Roger Moroney: Rocket launch a sight to behold

Roger Moroney.

I am intrigued by the prospect of turning my sights to the northeast skies later this year, around Guy Fawkes in November would be just dandy timing to be sure, and seeing a skyrocket take flight.

Not one of those modest fiery wick-lit chaps atop a stick, but a real rocket. One with serious fuel aboard and serious intent to get up into the gravity-free zone above and do ... whatever serious things it has to do.

Now, while Mahia Peninsula does not quite have the verbal impact of "Cape Canaveral", it will, by the end of this year, begin sharing the sounds of departing rocket engines, and that's all rather exciting to kids like me who never outgrew the challenge of firing rockets into the sky.

So okay, we set fire to a neighbour's guttering with a botched launch of a homemade rocket back in 1964, but that was simply an anomaly. A slight logistical error in the arena of stability.

At Cape Canaveral they would have referred to such an event as "Houston, we have a problem." In little seafront Napier, 52 years ago, the emergency was relayed as, "Dad ... could you get the hose out for us?" Oh, he wasn't very happy and we all learnt a new word that evening. Kids simply like rockets, and it was a sad night when the last of the old stick rockets was fired in the wake of them being banned. Apparently they had the potential to start fires after descent, and of course the students of the southern climes delighted in having ridiculous skyrocket battles.

So now we get hideously loud devices which shatter the stillness of the night pretty well all year, but there you go. What we shall see - and, for those closer to that peninsula, hear - will be a sleek-looking rocket and it will not be the first. Rocket Lab is sending it spaceward as a test launch and then, they say, there will be launches every month. Now just what they are going to be sending up there in the form of satellites is anybody's guess but I'm not in the slightest concerned or wary of that. I just want to see one take off. Rocket Lab surely have to create a spot not far from the pad where visitors can gather, have a barbie, a few cold bevvies, line up the deck chairs and sit back to watch technology at its spectacular best.

These are rockets which are driver-free, of course. Which I have no issue with as they are going to go straight up, unlike the ludicrous development of driverless cars which will go straight down someone's street and across their front lawn and through the lounge.

Automotive progress be damned. I suspect it is not the likes of Apple and other giants of the IT landscape who are driving this concept - I reckon it's the panelbeating lads because they'll make a fortune. And good on them, as they are the salt of the earth. (I'm quite likely to seek their brilliant services again one day so will leave it at that, except that such skilled artisans of plastic, aluminium and steel restoration should be accorded sainthood - that should be worth a 10 per cent discount, surely?)

The Mahia location is perfect and shares similarities with its American big brother, so little wonder the satellite technology boffins of the United States are setting up here also.

One is on a peninsula opposite a cape, and the other is on a cape near a peninsula.

And there is the Spanish link, for Cabo (Cape) Canaveral was discovered by the Spanish conquistador Juan Ponce de Leon in 1513, and I think the Spanish chaps sailed down this way around the same time after hitting the drink across the waters of Tierra del Fuego and turning starboard instead of port.

So there are rockets on the horizon and, as a nearly 62-year-old child, I am fizzing at the bung at the prospect of seeing them.

And I wonder who our American chums will send over to acknowledge this test flight, and its scientific bonding with the Kiwi skyrocket industry - Hillary ("behave yourself, Bill") Clinton or Donald ("what's another few million anyway?") Trump?

If it transpires to be the latter one can only hope his hair, tousled by the gentle Mahia zephyrs, catches on a stabilising fin and he goes up with it. For in space, no one can hear you rant.

- Roger Moroney is an award-winning journalist for Hawke's Bay Today and observer of the slightly off-centre.