 Tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou, tēnā tātou katoa, nō mai haere mai. Hello everyone and welcome to the session on how New Zealand can be a global leader in sustainable space in aerospace. In the next 60 minutes you will hear a discussion on New Zealand's potential to be at the forefront of sustainable space in aerospace activities. My name is Kelly Lee Dam and I'm the Head of Communications and Engagement at the Edmund Hillary Fellowship. We will open with a karekia. The Edmund Hillary Fellowship is a community of more than 500 entrepreneurs and investors and innovators committed to New Zealand as a base camp for global impact. Our purpose is to partner with Aotearoa to find and build solutions to our toughest challenges. Our vision is that Aotearoa inspires global leadership and solutions for future generations built on principles of tangatititi and values of Sir Edmund Hillary. EHF Fellows are creating impact in a wide range of areas. In the past seven years we estimate that every dollar of public investment has created $111 of potential direct economic impact. In 2023, fellows directly invested more than $114 million into New Zealand-based businesses. They connected Kiwi businesses to more than $312 million in capital, created over 100 new businesses and paid upwards of $45.5 million in New Zealand salary payments. Fellows are tackling systems change from education to environment and working with local communities on the ground giving their time and talent. And we have a number of fellows leading groundbreaking work in space and aerospace. This is a sector that has the potential to drive huge economic, environmental and social impact for Aotearoa. Aerospace and space is also an area where New Zealand could lead the way in terms of sustainable solutions and applications. And that is the focus of today's session. First, I want to acknowledge the sad and recent loss of Rod Orham, who was part of Kawakawa, the first cohort of fellows who had such a profound impact on this fellowship. Rod was a committed, credible and passionate voice for climate change. We are so honoured to have had Rod as a fellow and as a friend. He will be fondly remembered and greatly missed. I also just want to note apologies from Rosalee Nelson, our CEO of the Edmund Hillary Fellowship and Hillary Institute. She's unable to join us today, but is looking forward to seeing what comes out of this discussion. OK, so just a few housekeeping notes before I hand over. If you could just please keep your audio off unless you're speaking. We would encourage you to have your video on because we'd love to see your faces and see who we're talking with. If you could just ensure your Zoom name is your full name and your own name and not a work address or another person. We are recording this session to make it available afterwards and we're only going to be capturing the speakers in the recording. If you've got any thoughts or questions, please use the chat box and we'll pick these up either during or at the end of the session. If you are asking a question, if you could just put question in front of it so it's really clear that you're looking for a response. This session includes a group of panellists and each panellist will have a few minutes to share their stories and insights and our moderator will ask questions and then we'll open up for questions towards the end. So I'm absolutely delighted to introduce our moderator for today's session, Mark Rocket. Mark was the seed investor and co-director of Rocket Lab from 2007 to 2011. Mark is the CEO of Kia Aerospace, a company that is building solar powered aircraft that will continuously fly for months in the stratosphere. He's the president of Aerospace New Zealand, which is an industry-led body working to grow the aerospace sector. It's an absolute pleasure to have Mark moderating this session and Mark, welcome and I will hand over to you. Thank you Kelly and the AI chef team. Great to be here today. Yeah, we've got some really interesting topics to discuss and some great panellists. So this should be fun. I'll kick off just giving it a few general thoughts. Firstly, space versus aerospace. And yeah, I think, you know, it's quite an interesting scenario. Space certainly has that cachet. People are quite intrigued by it. But the reality is we've only got a small number of space companies and some of them are doing extremely well and doing fantastic things. And hopefully that will continue to grow. But the other side of it is the advanced aviation, the aero in the aerospace. And the reality is New Zealand has a long pedigree of work in aviation going right back to Richard Pearce, to the Air Force, to commercial work that's going on. And we've got many dozens of advanced aviation companies now in New Zealand doing really innovative work. And I see, you know, that's where a lot of the jobs are going to be, a lot of the job growth is going to be in the shorter term. And then hopefully we'll move more into the space economy side of things and develop more space companies. And yeah, I think space kind of has that sizzle. You know, we've got a minister for space. I did try and say maybe it should have been a minister for aerospace, but, you know, again, space has that kind of cache in it and sort of grabs the headlines, grabs the attention. But I think, you know, the majority of the work going on in aerospace is actually in that advanced aviation area where you've got so many people doing work in UAVs, drones, autonomous flight systems. Yeah, all sorts of really interesting projects going on all around New Zealand. So, yeah, I see that they line up really well if we can sort of combine the power of this advanced aviation and the space sector and grow that whole aerospace story. And that sort of leads me onto my second point about, so talking about the narrative, you