VIDEO: Students Running Towards Space Programs

By: Salena Schaffer

STARKVILLE, Miss. (WCBI)-

NASA is flourishing in new technology…

They’re launching more rockets and are considering manned missions to Mars.

All this growth is sparking more interest in the aerospace engineering field, especially in students.

“We’re at all time record highs, we don’t have rooms big enough to put people… so we’re having challenges just meeting the enrollment increase in terms of our infrastructure.” said Koneig.

Keith Koneig is entering his 29th year as an aerospace professor at Mississippi State.

He says the those numbers tend to dwindle as the program progresses.

“We typically lose about two thirds of the people that start our program… two thirds of them drop out at some point… usually we lose one third just between the freshman first semester and second semester.” said Koneig.

That’s because it’s just plain hard.

“It’s a challenging program, it’s not easy… it is rocket science!” said Koneig.

Despite the challenging major, students are excited about the industry’s future.

“I love seeing the industry so well because you know, I always loved the space race and reading about it and I was like oh man I would’ve love to have been an engineer in those days and now it’s almost like we’re having a second space race.” said MSU student Carson Lawrence.

“From a very early age I was very interested in space exploration and what it had to offer humanity from expanding our technologies, bringing countries together and it just fascinated me.” said Augustus Bunviri.

Students also say the projects they work on at MSU are identical to ones they’ll see in their future careers.

“My experience here transfers over to all the sorts of things I would do on a small satellite project to working with flight electronics, to setting up sensor systems and data collective systems to sort we use to test our rockets and motors and also our scientific payloads so it pretty much directly transfers over to the sort of real world work.” said Bunviri.