you are essentially let loose an entire quarter to figure it all out. The lectures are just guest lectures for the most part, which do not necessarily help you with your role.

If you are ever stuck, or want to validate your work, just go to office hours or email the professor. He is incredibly knowledgeable and very helpful. If you run something by him and he confirms it, you know you are okay. Your final grade will essentially just be his validation of your work, so getting a head start on that is a relief. You will not be able to finish everything without asking him at least some questions, since there is knowledge he has that is very useful that you need to ask the right questions to get. If you attend office hours even slightly regularly, you
will get an A in the class, and you will also be learning a lot from an expert in his field, win-win.

Professor Goebel is one of the most knowledgeable professors in the aerospace industry, so taking a class from him is a must for anyone interested in the field. MAE 161C is a great way to get a sense for how to do a first-order concept development design, with missions relevant to current space exploration. The lectures are generally guest speakers from Professor Goebel's friends in the industry that cover topics such as systems engineering, ion propulsion and mission planning. As long as you keep up with the deadlines and ask the professor or TA for help as needed to stay on schedule, and put reasonable effort into the project and report, I think everyone is guaranteed an A- or A. No midterm or final exams is also a plus.

This class was super cool, basically just take everything you've learned in 161 A and B and build your own spacecraft & mission. Classes are just guest lecturers from JPL or Goebel talking about his work at JPL, and while they're pretty interesting I ended up not going to most. The class is graded entirely on a quarter-long, 11-person-team project. Goebel is a cool professor, super knowledgeable and a great resource if you're going into aerospace.