BOULDER – The University of Colorado Boulder will begin construction this fall on a 139,000-square-foot aerospace-engineering building on the university’s East Campus.

The $82.5 million project was approved Thursday by the CU Board of Regents. Construction on the building, first conceived in 2008, is scheduled to begin this November and be completed by July 2019.

The building will include an in-door flight environment for testing unmanned aerial systems and a roof design with the sight lines needed to track satellites. It will house aerospace engineering’s six main research clusters for better collaboration between students and faculty. It will have a 200-seat auditorium, distance-learning-equipped classrooms, faculty offices and spaces for graduate students.

The building will help accommodate growth of the university’s aerospace program. Combined undergraduate and graduate enrollment grew from 647 in fall 2011 to 946 in fall 2016.

The college is on its way toward achieving its fundraising goal for the project, due in part to a $10 million gift earlier this year from Ann Smead and Michael Byram as well as a sponsorship by industry partner Lockheed Martin.

The new building will be located along Discovery Drive between the Sustainability, Energy and Environment Complex and the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics’ Space Science Building.