By Chris Whitworth
Today New Zealand launches its first rocket into space; a mere 52 years after Russia became the first nation to launch into orbit.
The rocket is pint-sized in comparison to the shuttles that have long since orbited the earth and carries a magnitude of messages from the nation along with experiments from the scientific community.
While we have never had a man walk on the moon, float in the zero gravity of space, or be among the handful of human beings to stare at the earth in its entirety, New Zealand has long had an attraction to the great unknown.
In fact, when the world first set its eyes on the heavens, a Kiwi bloke from Wellington was at the forefront of the expedition.
Sir William Hayward Pickering is considered by many to be the father of the NASA space movement and while he spent most of his adult years in America, New Zealand was never far from the scientist’s thoughts.
Every day of Pickering’s 22-year career, he was greeted in his office by a painting of Mt Cook, and he was said to have never lost the Kiwi twang in his voice.
The Kiwi scientist is only one of a handful of people in history to appear on the cover of TIME magazine twice, honoured for his achievements as director of the illustrious Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) at NASA.
Under Pickering’s command, the JPL was responsible for sending the first successful US around-the-earth probe into space, the Explorer 1, as well as subsequent unmanned missions capturing never-before-seen photographs of Venus, Mars and the Moon, in the Marine II and Ranger VII projects.
“No achievements by Russian cosmonaut or US astronaut, nor experiment made by any of the myriad of other satellites that have been shot aloft has taught man nearly so much as he learned already from the improbable voyage of Mariner II,” TIME magazine said in an article on Pickering.
Affectionately called “Mr JPL” by his work colleagues, Pickering would go on to receive personal accolades from not one, but five American presidents.
Pickering returned home several times to New Zealand over the course of his life, including a visit to set up the WH Pickering Fellowship – a scholarship for Kiwis to study engineering or science at his old stomping grounds - the Californian Institute of Technology.
In his retirement, the scientist would return to New Zealand to reopen a long forgotten observatory in Wellington.
The Gifford Observatory was originally set up in the 1920s by a maths teacher who first introduced a teenage Pickering to the expanse of space, through the lens of a telescope.
While New Zealand has not seen a man equal the achievements of Pickering, we have since enjoyed smaller contacts with space.
In 1994, a small school in Christchurch was among just 10 schools in the world to communicate directly with the Space Shuttle Discovery, as it made its trajectory over the Fiordlands.
Middleton Grange was the first school outside of America to ever contact a NASA space shuttle, seizing an eight minute window to communicate with astronauts as their ship throttled around the earth at over 27,000 km/h.
The communication was pre-internet era, and in true Kiwi fashion made possible by a local “radio buff”, and parent of the school, who rigged up several aerials on top of the school’s roof.
Anton Posthuma says he still remembers the day he talked to an astronaut.
Crammed in a school classroom during the term holidays, he says his class mates were fairly taken back by the adventure.
“I was standard four at the time, so yeah I was pretty excited - pretty cool,” he says.
“I think I asked something like ‘what happens if you experience a fire in space'?”
Rudi Jansen, head of science at the time, says in the following months the school was abuzz with space fever, adding extended space teaching into the science curriculum and enjoying a space-themed school fair.
However, the buzz was not to last.
“It was a fairly big deal at the time, now of course it’s in the annals of time,” says Mr Jansen.
In recent years, NASA has been accused of stagnating with a general loss of international interest in space exploration.
A private space industry is, however, now beginning to emerge, with hopes of reviving mankind’s passion for space exploration.
Billionaire Richard Branson is fronting the movement with plans for commercial flights to space.
Once again Kiwis have positioned themselves at the beginning of a movement, with our very own Rocket Lab scheduling its own mini explorations.
So as Rocket Lab co-owners Peter Beck and Mark Rocket, who legally changed his last name to match his aspirations, today track their 5.5m rocket across the skies, although not a big step for mankind, the venture will hopefully continue to inspire innovative New Zealanders in the age old quest for discovery and communication with the great unknown, space.
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