Tāwhaki: establishing a path to space
We provided advice and assistance to help establish the Tāwhaki National Aerospace Centre
The Kaitorete Peninsula near Christchurch is home to one of the most exciting developments in Aotearoa New Zealand – the Tāwhaki National Aerospace Centre.
The facility allows innovative new companies – such as Dawn Aerospace – to test concepts and vehicles in a controlled flight environment. The facility is jointly developed between local hapū and the Crown, and sits at the leading edge of space and drone research. The first step was to take the concepts for Tāwhaki and start turning them into reality.
As the saying goes, space is hard – and never more so than establishing national facilities for innovative new companies to design, build, test, and deploy the next generations of aerospace vehicles.
Our role was to assist the relatively new Board and management team to see the future clearly, understand the options and possibilities, and chart a path forward – one that embraced the potential of access to space, whilst remaining true to the cultural values of hapū and the kaitiakitanga of Kaitorete.
We assisted the management team and the Board with their analysis and thinking, preparing documents and papers that clearly set out options and pathways, and working alongside them to explore the way forward. In addition, we worked with the Tāwhaki team on preparing key commercial and sectoral documents for external parties, helping set the organisation on a sustainable pathway of growth.
Tāwhaki is fully operational with an all-weather runway for development flights, and is actively fostering the growth of companies such as Dawn Aerospace – currently testing a single-stage-to-orbit spaceplane at Kaitorete.
The facilities will expand in coming decades as access to space becomes more widely available, and Tāwhaki is uniquely positioned to ensure Aotearoa New Zealand is part of that future.
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