Kiwis launch into space

A New Zealand space programme would once have seemed a joke. But Peter Beck’s Rocket Lab has shown brains and imagination can find a Kiwi niche among the giants of the space age.

In fact, the NZ space programme is really just Beck’s company. Its version of Cape Kennedy is a green sward at Mahia Peninsula, from which Rocket Lab has put into orbit a tiny geodesic satellite. It plans to launch many others, perhaps as many as one a week.

This is a case where technological progress has opened up an opportunity for smaller players. Rockets that used to cost tens or hundreds of millions now cost only a few million.

Beck is one of those remarkable entrepreneurs, usually lacking a university education, whose technical flair and doggedness has allowed them to beat billionaires at their own game.

This tradition includes Team New Zealand, the Kiwi team that defeated the American tycoon Larry Ellison and took from him the America’s Cup. And Weta Digital, which this year has been nominated for yet another Oscar for its visual effects work (in the film War for the Planet of the Apes).

The cliche is that in each case, New Zealand’s particular expertise with a bit of No 8 wire has triumphed again.

But what Rocket Lab and many other New Zealand successes often show is an imaginative adaptation of the very latest technology.

Team New Zealand is just such a case, and it is pleasant to hear that it provided vital carbon composite technology for Rocket Lab.

Beck saw that tiny New Zealand had particular advantages in being small and remote from much of the world.

Its comparative lack of air traffic means that fewer flights have to be rerouted when a rocket is launched.

From Mahia, a rocket can be launched east over an ocean comparatively free of ships. For once, the ‘‘tyranny of distance’’ didn’t apply.

And Beck, like Team New Zealand, has proved adept at winning over big investors both in New Zealand and abroad.

Finally, the Government has helped.

Former Economic Development Minister Steven Joyce remembers Beck coming to see him and saying, ‘‘we’re nearly there and we need a regulatory system, can you draw one up?’’ The Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment did so in very little time.

So in the case of the space programme an outstanding local talent, backed by natural advantage and helped by nimblefooted officialdom, launched a new industry. This was at least partly a case of applying Ernest Rutherford’s dictum: ‘‘Gentlemen, we have no money, so we must think.’’

Whether this will lead to a developing space industry here remains to be seen. But it remains an inspiring start.