Payload
Places · Spaceport
Rocket Lab Launch Complex 1
A private orbital site on a sheep station, licensed for a launch every 72 hours because there is almost nothing downrange but ocean.
- Where
- Māhia Peninsula, New Zealand
- Coordinates
- 39.26°S 177.87°E
- Since
- 2017
- On the map
- Show me
- More
- rocketlabusa.com
The sky from here
This is a zone 1 sky — pristine on the nine-grade scale, Bortle 1–2, reaching roughly magnitude 7.2–8.0 unaided. The Milky Way casts a shadow. Airglow is visible, the zodiacal light reaches across the sky, and the darkest places on Earth look like this.
That grade puts 107 of the catalogue within easy reach of 10×50 binoculars and 107 within a 130mm — 58 of them need no instrument at all. There is nowhere darker worth driving to; this is already among the better skies on the planet.
There is no season here in which the sky fails to get properly dark — the Sun clears eighteen degrees below the horizon on all 365 nights.
The centre of the galaxy climbs to 80° at its best — high enough that the summer Milky Way is genuinely three-dimensional rather than a band low in the south. Of the 110 Messier objects, none are circumpolar and 11 never rise.
Of everything in the catalogue, Ptolemy's Cluster, Butterfly Cluster and Southern Pinwheel are the best served here, climbing to within a few degrees of straight up — an object at the zenith is being seen through the least air it will ever be seen through, and the difference against the same object low in the south is not subtle.
Against that, Little Dumbbell, Pinwheel Galaxy and Owl Nebula never clear the horizon here at all. No amount of aperture or patience changes that; the only remedy is to travel.
Read at 39.26°S 177.87°E. Darkness is estimated rather than measured; everything else follows from the latitude and holds along the whole parallel. How accurate this is.
In the news
Arstechnica
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Nearby
Questions
What part of the sky never rises at Rocket Lab Launch Complex 1?
Everything north of declination +51°. From 39.3°S that is a cap 39° in radius centred on the north celestial pole, which is 11% of the whole celestial sphere. Nothing about the calendar or the aperture changes that — the cap is below the horizon at every hour of every night. Its mirror image, the same 11% around the south celestial pole, is circumpolar here and never goes down.
How many hours of true darkness does Rocket Lab Launch Complex 1 get?
Between 5 hours 3 minutes on the shortest night of the year, around 21 December, and 11 hours 23 minutes on the longest, around 21 June. That counts only proper astronomical night, with the Sun eighteen degrees down; the merely-dark hours either side of it are longer. The sky here reaches it on every night of the year, which is not true much further from the equator.
What orbits can be reached from Rocket Lab Launch Complex 1?
Anything inclined at 39.3° or more, for free. A rocket launched due east from 39.3°S arrives in an orbit inclined at 39.3° — the shallowest the site can reach without spending propellant to turn the plane — and steeper orbits are simply a matter of launching on a different heading. That leaves the Space Station at 51.6° and the sun-synchronous band near 98° both within easy reach, since going steeper is only a matter of choosing a different heading. Shallower is where it gets expensive. Every one of the 39.3° between here and the 0° of a geostationary belt is paid for in a plane change, which is why equatorial pads are worth building even in inconvenient places.
How far is Rocket Lab Launch Complex 1 from the other sites on this map?
The nearest is Aoraki Mackenzie Dark Sky Reserve, about 815 km to the south-west. The nearest other spaceport is Woomera Range Complex, 3,840 km to the west. Distances are great-circle, so they are what a signal covers rather than what a road does.