India, Sept. 7 -- When Chandrayaan-3 touched down near the Moon's south pole, India celebrated a technological milestone - the moment the country now marks every year as National Space Day. Behind that success, though, sits a quieter question. Who trains the engineers who will build the spacecraft of the next three decades? And how?

For most of the last century, aerospace education followed a fairly settled formula: classroom theory, laboratory experimentation, iterative design. That formula produced the engineers behind India's launch vehicles, satellites and aircraft, and it still holds. No one designs a rocket without understanding fluid mechanics, combustion, structures, guidance and control, or orbital mechanics. Physics hasn't chan...