Kiwi-founded space company Rocket Lab's Māhia site in Hawke's Bay. Photo: Supplied / Rocket Lab
A rocket launching from the North Island on Monday aims to make it easier to clean up floating space junk.
Though the launch was commissioned by a Japanese company, Rocket Lab hopes more Kiwi-led missions are on the horizon.
The Auckland-based company is due to launch Astroscale Japan's ADRAS-J satellite at 3am on Monday from its primary launch site in Māhia.
Rocket Lab senior director of communications Morgan Bailey said it was aiming for an abandoned rocket in Earth's orbit.
"We're launching a satellite that is trying to approach an old, derelict rocket body that has been up in orbit for many years now."
The 150kg satellite will not be moving the debris itself, but will collect data for future clean-up missions.
"All of that information will hopefully be used to help inform the ability to grab dead rocket bodies like that and bring them back to Earth in the future," she said.
It will be the second rocket the company has launched this year, and the 44th overall, but the company has only ever launched one New Zealand-owned rocket - a satellite for the University of Auckland that was launched at no cost.
Bailey hoped the introduction of Judith Collins as the country's first minister for space would signal growth for the sector.
"Rocket Lab met with the new minister for space this week to talk about the space strategy and opportunities for New Zealand," she said.
"New Zealand really is a superpower in space globally, there's only a handful of nations that have the ability to launch to space."
Despite that, New Zealand's space companies relied on overseas funding to get off the ground.
"To have New Zealand building its own satellites, launching them from home soil, and using that data to help solve [our] problems... that's absolutely a dream," Bailey said.
"As a nation we're not quite there yet but we're still playing a huge role in space at home and internationally, and that's exciting."
She said the local space sector was working towards its first partially government-funded mission, the MethaneSAT programme in partnership with the Unites States' Environmental Defense Fund.
"That's a methane monitoring climate change that New Zealand is building the mission control and operation centre for," she said.
"So there's a bit of a road to go before New Zealand's operating its own constellations, but we're certainly taking a bigger role in space."