know, I think a lot of aerospace companies, they really need to work on making sure that we bring people along with us on the journey in New Zealand and also offshore. So it's something that we could do a little bit better on as an industry and it's something that came out of the summit, some of the discussions from the New Zealand Aerospace Summit last year was that we kind of need to work together to make sure that people know of the really cool innovative stuff that's going on. And, yeah, and just really telling more people about it. 20, 30 years ago, many people in New Zealand wouldn't have predicted where we are now where we've got really leading industries and the winemaking industry, boat building, build making, they've come such a long way. And I'd really love to see Aerospace be one of our leading industries in the next 10, 20 years. I think we've got some really huge opportunities there. And lastly, I'll just sort of touch on sustainability, which I think is a really interesting one. Obviously, it's a buzzword at the moment. What does sustainability really mean in 2024? So I think we'll have some really great discussions from the panellists around that. The reality is in space and aerospace around the world, a lot of the activity is actually really tied heavily to military applications. You look at Russia, America, China, a lot of those countries have really strong military industrial complexes which are really at the heart of a lot of their space and aerospace development. In New Zealand, we have a small air force with much limited capability and we're not really putting a lot of those research dollars into the space and aerospace industries that those other countries are and significantly a lot of that is not military. So I think that's an interesting opportunity for New Zealand where we could take a more of a commercial focus. And if you look at Rocket Lab as an example, we're the 11th country in the world to be orbital capable, but we're the only country that did that purely from a commercial foundation. All those other countries had that military industrial complex that propelled them forward, whereas in New Zealand, we got the investment to develop that orbital campaign. So I think that provides a really interesting model for New Zealand and a whole range of different niches. So yeah, that's just a quick opening from me. But I'd really love to pass it over now to Emeline, who is the co-founder and CEO of Space Space, a social enterprise for space for everyone starting with New Zealand. She is the co-founder of International Space Consultants. She's held senior positions at Singularity University and is part of the series Robotics Team. Emeline is an Edmund Hillary fellow and last year was named World Class Friends of New Zealand at the Kea Global Awards with her husband, Eric. Yeah, I'll pass it over to you, Emeline. Maybe you can start by sharing your experiences around New Zealand aerospace or space industry and how you describe the industry's potential. Thank you so much Mark for that introduction. Tenakoto, Tenakoto, Tenakoto Katoa, Morena, everybody. And again, thank you to EHF for giving me the opportunity to do this. So my remarks right now are for this particular session is really all about the background and because I do work more on the space side of things, I want to give a little bit of a background of what the global space industry opportunity is and then also what the state of the New Zealand space industry as we go into the discussions of why sustainable space is something that is a brand that New Zealand could actually own to the rest of the world and be naturally an industry leader. So let me just share two slides here. So just to point out that the global space economy right now is basically half a trillion dollars. There's a lot of misnomer about why in the global sense it's normally more government than commercial but that's really not the case anymore. As you can see here, it's actually 80-20 meaning that 80% is now commercial and then the possibilities of it from Peter Beck's quote last night is like 2.3 trillion global opportunity today. One thing that I also wanted to really point out here is that we're always fascinated with rockets and launches but that's actually a very small part of the global space economy. The big part of this half a trillion is really on the application side and so just to think about it is like data is king but there is a lot of opportunities in the manufacturing side. So moving over to the New Zealand kind of like ecosystem so you need all of the players to actually create an ecosystem and so I just wanted to point out where we are today. So we have a progressive government in the form of the New Zealand Space Agency which does the regulations and the policies. We have launch facilities and infrastructure especially because of Rocket Lab we now have at MAHA there's like two launch pads there's now a centre for testing as well in Auckland and then now Tafaki down in the South Island is also has a potential for being either a space port or an aviation test facility. There's ground stations in the South and the North and then like radar stations for Liulabs and then testing facilities also in Auckland on the education side there's now all of the kind of the major universities are offering like courses and also degrees either in aerospace engineering or also hybrids of like space sciences under the graduate level and then also on the undergraduate level. On the industry collaboration side there are two official industry associations so there's the New Zealand Aerospace and there's also Auckland Aerospace and then in terms of like funding sources as well they're all over the country it used to be that traditional investing was not there but like about two years ago we like seeing now the interest in venture capitalists