It’s good news for wannabe astronauts. Playground rockets, first inspired by the 1960s Cold War space race, are making a comeback.
A new version of the rocket is being installed at Waverley Park, which featured one of Sydney’s original moon rocket slippery dips.
The new rocket due to touch down in Waverley Park. Credit: Proludic
Mayor of Waverley Paula Masselos said the new rocket and launch tower is “set to spark joy in a new generation and harks back to a time before electronic gaming devices when imaginative play ruled, and [create] hopes and inspiration for future professions.”
Heritage consultant Susan Jackson-Stepowski says society became absolutely fixated on anything to do with space between the late 1950s and mid-1970s. Jackson-Stepowski is explaining the remarkable story of NSW’s rocket playgrounds with a talk at Marrickville Library on Wednesday.
“The commercial world picked up on all of this and started pushing out everything on a space theme,” she said.
The space race began when the former Soviet Union announced on October 4, 1957, that they had successfully launched a satellite, Sputnik. A month later came Sputnik 2 with Laika the Soviet space dog, a stray mongrel from the streets of Moscow, the first animal to orbit the Earth. The American public thought the Russians were eavesdropping. The US needed to catch up and NASA was born.
Rocket play equipment in Enmore Park with Ola Stepowski and her grandmother Susan Jackson-Stepowski. Credit: Steven Siewert
“The first plans for a rocket were brought back from the US to Australia in 1958 by an engineer from the Blue Mountains city council,” she said. “He gave those plans to a welder called Dick West who started making the rockets and other companies copied him. The Russians had rocket playgrounds as well.
“I call this soft propaganda – society was influencing the councils to choose what piece of equipment should go into a park,” Jackson-Stepowski said.