Schools with Astronomy and Mechanical Engineering? Formula SAE team? [CT resident, 3.97 GPA, 1540 SAT, <$40k]

How about UMass Amherst? They have an outstanding marching band and a strong Engineering program (I cannot comment on astronomy). They often offer high stats OOS students enough aid to bring it down to the $40k range. It is rural, but Amherst is a cute college town and there are several other colleges nearby. If there is any interest, though, I’d make sure to apply EA - most of the impacted programs like Engineering/CS are nearly filled during the EA round (this is true at a lot of the flagships).