to actually invest in the industry and I was just in this like really great event yesterday at the Parliament and it's just I was wild by some of the statistics that came out from Rocket Lab and by de facto of course New Zealand so I just wanted to kind of rattle this off just for people who if you don't know were the fourth in the world for the highest number of launches per year only behind US, China and Russia second most frequently launched rocket only behind SpaceX there's about 1,700 spacecrafts with parts from Rocket Lab out there and for context there's about 9000 operational satellites in orbit greater than 30% of spacecraft went up last year with the Rocket Lab logo the first mission on to the moon under the new NASA Artemis program which was Capstone was actually launched from New Zealand we will potentially land on the moon under the NASA Clips program this year crossing fingers with Rocket Lab components and parts working on a mission to Mars launching this year as well working on a large rocket neutron to compete with SpaceX Falcon 9 that can lift like about 13 tons to orbit and like lastly world's first space manufacturing mission completed to produce pharmaceutical drugs in space and successfully land back on Earth that was the VARDA mission as well through Rocket Lab and one last statistic from Peter Beck last night was there's 1,700 Rocket Lab suppliers in New Zealand which I think that just shows like the immense work that has been done over the past like half a decade or so in New Zealand and there's just lots of opportunities that's going to happen so I think I will end there Excellent thank you so much Emily now I'll pass it over to Max who is the founder and CEO of Xeno Astronautics a US and New Zealand based company pioneering super conducting magnets for space applications Max studied biomedical engineering and engineering science at the University of Auckland where Xeno was born today Xeno's space magnets ensure satellite missions are effectively managed through fuel free precise positioning Max can you share some of your experiences with the New Zealand space industry and how you describe the industry's potential? Thank you very much Mark well I'm not nearly as well prepared as Amalene that was great to see this slide and all the information thank you very much as you said Xeno is in the business of electrifying space sometimes I give a very rough analogy for people who are not in the industry I say that we're building electric vehicles for space applications just like we have electric vehicles on earth Tesla car let's say and the complex moving parts and the primary idea there is that we realize that if we are to explore space you know for a meaningful amount of time you know decades and centuries if we have to must do it sustainably you know those of us who are in the industry we are aware that if we don't do it sustainably there'll be a quick end to it you know because of the pollution of the orbit and so on so we must find a way to do it responsibly and I think ensuring that we're not attached to earth by this umbilical cord for you know constant reliance on earth for resupply of fuel resupply of you know spacecraft that continuously re-enter and so on there'll be a lot better for you know for the future of aerospace yeah and so my experience with the New Zealand in particular I mean we have a very small industry we have a as Amalene said we have a giant in the you know in the country which is rocket lab and we have you know another handful of companies that you know they come to mind like Don Aerospace, Kia Aerospace and a few you know smaller companies that are not yet active on the market but yeah I mean New Zealand is a handful handful of companies I think most of us most of the New Zealand businesses do business overseas we don't really do any business in New Zealand when it comes to Aerospace yeah and you know as far as the perception goes from the outside of the world you know from overseas you know Rocket Lab I'm just back from a satellite 2024 a huge conference held in the Washington DC and Rocket Lab was mentioned a few times as a small up-and-coming player so that just gives you a perspective we see it as a huge giant in New Zealand you know but they say we need to support small up-and-coming players like Rocket Lab you know so everyone else with a profile that is lower than Rocket Lab there's a small company doing a bit of business yeah great thanks Max yeah I think you know when I come back on the plane to New Zealand from overseas I have that sort of same feeling like yeah we're just such a a small fish in a big pond and yeah I think often times when we don't leave the country for a while we sort of look at our own naval a little bit and yeah don't really think about the bigger context as much as we should thanks Max Philop who is the Chief Technology Officer at Kia Aerospace where he leads the technical team to design and operate our stratospheric aircraft he worked at the German Aerospace Centre otherwise known as DLR in the unmanned department and has a PhD in rocket science with a focus on flight mechanics and control Philip is also an Edmund Hillary fellow yeah so Philip yeah maybe you can share your experience with the space industry and the aerospace industry yeah thanks Mark and hi everyone I think yeah for me the last five years especially have been quite interesting I think besides rocket lab especially in Canterbury if you know seeing the aerospace ecosystem growing quite fast and I think if someone had told me five years ago that we would have a one kilometre paved runway at the Tafaki Aerospace Centre at Kaituriti Spit we would have said like that's a great idea but probably doesn't really fit the timeline so I think we have a lot of great opportunities and I think we also use those opportunities quite well at the same time