Our Leadership
The HLA is both a Club and a Company. The Company is led by its Board of Directors (BoD) to carry out our Education & Outreach mission. The Club is led by its Executive Board (E-Board) to carry out the Engineering & Operations mission. You can learn more below.
Harlem Launch Alliance is founded to pursue two missions:
Engineering & Operations
The Engineering & Operations mission is organized for the following purposes:
The mastery of all baseline skills and capabilities necessary for the design, manufacture and operation of amateur sounding rockets.
The pursuit and advancement of the state of the art in experimental amateur rocketry, and the field's general promotion in New York City and the surrounding metropolitan area.
The development of the individual skills and organizational capabilities tangential to, but necessary for, test and launch operations under field conditions.
The development of an engineering culture driven by safety, decentralized individual initiative, experimentation, rigor and documentation.
To train, via advanced schools and/or experience of cases, members of the Corporation involved in this mission to the level of Subject Matter Expert (SME) among peers of an equivalent level of education but with no or limited rocketry experience.
Education & Outreach
The Education & Outreach mission is organized for the following purposes:
To engage participants in the Corporations missions in all aspects of the practice of amateur rocketry and the running of the Corporation; this includes STEM, liberal arts, business, psychology, and education fields.
The promotion of a transdisciplinary, situated learning approach to education and training to prepare students to be lifelong leaders and learners in whichever professional careers they pursue.
The establishment of basic schools open to a wide audience in areas deemed necessary or desirable for participation in all aspects of amateur rocketry both content-specific and tangential. From these schools the Corporation can recruit members for the Engineering & Operations mission, but in general, the schools should “raise the baseline” of skills in the community and be of such quality as to be a worthy end in themselves for their students.
The establishment of an Outreach Program(s) for elementary, middle and high school age children, directly or in cooperation with other organizations, to encourage interest and capability in amateur rocketry specifically and in all fields necessary but tangential to it.
