Rocket Lab offers tour to ‘heartbroken’ students after NASA trip abruptly canceled

Rocket Lab steps in to fill the void more than a dozen students find themselves in after their space camp dreams came crashing down.

The company is offering students a tour of its rocket factory and mission control center in Auckland after the collapse of a company arranging to send students to a US space camp.

Actura charged up to $13,000 for children from 25 New Zealand schools to participate in a two-week CASE Space School program at NASA headquarters in Houston, Texas. But parents were left stunned after receiving an email announcing the trip would not go ahead.

Rocket Lab has now offered to help.

About a dozen rockets were being manufactured at any one time at its Mount Wellington factory, spokesperson Morgan Connaughton told the Morning Report.

There are also around 500 rocket scientists and engineers, as well as a major mission control center.

“It’s not quite Houston, but maybe it’s even better because it’s home,” Connaughton said.

Rocket Lab was talking to partners about helping students from outside Auckland get to the facility, she said.

“If we can, we’d like everyone to come up here.

“We’re running for love to run our own space camps. The problem is, we have our hands full with our main business right now: launching rockets and building spaceships.”

She hadn’t heard of Actura, but said space camps weren’t a new idea and many companies organized trips to NASA.

Rocket Lab’s offer comes as many other community members are also reaching out to help “heartbroken” students.

What went wrong?

Mike’s daughter Renata, a middle school student, was ready to leave in three weeks.

“We started payments last year in April, we had our last one in January,” Renata told The Morning Report.

“From January to now, they sent out our flight itineraries, what the kids were going to do and we had a Zoom (call) with them at the end of May, and they got the kids excited and we were all excited. And then just came out out of nowhere we receive this email.

“We received an email saying they were going to be liquidated.”

The email arrived after midnight, but Renata was awake and as soon as he tried to respond, he said he “got an email back saying, ’email closed’.”

He said parents had “no idea” what was happening with Actura and felt “left out”.

The company had previously run such camps with schools in Australia and New Zealand, he said, and so they thought it was “legitimate”.

The students were heartbroken, Renata said.

“A lot of girls have put a lot of time and effort into this. For our family, we’ve had to do a lot of fundraising and a lot of events. So there’s a lot of time spent, a lot of community involvement.

“She (my daughter) is completely drained.”

He said his daughter had always been fascinated by space and planets, so when the opportunity presented itself, he jumped at it.

But soon after, “everything fell apart,” Renata said.