American billionaire stranded in New Zealand fulfills Rocket Lab promise and donates $ 286,000 to Starship

American billionaire Gabe Newell has kept his promise to donate $ 1 to Auckland’s Starship Children’s Hospital for every person who watched the live stream of Rocket Lab’s latest release, “Return to Sender” (included below).

Rocket Lab said this afternoon that $ 286,000 had been raised for Starship’s Pediatric Intensive Care Unit, thanks to Newell.

The billionaire was stranded in New Zealand for a 10-day holiday that ended with the close of March.

Then he decided to stay a while.

The divorced, 57-year-old father of two says he can do as much working remotely from New Zealand than from his home in Seattle, where he became a billionaire at Microsoft, working on the first three versions of Windows. He became a billionaire after he left to found Valve.

Valve develops its own video games and sells titles from all participants through its online store Steam, which has become the dominant online platform for distributing game content in the post-disc era.

Today, Forbes estimates Newell’s wealth at $ 4 billion ($ 5.7 billion).

Newell recently said that his company was only 50 to 75 percent more productive with people working remotely.

Without explicitly mentioning Valve, he said it would make sense for game development companies to relocate, at least temporarily, to New Zealand, where they could work together in an office.

He is seeking a meeting with Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern to develop his idea.

The “Return to Sender” upload included “Gnome Chompski”, a 6-inch tall figure created by Weta Workshop, which helped publicize Newell’s fundraising campaign (and officially designated a “massive simulator … with an important R&D role in allowing Rocket Lab to test and rate a novel 3D printing technique) Chompski, who first appeared in Half-Life as a “garden ornament and improvised weapon”, was a joke recurring in several Valve games.

The launch was also noted for taking New Zealand’s first student-built satellite, Waka Āmiorangi Aotearoa APSS-1, into space, which will study electrical disturbances in the upper atmosphere and whether they have any correlation with earthquakes, and therefore in predicting future rumblings. Rocket Lab sponsored the project by providing the launch at no cost to the University of Auckland.

And his headline stunt was Rocket Lab’s first attempt at retrieving power-ups. The first stage of “Return to Sender” parachuted back to Earth after separating two and a half minutes after the 3.20pm launch, making a soft landing in the ocean from Launch Complex 1 in Mahia some 13 minutes later.

Founder Peter Beck posted a photo of the thruster being transported aboard a recovery ship shortly after 11pm.

Rocket Lab plans to refine the recovery process so that a helicopter can catch the propellant in the middle of its descent. Learn more about the “Return to Sender” release here.