we are still a small player worldwide and I think often in New Zealand we are quite proud of ourselves that's probably a good thing but I think the rest of the world doesn't think as highly of us as we do so I think we still have a very very long way to go and one thing I think that's quite important is probably of how we represent ourselves to the world and the story that we tell and that's simply to get more expertise to New Zealand so experts coming to New Zealand or even students coming to New Zealand pursuing an aerospace career starting a university Auckland Wellington universities they are only like space programs aerospace programs and yeah just give an example I myself like more than 10 years ago found my view on New Zealand by finding a very very small start up I think they had around 10 people at the time and some you know same ambitious goals to launch you know suborbital rockets and I thought that was yeah extremely cool and I thought it was yeah cool enough to actually then make myself to New Zealand and that company later became you know Rocket Lab as you know it today so pretty much like our biggest aerospace player but when I focus for the first time on New Zealand Rocket Lab was not what they are today they were just yeah again 10 people they hadn't even announced the electronic rocket program but to me that was actually cool enough to pretty much like come to New Zealand and I think even though small story opportunities are very very important and I think we have quite a lot of them so if you take that to the doing quite well overall yeah back to you Mark Yeah thanks Phillip maybe just to sort of further that discussion you started there I mean we do need to attract talent to New Zealand and that's quite an interesting story that you know you're in Germany you were doing a bit of aviation and rocket tree stuff but you realised that in the northern hemisphere it was quite limited what you could actually do up there so you were quite interested in what it was doing do you have any other thoughts on what are the things that we need to do as a country to attract more talent and people like yourself from around the world to come and work in the aerospace industry I mean first of all if you're talking about professionals then the visa situation is really important so it's important that there are no hurdles for experts to come to New Zealand I mean Covid obviously it was a special situation it was quite wide but for example at Kerospace we clearly struggled to get experts from overseas and if we then have to look at aerospace experts within New Zealand that's a lot more challenging so because there's there's no history there are normally no graduates from a let's say more student perspective I think it's important to highlight programmes like UC Aerospace they have attempted space short multiple times and I mean they have won rocketry challenges they have really shown that they actually were leading on a student level and I think something like that programmes like that if they get the right funding if they get the right advertising worldwide through the various channels that we have available then I think that can really attract people from overseas Right, thanks Philip so yeah I'll just head into a few questions and sort of put these questions to the panellists so Emeline how could we use sustainability to differentiate ourselves in a highly competitive international market Yeah, thanks so much for that question it's interesting because as you mentioned earlier what is the definition of sustainability because there's there's so many it could be either environmental impact on earth environmental impact on space the benefits on earth economic benefits on earth I think today it's really important especially because New Zealand already has this culture of stewardship that is ingrained I think in the culture and also very environmentally conscious that I think those inherent values actually helps shape and could shape the industry here towards like sustainable space practices and products and services which having kind of like looked at the industry over the past few years organically that's already happening I think from the what we're seeing today from green propulsion to basically having leolabs here with space situational awareness to companies that are trying to tackle space debris it's already I think ingrained and if we can even work on those specific niches and markets in a more non-organic but a more actually efficient way then I think we could be as I mentioned we could take that brand and be the ideal kind of like country to be doing sustainable space and especially now that we have a new minister of space which is first in the world actually and so I think having that kind of like leadership within government will certainly help shape the industry and potentially like accelerate the growth in all of the activities that's happening Right, thanks Emily, Max over to you what are your thoughts about how New Zealand can really work in that sustainability niche for aerospace or you just on mute there Max Thanks Mark, sorry my apologies certainly as Emily said it does align with our culture being a tidy Kiwi it's something that we enjoy and that we take pride in one thing that I think is important to understand that we have to whatever products we build in aerospace industries they have to be competitive in the global market and these products must meet the demands so we can't be deluded into thinking that if we build something that is green and sustainable but it doesn't perform well we'll be able to build a business around it like it's not going to work and so a compliment here to guys from donor aerospace I know that whenever I'm at conferences and I talk about their business I always hear that great company builds great products so it's a great example where performance