No.8 Re-wired: The New Zealand Space Programme

In 2009 New Zealand’s first space flight made big headlines. The rocket, called Manu Karere, meaning Bird Messenger, was blessed by iwi, fixed with a $6 part from a local engineering shop and then launched from the Coromandel coast. It burned for 20 seconds, flew at 5000km/h and reached over 100km above Earth. For a short time it was the highest thing in  the Coromandel, which is saying something. Rocket Lab are based in Auckland.

CEO Peter Beck is an engineer with no university degree who has learned rocket science by doing it. At the age of 18, Beck left his home town of Invercargill to work for Fisher & Paykel in Dunedin. He set up Rocket Lab in 2006 with funding from rocket-mad angel investor Mark Rocket (not the name he was born with). Now, at the age of 36, Beck already has a long history of innovation, multiple awards, and a good reputation in the aerospace world.

Since the first launch, Rocket Lab have begun to make world-first technologies. In late 2012 they demonstrated a rocket to representatives of their US military clients. The rocket runs on a viscous liquid monopropellant (VLM) fuel which is thixotropic – neither a solid nor a liquid. It has all the best properties of both of those sorts of fuel and, if successful, will be a major advance in rocket science. They are also developing a new liquid engine called the Rutherford, intended for use in their first orbital rockets. Popular Science magazine gave Rocket Lab its 2011 ‘Best of What’s New’ award for Instant Eyes, an unmanned rocket that ‘launches with the push of a button and snaps five-megapixel shots throughout the 120 seconds it takes to parachute 2500 feet back to Earth, transmitting them by encrypted Wi-Fi to the soldier’s phone, tablet or laptop. Once the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) hits the ground, it self-destructs.’

Beck says that although New Zealanders are often bemused about a Kiwi space programme, it isn’t hard to interest overseas companies in his developments. ‘If you’ve got a technology that’s superior, people will listen.’ Among Rocket Lab’s clients are the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency or DARPA – the US Department of Defense agency that gave the world the internet – and the US Office of Naval Research. Beck says Americans often introduce him by saying, ‘This is Rocket Lab, the New Zealand space industry!’ Then they laugh because one company is our whole industry. We laugh because one company is one more than we’ve ever had before.