But there are concerns we are not working fast enough to meet the growing demand for such data. As the Linz report notes, New Zealand has no national strategy for Earth observation, little cohesion or co-operation within its scattered space sector and no single point of contact, not even “a small department in charge of Earth observations”.

Linz resilience group manager Graeme Blick says huge opportunities are to be gained from collaborating to buy or gather satellite data, but still “there’s no one EO dataset that can provide all the insights needed to address big challenges such as climate change, urban growth or water”.

Already, that is changing. Following the “What on Earth Colloquium” in Wellington in March, a number of organisations using EO data, including Linz, formed a working group to develop a more coherent EO community. The group has commissioned a stocktake of exising EO users and the datasets they use. In October, LINZ represented New Zealand at the inter-governmental Group on Earth Observations (GEO) in Kyoto.

New Zealand has not followed the usual path into the space or EO industry. Space programmes have traditionally grown from big-budget government investments, boosted by the galactic aspirations of billionaires – Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, Amazon chief executive Jeff Bezos, PayPal’s Elon Musk and Virgin’s Richard Branson – then spinning out into a raft of small tech-savvy start-ups feeding the market for space launches and observational data.

Mark Rocket, Kea Aerospace founder, former co-director of Rocket Lab and the first Kiwi to sign up to Virgin Galactic’s space tourism programme, says there are two ends to the space-launch market. “You have the SpaceX end [SpaceX is a private American aerospace manufacturer founded by Musk] which is the expensive big, heavy stuff, and you have the lower end where, instead of sending buses up into space, you want to send little microwave or fridge-size payloads,” says Rocket, who changed his name by deed poll from Mark Stevens.

Finding a niche

New Zealand’s pitch for space is on the back of small hardware – including the compact 10x10x10cm satellites called CubeSats – and more frequent launches operating in a commercial space.

This is what Rafael Kargren, director of technical and commercial operations at the recently established Centre for Space Science Technologies in Alexandra, describes as Space 2.0 – a platform of new start-ups and investments driven by people saying you do not need to spend $150 million to build a satellite and take 10 years to build it. “You can do it in two months at a cost of $10,000.”

Targeting this lower end, Rocket Lab is now a US corporation with a subsidiary in New Zealand, with financial backing from Lockheed Martin, venture capitalists Vinod Khosla and Bessemer Venture Partners, Callaghan Innovation and Sir Stephen Tindall’s K1W1 investment fund. It has access to three launch sites in the US but New Zealand, says Beck, still has a huge advantage in its uncluttered airspace.

“In the US, every time you launch a rocket you have to close down large chunks of airspace, so you end up diverting a whole lot of air traffic. The launch site here gives us a frequency we need, and the market for this right now is enormous. There are 2900 spacecraft requiring launch in the next five years – and that assumes no growth in the market.”

New Zealand is no stranger to this market. Google and Nasa already launch high-altitude balloons from here. This is the seventh year Nasa’s Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (Sofia) has run its winter stargazing mission from Christchurch. In 2015, following a deal between then prime minister John Key and China’s President Xi Jinping, Hong Kong-listed company Kuang-Chi Science launched a huge one-tonne helium balloon into near space (between 20km and 100km above sea level) from a Chinese-owned dairy farm near Ashburton. According to a statement from Kuang-Chi, the technology “has a number of potential applications, the most obvious being Wi-Fi access”.

Venture Southland’s Awarua Satellite Ground Station just north of Bluff, originally commissioned by the European Space Agency, has been in operation since 2008 and is set to build a new satellite-tracking antenna.

Auckland University of Technology’s Institute for Radio Astronomy and Space Research, New Zealand’s first (and only) radio astronomical institute, collaborates with international observatories and space agencies and conducts research into radio astronomy, astrophysics and Earth science applications.