Joseph Chamberlain

Hi! My name is Joseph Chamberlain, and I’m a year 13 student at Freyberg High School. I was lucky enough to be selected to attend the USA Space Camp in Huntsville, Alabama this year. I’m super grateful for this opportunity and am looking forward to it.

For several years now I have been deeply interested in aeroplanes, rockets and space exploration. What fascinates me most is the amount of engineering behind them. I enjoy studying physics, chemistry, calculus and astronomy at school and learning how these concepts apply to real life. I often try to find a link between rocketry and space travel to what we learn at school and sometimes test out my calculations in a spaceflight game called Kerbal Space Program. I also enjoy learning and reading about space exploration history, most notably the U.S. manned spaceflight programme in the 1960s and early 70s. I also admire the work that SpaceX is doing and keep a close eye on their current projects.

I’m involved with an astronomy project to study the orbital motion of an exoplanet, WASP-17b, and have been working on that for the past year. I also like to spend time in the garage building small homemade rockets. Sometimes I’m able to test them, and sometimes they explode. Not ideal, but fun!

Other things I am interested in are competing in athletics meets in the 400-metre run, speedsolving Rubik’s cubes, and playing hockey.   I am a house captain and part of the senior leadership team at high school. 

In the future, I plan to study either mechanical or aerospace engineering at university and hope to eventually get a career in the space industry as an engineer to design spacecraft and launch vehicles.

I am super grateful to Royal Society Te Apārangi for giving me the incredible opportunity to attend Space Camp in the United States. It’s been a big dream of mine for a long time and the fact that it’s starting to become real is exciting! I will certainly make the most of the trip.