Instituto Tecnológico de Aeronáutica (ITA)

The Instituto Tecnológico de Aeronáutica (ITA) is a Brazilian aerospace engineering university founded in 1950 and based in São José dos Campos, São Paulo, within the Brazilian Air Force's CTA/DCTA aerospace technology complex — the same institutional family as the rocket-focused Institute of Aeronautics and Space (IAE).

ITA offers five-year undergraduate engineering programs in aeronautical, aerospace, civil-aeronautical, computer, electronic and mechanical engineering, plus aerospace-focused graduate degrees, admitting roughly 110 undergraduates a year from a large applicant pool; all undergraduates receive full scholarships and on-campus housing. Beyond its teaching role, ITA builds its own flight hardware: ITASAT-1, a 8-kilogram 6U CubeSat carrying a data-collection payload, a GPS receiver and a roughly 80-metre-resolution camera, launched as a secondary payload on a Falcon 9 on the SSO-A rideshare mission on 3 December 2018.

ITA's alumni have played an outsized role in Brazil's aerospace sector, including at aircraft maker Embraer and at the National Institute for Space Research (INPE), and the institution is consistently ranked among Brazil's top engineering schools. It is funded by the Brazilian Air Force as a state institution rather than through tuition or commercial revenue, and in 2024 it announced plans to open a second campus in Fortaleza, Ceará, expected in 2027. ITA is Brazil's primary training pipeline for aerospace engineers and one of the country's few universities with an orbital CubeSat flight of its own design.