Boatbuilding - it's not rocket science | Manawatu-Wanganui News | Local News in Manawatu-Wanganui

He was looking for a more low-key job than figuring out how to fuel rockets, but Jason Quinn is not sure that he's found it in Wanganui industry.

His new job as project and operations manager at Wanganui's Q-West Boat Builders is proving pretty full on.

Although he spent the last 10 years working for Nasa, the United States government's National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Jason Quinn doesn't call himself a rocket scientist.

"I'm a design engineer and proud of it."

He said Kiwis were practical people and not overly impressed by his background, though there had been some jokes about building a rocket in the backyard.

Mr Quinn came to New Zealand from the US to "find himself". He wasn't sure whether he wanted to work in space engineering for the rest of his life.

He is missing his US family and design engineering more than he expected.

Arriving in New Zealand he has ended up in Wanganui because he wanted a small town and his wife Shelley wanted to dance. They looked for a small town with ballet opportunities.

"Wanganui had two decent ballet schools, so we moved to Wanganui," he said.

He got a job at Q-West Boat Builders and in eight weeks there he's already learned a lot - about Lean manufacturing, about using off-the-shelf hardware to do non-off-the-shelf jobs and about how to manage people.

Work at Q-West is fast-moving.

"The important and urgent stuff is very consuming. There's no time to sit down and think things out," he said.

He spent the previous 10 years working for Nasa at the George C. Marshall Space Flight Centre in Huntsville, Alabama. Most days he cycled from Huntsville out to the centre for work.

The Marshall centre, one of 10 in the US, employed about 3000 civil servants, 3000 contractors and support staff and about 14,000 army personnel.

It designed, tested and built Apollo, the rocket that went to the moon.

Jobs in such places are specialised. Mr Quinn studied mechanical and aeropace engineering at two universities, worked in manufacturing and designed some jet engines before being sought out by Nasa.

He was one of only three or four people in the US with the skills it needed. He sent in a resume and was accepted without even being interviewed.

"I was hiking out in Sequoia National (Park) when I got the job."

During his last three years at the Marshall centre he was designing and testing the propulsion system for the country's Ares rocket. Ares was being built to transport the astronauts at the International Space Station back and forth from Earth.

The design work was heading for success before the US canned it in February as unaffordable.

"It didn't kill anybody, though it came close, and we didn't blow up anything. We had a few fires," Mr Quinn said.

One test conductor who was "a real pro" saw a fire start in the prototype but didn't end the test. Instead he used an extinguisher to apply just enough water to damp it down and keep the test going.

With the Ares project ended, astronauts will have to be ferried to the space station by a Russian rocket, an old fashioned and dependable thing "the space equivalent of a Massey Ferguson tractor".

"It's really bad for the environment, but it works great."

At the beginning of his time with Nasa, Mr Quinn first worked on a hypersonic vehicle called a D21. Then he worked on the ISTAR programme, which aimed to use new hypersonic engine technology to build a vehicle going many times faster than a jet airliner - the "space plane" inventors have dreamed of.

His Nasa papers can be found online, by searching on Jason Eugene Quinn.