Space Minister Judith Collins says the government is helping through light-touch regulation and encouraging careers in space. Photo / Calvin Samuel, RNZ
By Phil Pennington of RNZ
The Government is spending almost 20 times less on space per head than the United States, and half that of the United Kingdom.
The first sector survey in six years shows five out of the seven rival space countries New Zealand compares itself to are ahead in Government funding.
The local spend was about US$11 ($19) a head in 2023-24, versus US$20 ($34) in Britain and US$200 ($339) in America.
Britain has six spaceports under development.
New Zealand has a single one at Mahia in use for several years, and the Government has ruled out subsidising building another spaceport near Christchurch.
France, Germany and Korea’s governments are all also spending more per head on space.
However they, Canada and Italy each have only a single spaceport still under development.
Local space and advanced aviation revenue is up 50% in five years to $2.5 billion a year; the target is to double it by 2030.
The new report by consultancy Deloitte had a wrong figure in it: it gave the New Zealand Government spend as just over $1 a year.
When RNZ asked about this, officials told us the figure was wrong and should be US$11.06 ($18.77), not US$1.11 ($1.88): “We’ve identified there is a mistake in the report.”
MBIE science and space general manager Robyn Henderson said late on Thursday: “The substantive content of this report is a survey of the New Zealand space and advanced aviation sectors, and we are confident in its findings.”
The report said local start-ups in particular want more Government help, such as more grants or tax incentives.
Public-private partnerships, or PPPs, could attract more international cooperation.
PPPs were being used by Japan to develop lunar rovers, autonomous navigation systems, and simulation and testing platforms, it added.
Space Minister Judith Collins said the Government was helping through “light-touch” regulation and encouraging careers in space.
On the downside, “there appears to be limited international awareness of the New Zealand ... sector outside of our growing launch capabilities”, the report said.
Australia and India recently did a deal on collaborative space projects, and this sort of thing here could help, it suggested.
Another way was to promote clusters, like the nascent Christchurch space one (Tāwhaki National Aerospace Centre is just south of the city. It has the best site for rocket launches in the country, though a spaceport is not in prospect).
“California, Seattle, Toulouse, Hamburg, Chengdu and Bangalore are all examples of Aerospace clusters that provide an ecosystem which is conducive for collaboration and rapid dispersal of technology and market information.”
The sector was “commercially led and homegrown”, with 78% of survey respondents saying more than half their workforce was local, the report said.
On Tuesday, Collins said as space and cyber threats grew, there would be more connection between the space agency and the Defence Force.
However, the Deloitte report does not contain the word “military” and mentions defence as a passing reference just once.
The Deloitte 2019 report on the sector talked about defence a lot, particularly about how it was central to many other countries’ space industries but, unusually, not to New Zealand’s.
Subsequent official documents have stated the NZDF wants to acquire many more space assets of its own.
In addition, the Government has stated the space sector could benefit from the Pentagon looking to widen its use of commercial space solutions, an approach its new strategies are now accelerating, US reporting shows.
It is unclear if the US government’s investment in space includes its military operations. The report gives its total budget as US$69.5 billion ($117.9b) a year; however, the Pentagon’s US Space Force alone has a budget of over US$50 billion ($85b).
A key advantage New Zealand has is a military-linked one - a technology safeguards agreement (TSA) that provides security around the import and use here of US rocket launch technology and satellites. Agreed in 2016, though ratified at the UN only last year, it helped pave the way for launches at Rocket Lab’s Mahia spaceport.
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