happens to be also a green option and I hear in the industry and another thing that comes to mind when I think about the topic of sustainability is government support like I look for example at Japan Japan is another nation that has a history of taking a lot of pride and sustainability and clean long term solutions Japanese are known for this and I see Japanese invest on the government level a lot of money to startups and the companies that are building sustainable technologies and so on and so forth so that's something we could do more in New Zealand I guess it's been historically quite difficult for us to get any funding Mark you would know there's very little support from the government that is material really in New Zealand it's a good thing and a bad thing it makes New Zealand companies very strong if they survive but it's quite hard to survive sometimes for a New Zealand company but my bottom line is I think sustainability could be a great niche and we have to be very competitive with these products Thanks Max that's great we've seen some government initiatives that here in New Zealand have worked quite well there was a partnership between the German Aerospace Centre and DLR and MB and that funded a project there's a recent project with NASA and MB so it's great to see the government is funding some strategic projects but we'd love to see a lot more of that if you look at those other countries there's a lot of dollars of these projects that are going on obviously New Zealand doesn't have a huge budget but if we can be strategic and every year put out projects that are funded that are supported by the government I think certainly we need government infrastructure investment like in Tafaki making sure that we have the infrastructure we need to grow the aerospace industry we also need investors national New Zealand investors as well as international investors and also government procurement why would the government go and use people internationally when we have a lot of that capability that we could nurture locally and I think procurement has been a big one it's something I know Dorn Aerospace are pretty big on as well we really need to use our own talents if we're going to be spending lots of money on certain projects then New Zealand companies should be looked at for that not just international companies Phillip over to you for the and Aerospace in New Zealand I think we need to look at what I would call like the big ticket items so when it comes to sustainability there are many many ways of being more sustainable but the question is where can you apply something like the 80-20 rule where can we achieve 80% results with like the minimum of input and to give you like like a real example a care space we are designing a solar powered electric high altitude aircraft and while it's definitely cool to be involved in green aerospace and to drive green aerospace technology you know just having a solar powered aircraft being electric I don't think that that's going to make the big difference what is hopefully going to make the big difference is the payloads that we would have or the payloads that New Zealand companies could enable for example like Max's company having better magnetic systems on board Dawn Aerospace having better green propulsion systems on board so if you really look at these payloads and what they can do then I think that's where we can be really sustainable so if we can monitor all of New Zealand in various environmental aspects and we change policy making we change we actually understand and perceive our environment and we make better decisions and all of that could for example be just simply achieved with a few satellite payloads I think then we are really achieving something and that's when we can really create sustainable outcomes that said like while those applications those big applications make the big difference I think it's too important the subsystems and all of the processes that will support these missions Yeah, back to you Mark Thanks Phillip Yeah, I think if you look at internationally there's different technologies such as nuclear technology which is quite popular in other countries but here in New Zealand obviously when nuclear free doesn't really appeal and a lot of that there's a lot of tension around the military involvement and it's very offensive about aerospace because it does have strong ties with the military so yeah, I think companies like Kia and Dawn we're naturally being pulled over to projects that are aligned with New Zealand's values and hopefully we can see a lot more of those projects develop but as New Zealanders a lot of us are quite keen to work on solving problems like change mitigation, et cetera so hopefully our natural tendencies towards that will help us attract more of those projects internationally and start them off here nationally as well Back to you Emily what are your thoughts on some of the obstacles or gaps that we need to overcome? Yeah, I think you certainly said a lot about investments and funding for sure a lot of other countries and especially with governments pushing and having a lot more funding opportunities that are available to the industry today we have some funding but they're integrated with other industries and other technology or deep tech it would be great to actually have some funding that are really specific to space and aerospace that would be good for either precede or idea stage types of endeavors that the government could actually set aside funding for and that would definitely I think accelerate what is happening today so there's that part of it I think the other part as well as I think related to the questions that I see in terms of education today education certainly has started we're a little bit late in the game because the aerospace engineering and like all of those specifically related to