She called the Canterbury proposal “modest” and saw how it could work on a visit to the Cape Canaveral launch site in Florida that has sent astronauts to the moon.
“I remember just seeing all of these spoonbills and birds, and they’ve got manatees and it was incredible.
“It was just a thriving ecosystem and you’ve got the inspiration of the space industry happening there as well, and I’m going, ‘Gee, that would be pretty neat, if Canterbury could have something like that’.”
Tāwhaki, a Crown-iwi joint venture, has a double-pronged mission to boost aerospace business, and to help environmentally restore the spit and Lake Ellesmere Te Waihora next to it.
It markets itself to Europe as a unique location to give launch companies there more choice.
Rocket Lab’s Māhia is currently the only southern hemisphere launch site. Plans for new spaceports are underway in several countries, but mostly in the north.
Bannister noted how Kaitorete could launch over clear oceans, as well as take advantage of the spin of the earth, being on the east coast.
“You’re well clear of large areas of dense population, that’s a real advantage.
“This is why launch sites tend to be located on the east of places as much as possible. In Ōtautahi, we have that possibility.”
Rocket fuels can be polluting, but the fuels being considered by Tāwhaki in a feasibility study with its French partners are at the less polluting end of the spectrum – gas, not chlorine-containing solid rocket fuels.
“The types of fuels that our modelling looked at have a very severe impact on stratospheric ozone.”
Tāwhaki acting chief executive John Holt told RNZ’s Morning Report on Thursday there was a rapidly growing, trillion-dollar launch market to tap.
Bannister said the plan was about claiming a small piece of that.
“In terms of scaling up in the future, that’s something that I think we’ve seen in the past that the New Zealand Space Agency and now the policy framework is very responsive to thinking about impacts.”