The Environmental Protection Authority will check the application is complete and, if so, the application will be notified during the next 10 working days. Public submissions can be made during the following 20 working days and there are then 40 working days for the parties to exchange evidence.
Under new legislation, the authority hearing cannot take longer than 40 working days, and its decision has to be made within 20 working days after that. If all those rules are followed, the hearing will have to start by February 21. The whole application process could take only six months.
Mr McCabe said that was too fast. "The legislative framework is inadequate and unbalanced and has been put in place by the National Government to fast-track these applications," he said.
"The minister, Simon Bridges, has said he wants this to go ahead, and the authority commissioners are appointed by him."
Authority applications and assessment manager Sarah Gardner said the agency was at arm's length from the Government. Evidence would be heard by a committee of three to five people chosen by an authority board member, and government ministers were not involved in appointing the committee members.
The application contains thousands of pages, including many scientific reports. A summary will go on TTR's website and the application - limited to 10MB in total - will be available to download when it is notified by the authority.
Mr Sommerville hopes the information will be convincing to opponents as well as to the authority. "If it's not, I will be very surprised if anybody will be able to do anything out there," he said.
Mr McCabe said KASM had a legal and science team ready to provide counter-evidence on the mining application and that a moratorium was needed because people didn't know enough about the marine environment, and it was already under stress.
The governments of Australia's Northern Territory and Namibia have moratoria on seabed mining on their coastlines.
"We need to know what stands to be lost before it is put at risk."
New Zealanders needed more information and more time to make submissions, Mr McCabe said.
The economic case for the mining is that wages and royalties will add an extra $147 million to New Zealand's export earnings and an extra $302 million to the gross domestic product.
But Mr McCabe said the project's economic and social impacts were questionable. Most of TTR was in overseas ownership, and there was no proposal to add value to the raw iron particles onshore.
He said mining the seabed could damage New Zealand's clean green reputation, and the technology for it was experimental and untested.
TTR's proposal is to mine the sand with a remote-controlled 12m crawler on the seabed. The sand would be pumped to a processing ship on the surface and the iron particles removed magnetically, and rinsed with freshwater made on board in a desalination process.
The rejected sand would be thickened with brine and released from a pipe 4m above the seabed back into pits left by the mining.
The iron concentrate would be transferred to a shuttle ship, ferried to a bulk carrier and taken to markets in Asia.
Released sand will make a plume that heads south down the coast, but the company's evidence is its effect will be minor by the time it reaches shore, given the bight's constant waves and sand movement.
Mining will kill any life in sand that is pumped to the surface - species such as tubeworms - but the sand would be quickly recolonised, Mr Sommerville said.
