New Zealand is positioning itself for a bigger role in the global space race, with a potential new spaceport in Canterbury.
“This is New Zealand’s next greatest chance to get in on space launch and sending rockets into space of all kinds, but there’s a huge number of questions and a lot of hurdles ahead for it to get over the line,” says RNZ journalist Phil Pennington, who has extensively covered the Tāwhaki National Aerospace Centre’s ambitious plans.
“But this is the closest they’ve come. So Tāwhaki really has gone from yay rockets, nay rockets, back to yay rockets but much firmer now; much firmer.”
But as our space ambitions take off, so do the questions about satellite security and the risks of putting more infrastructure into orbit.
“In 2025, we were the third most frequent launch nation in the world. Some of these are military payloads, and that could draw New Zealand into space conflict,” says Auckland University PhD candidate Carolle Varughese, who is a space security research fellow with the United Nations Institute of Disarmament Research.
“I am worried about how the space environment is being used and what our relationship with the space environment will be in the future.”
Pennington tells The Detail that large rockets weighing up to 100 tonnes each could be launched a dozen times a year from south of Christchurch in just a few years.
He says Tāwhaki and a French company are working on capital, consents and customers from Europe to build the spaceport.
It would cater for increasing global demand in “a trillion-dollar industry”.
“Taxpayers, so far, have put in about 35 million dollars getting it to this stage,” Pennington says.
“The iwi are also stakeholders … this is a very expensive business …
“You really need governments to be gung-ho on board with this for the commercial companies to be interested because they’re such a big outlay.”
He says the industry is fast-moving and competition is heating up on the world stage.
“One thing we’re up against is that there’s at least half a dozen other countries that in the last two to three years have suddenly gone: ‘Hey, we need to start building spaceports; we need to get with this’.
“There’s an alliance of half a dozen that’s formed, and we’re not in that alliance, and they’re helping each other.”
But as New Zealand’s space ambitions grow, how does the country balance the opportunities with threats and security risks?
“It is absolutely legitimate to ask the questions and to wonder… and it’s fair to say I wish there was more transparency in this industry and they have a fair way to go with that,” Pennington says.
Carolle Varughese, who studies space-related risks, tells The Detail that “some of these risks that New Zealand is willing to take may keep the peace in space or maybe further escalate tensions”.
“So it’s important to consider maybe where the benefits and profits of space activities are going and how the harms from space activities are being distributed and who are they being distributed amongst.”
She says New Zealand is becoming increasingly reliant on what is happening in space, with satellites being used for everything from banking to navigation to research and telecommunications – “so, strategically, incredibly important”.
But those satellites can be vulnerable in space wars.
“So conflicts are already happening in space. When Russia invaded Ukraine, the communications provider Viasat experienced a cyber attack …
“Now for us here in New Zealand, issues also happen on the ground.”
She pointed to a recently published New Zealand Security Intelligence Service report that revealed a “foreign state was looking to deceptively install ground-based space infrastructure to enhance their country’s capabilities without … New Zealand’s authorisation or any transparency on how that might be used. So things can happen in space, but also on Earth.
“Now, there’s another reason why satellites may be deliberately targeted, and that’s if they’re military targets. So satellites can serve both civilian and military purposes. And the hard part is that the benefits from the civilian and military users … they’re not really easily separated.”
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