There may be something about Earth’s remote places that root many of humanity’s greatest achievements in space. John Glenn (the first American to orbit the Earth) and Neil Armstrong (the first man on the Moon) both hailed from rural Ohio towns. Yuri Gagarin (the first man in space) grew up in a small Russian village.
Perhaps, however, the apparent nexus between Earth’s isolated locales and those final frontiers is derived from more practical reasons.
Stars and planets tend to reveal themselves in ways that cities conceal. Travel beyond urban centers, and past artificial glows that can wash out the night’s sky, and “you can know light,” explained Dr. Janet Kavandi. A NASA veteran of three Space Shuttle missions and former president of Sierra Space – a Colorado-based company gearing up for its inaugural Dream Chaser spaceplane mission – Kavandi reflected on her own childhood of stargazing in Jasper County, Missouri. She described how she and her father would “sit on the back porch and look at the satellites going overhead, and the stars, and talk about what it would be like to fly up there.
“I now have a house in Houston, and I can’t see anything.”
That sort of account, it turns out, is remarkably common among those devoted to the cosmos. CEO and founder of Rocket Lab Peter Beck, who grew up in one of the world’s southernmost locales at the southern tip of New Zealand’s South Island, tells a similar story.
“One of the youngest childhood memories I have was my father taking me out outside,” he told me during a recent interview. “We lived in a small town, and you could see the night sky and Milky Way. And I remember him vividly pointing to the stars and saying those are stars, and around those stars are planets. And there could be somebody looking back at you.
“That, for me, absolutely blew my mind.”
Those moments with his father, beyond the diluting reach of urban light, “was really the beginning of my whole career and love for space,” he explained. “I can trace right back to that memory the reason for going to Venus.”
Described by company leadership as a “nights-and-weekends” project, Rocket Lab has since partnered with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to deliver the first private mission to Venus. It would be the first such commercial endeavor, though not the first ever visit to Earth’s closest neighboring planet.
Following Gagarin’s first space flight in 1961, the Soviet Union launched a series of Venusian probes, including an uncrewed vehicle known as Venera 7, which made history in 1970 as the first craft to land on and return data from another planet. The Rocket Lab-MIT mission, by contrast, does not intend to land on Venus, and had been instead forged after astronomers detected what appeared to be the presence of phosphine in the Venusian atmosphere. A potential biomarker of life, phosphine is often associated with decaying organic matter.
This upcoming mission, therefore, is not just about the study of atmosphere, but also oriented around that age-old search for alien life.
For context, Venus is often considered Earth’s twin, formed out of ingredients similar to that of our own planet. At one point, it may have enjoyed liquid-water oceans and a habitable surface. Scientists, however, now believe that an excessive build-up of carbon dioxide in the Venusian atmosphere may have triggered a runaway greenhouse effect that essentially trapped heat and boiled off its oceans. This once potentially habitable planet thus became a veritable hellscape, with average temperatures hot enough to melt lead. Its upper atmosphere, by contrast, is thought to be considerably more mild.
If the search for life was oriented there, researchers inquired, would alien microbes at last be uncovered? Initial detections of phosphine certainly sparked excitement. The find, however, has since been met with skepticism and debate. Still, if present, the link to atmospheric organisms on Venus – like those that already exist on Earth – might be difficult to rule out.
Armed with a device called a nephelometer, which helps study particles by analyzing how light interacts with them, the Rocket Lab-MIT probe is expected to collect data for approximately five minutes as it pierces the Venusian cloud layer. It then will “have a crack,” Beck said, at uncovering those floating signs of life.
“It is a privately-funded philanthropic mission, and so that’s where the nights-and-weekends come from,” he explained on the Space Minds podcast. But it is how the leader of a $13 billion company wants to spend his time and where he thinks there’s value.
“We’ve all got real jobs to do. But if you can go there and you don’t find life, I think that’s super interesting,” he added. “If you go there, and you did find life, that answers one of the biggest questions in our history … and you can pretty conclusively draw that life is going to be prolific throughout the universe.”
Such a discovery would offer another remote corner of the Earth a reason to boast. Indeed it might even be fitting, given modern space history, were it derived from a childhood gaze of the night’s sky that set in motion an eventual answer to that ancient question: Are we truly alone?
David Ariosto is co-host of the Space Minds podcast on SpaceNews, and author of the upcoming Knopf book, “Open Space.”
This article first appeared in the February 2025 issue of SpaceNews Magazine.
