Cameron Wood loves heading down to Napier's Marine Parade to watch and capture the launches. Photo / Paul Taylor
Cameron Wood loves heading down to Napier's Marine Parade to watch and capture the launches. Photo / Paul Taylor
Ahead of Rocket Lab’s launch of its 37th rocket from Māhia and 40th rocket overall on Thursday (pending weather conditions), Hawke’s Bay Today spoke to passionate members of the ‘rocket-chasing’ community in the region.
“I call it rocket-chasing.”
That is the term coined by Napier’s Cameron Wood for the growingnumber of people who closely follow Rocket Lab’s launches and missions.
Wood has a keen interest in space exploration, and said it was just incredible how many rockets were being launched from our backyard on the Māhia Peninsula.
“This rocket reflects off the water in such a beautiful way - even though it is such a small rocket, it has this bright light that you see slowly rising off the horizon and getting faster and faster as it approaches 25,000km/h,” he said of Rocket Lab’s 18-metre-tall Electron rocket.
“It is brighter than Venus, and Venus is the third-brightest object in the night sky.”
Wood is behind the Hawke’s Bay Rocket Watchers page on Facebook, and said there appeared to be a growing interest in the Rocket Lab missions.
He said he wants to see more gatherings organised in places like Napier to watch the launches - the city’s about 90 kilometres down the coast from Māhia.
“I’d love for there to be more involvement with the community, because I think it is absolutely nuts that little old New Zealand - let alone little old Hawke’s Bay - gets front-row-seat access to space,” he said.
“I’d love to see maybe ... a projection on the beach so people can watch and be aware of what is happening.”
Rocket Lab launching its 18-metre-tall Electron rocket from its Māhia pad. Photo / Rocket Lab
He said the night launches were particularly spectacular, and he always headed along to the viewing platform off Marine Parade in Napier to watch and film them. He invited anyone to join him.
Wood said his favourite launch from Māhia was the Capstone moon mission completed last June, the object of which was “to scout out an orbit for a space station around the moon”.
‘More than just a rocket going into space’
Dartmoor mum and businesswoman Sarah Grant said she was as much fascinated by the ambition of Rocket Lab and its founder as the launches themselves.
“I just love that he is a Kiwi who has chosen to set up a New Zealand space agency, effectively, and that he hasn’t given up and has brought so many people along on the journey with him,” she said.
“So for me, it is more than just a rocket going into space.”
Grant has co-founded a start-up company herself, Magic Beans, and said Rocket Lab missions were “really inspiring to me”.
She does not miss the launches, particularly at night, and her two daughters are just as “space-crazy” as their mum.
Sarah Grant (also inset) waiting near Marine Parade with her daughters for a previous rocket launch.
“If it is late at night and my kids are asleep, I’d always give them the option: ‘Do you want me to wake you up to come outside and watch a rocket?’
“It is always an emphatic ‘yes’.
“They are two little girls. Not that gender has anything to do with it, but a lot of people think that girls aren’t into rockets and technology and stuff like that, which is complete bollocks.”
She said they would rug up and go watch it outside the back of their home, or if it was an evening launch, they would head to the beach.
Grant said the rise of Rocket Lab, which employs about 1600 people around the world, including about 650 in New Zealand, meant there were career pathways for young people.
“To be able to show kids that [high-level] technology is not a thing that happens a long way away in America, but that we can do it here with our skills, brains and resources by collectively working together and being ambitious - I just think it is so cool.”
‘Why wouldn’t you take the five minutes?’
Gary Sparks runs the Hawke’s Bay Holt Planetarium in Napier, where thousands of school students and visitors learn more about the wonders of the night sky.
Sparks said he believed there was scope to include more rocketry in the school curriculum, which is set by the Ministry of Education.
“The fact that students coming through school here [in Hawke’s Bay] can now actually see a career pathway working for Rocket Lab and the aerospace industry - in that point of view, it has opened up huge avenues, such as engineering.”
The planetarium now includes a couple of displays about Rocket Lab, and Sparks said he enjoyed watching the launches from his front porch.
“The launches are so easy to see. Why wouldn’t you take the five minutes and stand there and watch a rocket being launched into space?
“Not a whole lot of people around the world get that chance.”
Gary Sparks is the director of the planetarium in Napier, which features a couple of Rocket Lab displays. Photo / Gary Hamilton-Irvine
Sparks said he had been approached by tour operators to see if he knew of any organisations that hosted rocket-watching events, but the problem was there was no guarantee it was going to happen.
“It is like booking a trip to go watch whale-watching in Kaikoura.”
He explained one of the main reasons Rocket Lab had put its launch pad at Māhia was so it can launch rockets close to the south pole, which means satellites can follow a polar orbit as opposed to going around the equator.
“If you launch your satellites so they go around the poles - polar orbit - the Earth rotates underneath you, and everytime you come around you see a new strip of the Earth, and within 24 hours you have a complete map of the Earth,” he said.
“That’s why it is there ... they wanted a place that was as far south as they could get it with nothing south of it, other than water, so Māhia is perfect.”
The planetarium was opened at its current site at Napier Boys’ High School by Sir Ian Axford in 1998, who himself attended Napier Boys’ and went on to become a world-leading space scientist. It is open each Sunday evening to the public.
Thursday’s Electron rocket launch has a launch window from 11.30am to 3.30pm, pending weather conditions. The day mission (to deploy satellites) will be harder to view than a night launch. All launches are live-streamed on the Rocket Lab website.
Gary Hamilton-Irvine is a Hawke’s Bay-based reporter who covers a range of news topics including business, councils, breaking news and cyclone recovery. He formerly worked at News Corp Australia.