aerospace and space just started maybe like around three years ago when other countries have had this for decades even if they're not spacefaring so I think we need to accelerate and that's happening now on the university level but I think if you even go even further down there needs to be more stem like focused kind of direction for either primary middle and high school because this is a long term kind of goal and we may be looking at university students that will graduate after two to four years and so there is a gap between now and then for those to kind of get up to speed to be part of the industry and so therefore just like what Phillip said we need also to attract other people into New Zealand which takes me back to the Edmund Hillary fellowship which is actually one program that has attracted a bunch of these people that are now kind of like part of the potential kind of like network that could help so for example I don't know people know but like two of the three founders of Planet which is the biggest constellation of Earth observation satellites on Earth are Edmund Hillary Fellows the three founders of Sarah's Robotics which is a Clips basically it's a NASA commercial payloads lunar services company that can actually like propose to send NASA to the moon are Edmund Hillary Fellows and those are just examples but I think if we can hopefully I know that fellowship is now not taking any new ones but just hint hint to government this is a good program that potentially might be good to still continue on further and so I mean so those are the main things and then the one last thing is I think there still needs to to have some kind of a a mind shift in the public where like aerospace and space is actually something that is critical to not just to the future but it actually is part of your daily life today like if like satellites go down today or grid's energy systems Wall Street like your weather how you actually navigate everything goes down and so it's something that touches us every day and I think that mind shift of being able to educate people that this is something that is important to you today important for the future and it's also economically something that is a big opportunity in the future great so I'll ask two more questions for the panelists and then I'll throw it out to the broader audience and we'll answer some questions there so Max what is it going to take up to scale what's it going to take to scale up the New Zealand aerospace and space industries in a sustainable way it's a good question Mark to scale in a sustainable way ultimately I think it's going to be it's going to be hard to do without you know the drive from the government like we must have the support of the government behind us to pull it off and as Emeline said I fully agree space is is the next big thing essentially we have a number of them in the world currently I mean AI's number is one of them space is another one space economy is going to be it feels to me like we are missing out in New Zealand we have a great opportunity that Rocket Lab exposed us to thanks to that but I think we are missing out on the opportunity and I think we should really pay a lot more attention we could become the Singapore of space Singapore is the financial hub of the world so to speak we could become the sustainable space hub of the world if we do it wisely and I think it's not too late just yet but we need to move certainly without proper support from the government all I see Mark is companies will probably emerge and likely leave New Zealand either partly or fully like what happened to Rocket Lab I'm not the expert on Rocket Lab but from my understanding they have roughly eight to nine hundred stuff here in New Zealand and around a thousand stuff in the States mostly it's shifting to the US now donor space also you know jewel it's a Netherlands and New Zealand Zeno is feeling the pressure you know to also have the presence in the States and in Europe as well and I'm sure you Mark at Kia Aerospace in a similar position it's very hard it's very hard without the appropriate support to stay and be put Yeah, we started off as Rocket Lab New Zealand and now it's Rocket Lab USA and that's a critical story not just in the aerospace industry so many other successful companies New Zealand is a great incubator of talent but we haven't sort of really worked out that secret key on how we kind of retain the ownership here as much as we could so really I'd love to see more companies be based here but it is difficult if you've got way more funding opportunities and way more investment opportunities internationally you know when a CEO goes to the board and says well we can get this here in New Zealand or we can get this here overseas it's a kind of a hard argument so yeah something that we need to be cognisant of as a country we don't want to be just a talent incubator we actually want to retain that talent and retain that growth and wealth so yes I think it's something that needs to be more in the radar and it's really not a conversation that you hear very often I think as a country we do really need to address that and think about that more Thanks Max so Phillip I just wanted to ask you how do we best tell the story about sustainable aerospace capability Good question I mean first of all I think we have a lot of different channels that all have expertise and telling stories we have MB, NZTE even EHF was like it's marketing channels media channels and also the individual people that pretty much form part of these organisations and that means we should have already like all the capabilities of creating the stories we just have to dig into the examples and yeah promote them I mean otherwise we get only like the people that actively search for what's happening in the world what's happening in New Zealand but if you make it really easy