A sign of the times: New Zealand is now poised to become the latest country to enter the space rase, 3News reports:
New Zealand is about to enter the space race with a private venture which aims to cash in on the market for scientific research.
A Kiwi company has not only built its own rocket, but designed the fuel to blast it 120km straight up.
In a bunker in Parnell, Auckland, ATEA-1 is preparing to rise to the occasion.
The six-metre rocket will see New Zealand become the 13th member of the space club and acknowledged as a leader in technology.
From an island off the Coromandel Peninsula next week, the ATEA-1 will be launched with a small, 2kg payload of scientific equipment.
Space begins at 100km up, and ATEA-1 should reach 120km, stay there for three minutes and then parachute down into the sea for payload recovery, a total flight time of 45 minutes.
“In the northern hemisphere there has been a tremendous amount of research done with these sorts of rockets,” says project engineer Peter Beck.
Three Auckland men will create history by being the first Kiwis to send something into space from New Zealand.
Company Rocket Lab is planning the first ever launch into space from New Zealand soil on November 30 from the Corromandel.
Rocket Lab director Peter Beck says the event changes the status of the country.
“Once we successfully reach space, at that point New Zealand is essentially a space nation, which it currently is not.”
Beck, 32, is the originial rocket man. He built a rocket bike when he was a teenager and has spent the last 15 years making things that shoot into space.
The nose of this rocket will reach 900 degrees celcius as it travels to an altitude of 120 kilometres into the atmosphere and falls back to the Pacific Ocean. The rocket, Manu Karere or bird messenger, will spend about half an hour in space.
Rocket Lab is a business venture to get people to pay to send things into space.
Stuff.co.nz gives details on the rocket:
Called Manu Korere – which translates as bird messenger – the rocket was designed by private company Rocket Lab, headed by former crown research scientist Peter Beck, 32.
At six metres long and 150mm in diameter the rocket is designed for scientific sub-orbital ‘sounding’ missions.
It will travel to an altitude of 120 kilometres – space starts at 100 kilometres – then return to earth in a sub-orbital ballistic curve, to be recovered from a splashdown at sea.
It can carry a payload of just two kilograms, but that is more than enough for modern miniaturised scientific instruments, says Mr Beck.
Rocket Lab hopes to grab a slice of the lucrative space market, selling access to its rocket to send science equipment into space, testing things like climate change.
The rocket – officially an Atea-1 model – is almost entirely constructed from lightweight carbon fibre composites. Components such as the rocket nozzle and combustion chamber are all manufactured from Rocket Lab- developed composite materials which are a fraction of the weight of traditional metal components.
The rocket generates the equivalent of 3200 horsepower from a rocket engine weighing just 13kg.
Space…the final frontier…is getting more populated and used in ways that won’t only benefit science, but business here on earth..
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Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.