One man’s mission to conquer space

Last month, from its base in New Zealand, Peter Beck’s space company, Rocket Lab, conducted its first successful attempt to put satellites in orbit. The launch vehicle, the Electron, carried a payload including the Humanity Star, a very shiny, 65-sided, carbon-fibre satellite whose only function is to reflect the sunlight as it spins. Scientists didn’t approve: astronomers claimed it would interfere with their observations, others called it “space graffiti”, while the Scientific American described it as “satellite vermin”.

Were you taken aback about the reaction your Humanity Star geodesic sphere satellite project got from some scientists?
The Humanity Star project is something I’d been wanting to do for many, many years. The whole point of Humanity Star was to try and get people outside and to look up and to realise we are one little planet in a giant universe. Once you understand that, you have a different perspective on the planet and a different perspective on the things that are important to us.

Humanity faces some real challenges, climate change being the one most visible now. One government is not going to solve it – it will take humanity to react as a species. We need to look after this little rock a little better and we need to start acting as a species rather than as independent countries.

Are you surprised the critics of your Humanity Star are mostly scientists and astronomers – who spend their lives raising similar issues?
Clearly, when you do something like this, it is going to miss the mark for some people. But the way I’ve designed Humanity Star and the orbit that I’ve put it in, the duration of its life – it’s all been carefully designed. The Humanity Star is only visible on the horizon at dawn and dusk and there’s very little astronomy done at those times.

Is it viewable yet?
If you stand in one place for the entire duration of the flight – nine months – you will get around half-a-dozen opportunities to see it. So it’s not this giant, persistent bright thing in the sky. It’s very subtle. It is relatively difficult to see it. You have to seek it out.

Last year, you were the first company to launch an orbital class rocket from a private launch pad. What is the significance of that?
The Electron programme is about democratising space and opening it up to exciting sustainable projects to benefit us on Earth. To do that, you need frequent launches. The space industry is moving away from these very large geosynchronous school bus-size platforms on to these very small, very responsive satellites. This is a much more sustainable way of building space infrastructure because the satellites only stay in orbit for five to seven years, whereas a geosynchronous one is up there for 25,000 years. But to put up a constellation of satellites you need frequency. America went to space about 21 times last year, so when you’re trying to put a constellation of 50 satellites up and a major country is only going 20 times it becomes very difficult.

You’ve got licence to launch every 72 hours for 30 years.
It’s very difficult to get the frequency out of traditional launch sites. We had to create a launch site where we could achieve the frequency we needed. That really changes the dynamic of how you use space. We are in New Zealand because the best launch site is a small island nation in the middle of nowhere – which is what New Zealand is.

Your spacecraft are built from carbon fibre, you 3D-print engine parts and the electric engines run on lithium batteries…
Everything we do revolves around how can we achieve launch frequency at an affordable price. If you are trying to launch a rocket every week, you need to build a rocket every week, so traditional techniques were not going to work. We started with a clean sheet of paper and thought, how can we solve this problem? That’s where all the innovations were driven out of.