Aeronautics and Astronautics with Foundation Year

Aeronautics and astronautics is the engineering discipline concerned with the design, development and operation of vehicles that travel through the Earth's atmosphere and beyond it. Aeronautics focuses on aircraft, from commercial passenger jets to unmanned aerial systems, while astronautics extends those principles into the environment of outer space, encompassing satellites, launch vehicles and the systems that sustain them. Together these fields sit at the frontier of engineering achievement, combining classical mechanics, thermodynamics, materials science, control systems and computational fluid dynamics into one of the most technically demanding and intellectually rewarding areas of study available.

At the University of Southampton, this four-year full-time degree includes a foundation year, giving you a supported transition into the mathematical and physical demands of the programme before you move into core aerospace engineering content. You will gain exposure to the tools and methods engineers use to model, test and refine aerospace systems, learning to think about how aircraft and spacecraft behave under the extreme conditions of flight. Problems are drawn from real design challenges, and you will build the capacity to analyse, evaluate and improve complex aerospace systems.

Typical entry is around 152 UCAS tariff points, reflecting the strong analytical demands of the subject.

The skills developed in this degree are highly valued across the aerospace and defence industries, in space agencies, research institutions and a growing range of adjacent sectors. Graduates go on to roles in aircraft design and manufacture, propulsion systems, structural analysis, avionics, satellite engineering and mission operations. The engineering fundamentals also transfer strongly into motorsport, energy, advanced manufacturing and computational simulation.

Further study at postgraduate level, including research degrees focused on specific aerodynamic, structural or propulsion challenges, is a common route for those who want to deepen their technical expertise or move into academic or industrial research.