A year ago the only times the word "Wairoa" and "rocket" appeared in the same paragraph seemed to be when such horses as "Little Rocket" were racing at Te Kupenga, or when someone explained they weren't a "rocket scientist".
Mayor Craig Little says he came to use the latter frequently when the sceptics would ask when the first launch would take place at Onenui. "I'm not a rocket scientist," he would say. "It (saying 'rocket scientist') was like the local joke around here," he recalled this week.
Mr Little was, however, never one to dismiss the notion that Mahia Peninsular could soon launch New Zealand into the space age in a commercial rocket venture with what he believes has enormous possibilities that Rocket Lab may bring to Wairoa, Hawke's Bay and the East Coast.
"I first heard of it about a year ago," Mr Little said. "I saw bits and pieces coming together, but we thought we'd lost them to Canterbury.
"Sceptics? Hell yeah," he said. "But what I tell them is we've got to be better off with it than without it."