York County school launches rocket during the first Aerospace Day in Harrisburg
YORK COUNTY, Pa. (WHTM)–A York County school has cornered the market on rocket science and it was honored on Tuesday at the state capitol.
The first Aerospace Day was held in Harrisburg, and aerospace and aviation have certainly launched in Pennsylvania, providing tens of thousands of jobs.
“And so we’re often always thinking about places like Texas for Texas and Florida that have NASA,” Lt. Gov. Austin Davis said. “We’ve got a lot going on right here in Pennsylvania.”
Spring Grove High School in York County has the top rocketry program in the nation, and Senior Haley Hake is a trailblazer, “I’m in it because one of my friends was in it and I kind of started tagging along and then I fell in love,” she said. “Oh, we don’t see a lot of females in it. And it’s because there’s no role models to say, Oh, females can do this. So that’s what I’m here for, kind of.”
The crowd at the capitol was there for the rocket.
“It usually goes 800 feet,” Hake said. “We put a smaller motor in it today because we didn’t want to land in a tree.”
“I jinxed them early on because I said, ‘what happens when they get stuck in a tree?’ And so it’s my fault that we hit the tree,” Davis said.
But solving problems is what these kids do.
“We have a 50 foot pole to get that out,” Hake said.
The capitol’s first rocket launch won’t be its last.
“President John F Kennedy famously said that we set our collective sights on the moon not because it is easy, but because it is hard,” President of PA Chamber of Business and Industry Luke Bernstein said.
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