{"id":610127,"date":"2026-09-24T09:16:09","date_gmt":"2026-09-24T09:16:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/610127\/"},"modified":"2026-09-24T09:16:09","modified_gmt":"2026-09-24T09:16:09","slug":"new-zealand-agrees-to-put-almost-24-million-into-military-satellite-us-is-building-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/610127\/","title":{"rendered":"New Zealand agrees to put almost $24 million into military satellite US is building"},"content":{"rendered":"

The NZ Defence Force<\/a> said maintaining the network allowed it to receive the military communication capacity it needed.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn exchange for financial contributions, partners continue to receive a proportional allocation of bandwidth from the WGS constellation.\u201d<\/p>\n

The $23.7m spend is split over two years.<\/p>\n

Belgium, Canada, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland and the UK are putting money in.<\/p>\n

NZ earlier put $15m towards WGS-11. It had been due for launch this year but been pushed back to next. The 12th had been due to launch next year but has been pushed back.<\/p>\n

The US Space Force said its international partnerships were \u201cone of our greatest strategic advantages\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis agreement demonstrates that when we invest together in shared capabilities, we realise a level of global coverage and mission assurance that no single nation could achieve alone.\u201d<\/p>\n

In New Zealand, the Government and the military<\/a> are on track to spend more on space-related defence capabilities.<\/p>\n

The NZDF has long said that \u201cif our satellite communications become unavailable, NZDF\u2019s military capability will be severely diminished\u201d and that it had been working since at least 2014 to diversify communication channels.<\/p>\n

Another initiative is a national space mission to put up the country\u2019s first sovereign satellite, although how far advanced plans are for that is unclear.<\/p>\n

Internationally, New Zealand is in an elite US-led group, Operation Olympic Defender, that has been working on a joint plan for how to protect and defend space assets from threats that should be done by the end of the year, Space Force said earlier.<\/p>\n

Work was going on to determine how to \u201cchallenge the posture\u201d of would-be adversaries viewed as threatening the peaceful use of space.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The NZ Defence Force said maintaining the network allowed it to receive the military communication capacity it needed.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":610128,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[2782,12466,15408,674,296,185,647,1132,117,111,43,139,69,31341,21037,9214,4029,61,3040,80],"class_list":["post-610127","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-zealand","tag-2782","tag-agrees","tag-almost","tag-building","tag-into","tag-is","tag-military","tag-million","tag-new","tag-new-zealand","tag-news","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-pennington","tag-phil","tag-put","tag-satellite","tag-to","tag-us","tag-zealand"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/610127","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=610127"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/610127\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/610128"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=610127"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=610127"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=610127"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}