for them to hear about it then I think that's a good step Great thanks Phillip so now I'll go to some of the questions that we're seeing in the chat so feel free to keep firing those through Emily, a question for you how can New Zealand play a part in the international regulation of space Oh great question and naturally it's already happening if you remember so the New Zealand Space Agency I put on my slides a progressive one because they actually put out really good policy and regulations back in 2017 when the space act in New Zealand started it was the first one to actually create a policy on high altitude like policies and regulations which was first in the world and so that's like something that already could potentially be adopted by other countries the New Zealand Space Agency these UN COPAs like the UN Office for Outer Space Affairs so they're already part of the global kind of policy making bodies and are already putting their weight and could still do more because especially when we're talking about like sustainable space the policy is lagging behind in terms of what we need to have in terms of regulations especially because commercial is now getting ahead of government activities and so I think the agency can certainly play a big role in putting out more of those policies that can be adopted kind of like worldwide Right, thanks Emily and thanks to Janine Itch for that question I had a question about regional clustering for aerospace as growth and success boosted by geographical proximity to peers thank you Richard Cotman for that maybe I'll jump in on that one I'm involved with Aerospace New Zealand where we're doing a lot of work and building the aerospace industry certainly here in Canterbury we've got a cluster of aerospace entities that are working really well together we're seeing the same thing happen with the Space Institute and Rocket Lab and a whole lot of really cool aerospace Auckland up there doing really, really great stuff so that they've got a real space kind of feel here in Canterbury with Tafaki and the university engineering talent we're doing a lot of advanced aviation UAV drone kind of work down in Southland you've got the space radar etc that's happening down there Arirua so Arirua so yeah certainly we are seeing different clusters emerge and even if you look at the United States all the different states contributed in different ways to the space shuttle so everyone had their kind of specialty someone work on the boosters someone work on the fuel tanks someone work on different aspects of the shuttle the same thing could happen in New Zealand we might have a certain flavour in each of the regions that we're focusing on that collectively certainly universities are a real powerhouse of generating talent and I know for example Dawn Aerospace came down to Canterbury because they saw the engineering talent that was coming out of the university same with Auckland we're seeing a lot of people at Auckland going off to work in the industry so I believe clustering is really important and the work that Emeline is doing Aerospace New Zealand there's a range of people that are working together to connect people and we have regular meetups again the New Zealand Aerospace Summit which is coming up in September that's where a lot of the Aerospace Industry will get together and we've seen tangible collaborations and projects come out of those meetups which I think is just incredibly important so yeah I'm big on that regional clustering side of things so we'll move on to the next question here from Edward are there any immediate technical design challenges or R&D challenges that government entities such as Callaghan could tackle to help New Zealand companies particularly start-ups get up and running Max I don't know if you can give your thoughts on that one Yes Mark certainly very briefly so Callaghan you know with Zener in particular and loans in the past and you know we're currently in the process of acquiring another grant I believe with Callaghan so it is helpful yes it is helpful primarily the help is financial you know we you know we don't really draw any help from the technical standpoint there but yeah financial help is available and it has been good I have a few thoughts on that too Mary Yeah great Yeah first of all financial is important and especially like Callaghan unfortunately has changed I think especially due to Covid so a lot of the pre-existing grants and scholarships don't exist anymore and I make that very very clear right now if Callaghan hadn't given me like a PhD scholarship I would not be in New Zealand right now I would have gone back to Germany because I had to come here for financial support I took a big risk and only Callaghan kept me here till the end that's why I stayed in New Zealand so unfortunately those systems don't exist anymore I don't know how PhD students post-graduates get their money from right now let's say take you know big loans it's definitely one part so to support that on the other hand when it comes to just government entities I think that's important you know on the ground that actually work on regulations and so on that they are given pretty much the tools and the freedom to make changes and I think we should start really separating you know like when we're talking about the regulator I think we should actually start talking about the people working for the regulator versus the regulations because they're two different things and I give you like an example that I feel with in 1944 the Chicago IKO convention someone came up with a smart plan that any unmanned or any aircraft flying more than 12 nautical miles over the ocean you need to have certification anyone in the industry knows that getting certification for an unmanned aircraft is absolutely unrealistic right now the processes don't exist now the company like gear