By Simon Shepherd
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.
“But there is a big gaping hole of data in the southern hemisphere.”
It has been a three-year project for the 32-year-old engineer and his 26-year-old colleague Nikhil.
They have been building and testing engines, a mini-rocket to trial the computer that flies it and have even designed their own solid fuel.
“Essentially it is a polymer-based fuel but we do mix in 11 herbs and spices of our own to give the performance that is required,” Mr Beck says.
Compared to a space shuttle it is small business.
The NASA space shuttle Endeavour weighs 2,000,000kg, the ATEA-1 just 60kg.
A shuttle is 56m long; ATEA-1 is 6m.
But a shuttle only reaches Mach-3 - three times the speed of sound, while the Kiwi speedster should make mach 5.
Mr Beck is fairly confident that it will not go bang although he is being caution.
“When you are travelling at five times the speed of sound stuff does happen.”
To get some more publicity for the launch, Rocketlab is auctioning off 100g in this payload section.
Mark Rocket is already an astronaut; he is booked on Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic flight and says ATEA-1 already has one odd client.
He says a USB flash drive containing about 22,000 messages from a company called Space Service Inc will be sent up in the rocket.
“They have clients who want to put their message into a rocket and send them to the stars.”
If it comes back down with a reply to those messages, even NASA will be envious.
3 News