A symbolic piece of New Zealand will journey beyond Earth’s atmosphere this weekend as Christchurch aerospace entrepreneur Mark Rocket prepares to become the first New Zealander to fly to space.
The launch, set for early Sunday morning (NZ time), will be the 12th human space flight from Jeff Bezos’ space tourism venture, taking Rocket and five others on a suborbital flight departing from Texas.
New Zealand has a special acknowledgement in the mission patch for NS-32, with a kea front and centre in the image.
A Blue Origin statement said “the kea parrot represents Mark Rocket’s home country of New Zealand”.
Rocket, who changed his surname in 2000 to reflect his lifelong passion, is chief executive of Kea Aerospace, a company developing solar powered, unmanned aircraft that fly to the stratosphere.
The aircraft can be used to collect high resolution Earth observation data.
Christchurch man Mark Rocket is booked on board Blue Origin’s twelfth human space flight. (Source: Breakfast)
Rocket spoke exclusively to 1News before he departed last week for the trip of a lifetime.
“I’ve always been fascinated by the concepts of space and infinity. Essentially, we live in a solar system which is vast, a galaxy which is vast, and this incredible universe. which is just hard to imagine the concepts. So I’ve always found that really compelling.”
The New Shepard rocket system he will travel on blasts off vertically, reaching more than 100 kilometres above Earth, before returning to the ground under parachutes.
The entire flight lasts around 11 minutes.
“Certainly, the trip itself is pretty short, but buckling in, getting ready to experience 3Gs of rocket-powered flight up to space will be pretty phenomenal,” he said.
Once in space, the crew can unbuckle and fly around the cabin in zero gravity, which Rocket said will be a “major milestone”.
The New Shepard programme, run by Blue Origin has now flown 58 humans above the Karman line, the internationally recognised boundary of space.