aerospace and potentially dawn aerospace can't legally fly unless they get certification that could take years maybe decade who knows however like at CA for example they have a team called the emerging technologies team and the people there they tried and tried and they said like we're working on it and they went to conferences to Canada and they really got the ball rolling and they actually found the first solution so that we can now fly but they had to deal with international rules and you know it's not that they didn't want to I mean they tried it's more like their hands are bound because an international regulation and the same could fly for a national regulation says you can't do this or it simply says like yes let's change this but the next iteration cycle for this particular act takes three years you know in the meantime feel free to put in some comments on how to change it but we can't do anything our hands are bound so the people really working for the regulators from my experience they are super keen to change things you know like I think we are better connected probably with our regulators than in my experience and probably in most other countries you know we know the people by first name we know what they're doing they're really motivated and they're not going on to this but we have to give them the tools and I think especially you know ministers and upper management of these regulators they really need to give them people the freedom and the opportunities to make the change that they want to do Thanks Phillip we're sort of running short on time but maybe just a couple of quick questions so there's one from Tim Brown Emily how well is our current education offering aligned with what the industry needs as I mentioned earlier I think it's now getting aligned because it's this new courses and degrees are now being offered in university but at the same time there's also parallel and other disciplines for example like remote sensing to data analysis all of those downstream side of things and then also like mechatronics as well all of these different courses that funnel in to either space manufacturing or space manufacturing they're all there already so it's just a matter of connecting the dots and also those people who are really interested in the industry there is already potential for those on the educational side but as I mentioned before it's not down where you influence kids minds to actually go into this industry really earlier on in their career and that needs to happen on the primary and middle middle school level Great thanks Emily One last real quick question Mark Brigman from Kudnet Ventures Hi Mark Max or Phillip he's done quite a long message there but essentially how do we retain the R&D while the company grows in the target market so how do we sort of scale up businesses and get the amount of talent that we need to employ here if we did have a space exercise company how could we achieve that in New Zealand Phillip did you have any thoughts on that question from Mark Phillip what are your thoughts Phillip do you want to go first I'm just looking at the size of SpaceX in the meantime so I can come in for Mark I think step number one is make at least the visa processes really easy for companies like us timing really really matters if it takes three months to bring an expert in you put a job add up takes a month and then you need to go through all these interview processes and if it then takes another three, four, five months to someone actually finally get in I mean that's not really at a pace that we actually operate so that's definitely one big part and I think for the rest you simply have to work economically competitive and as long as we can do that I think we could eventually build pretty large companies I think Rocket Lab is so good example I think in their particular case it's largely driven by by politics so we're talking about space politics and ita restrictions where if you don't have you're linked to the US you just can't really do it but as long as you don't have these things I think it is potentially doable Thanks Philip Any final thoughts from you Max? Yeah, very quickly so Mark thank you SpaceX had roughly 10,000 staff Rocket Lab currently in New Zealand at 1,000 employees approximately 2,000 worldwide my general rule of thumb normally if we look at a problem and we are within an order of magnitude short we can probably pull it off but in New Zealand could potentially be a place where we originate seeds and let them go prosper elsewhere in the world but something in me tells me that we could potentially if we do it wisely we could bridge that gap the order of magnitude gap and actually become a country that hosts these future aerospace owners and giants of 10,000 people I mean generally you could consider that a pretty great success and I think the numbers for SpaceX in many ways speak for themselves but is that actually even our strengths I think New Zealand could even enable many many more smaller aerospace startups so let's say 50 to a thousand and really split that up thanks Philip Mark I see you've got your hand up there but I think Kelly's going to get grumpy at me if I keep going too much longer but feel free to send me an email or give us a call but basically a really great session really enjoyed the answers and the questions that we got back over to you Kelly Thank you Mark I'm not grumpy at all it's been a great session so I just wanted to say thank you so much for sharing your time and your knowledge with us so we're all extremely grateful and thanks to everyone on the call for joining this session but I will close this with a karakea kia hora, te marino kia whakapapa, punamu, te mawana he hui a rahe ma tato i te ranginae aroha atu, aroha mai tato i a tato katoa thank you so much everyone for joining us and we'll see you again real soon matiwa