Griffin on Tech: MethaneSAT loss, transparency, and a win for Auckland
Space, as Sir Peter Beck of Elon Musk will readily admit, is an unforgiving frontier.
For every dazzling image beamed home from Mars rovers or navigation satellite keeping ships on course, there are missions that go astray, technology that fails, and millions, sometimes billions, of taxpayer dollars lost to the void.
But when the MethaneSAT mission, heralded as a flagship in climate science and New Zealand’s bold foray into funding advanced space technology, was declared lost a couple of weeks back, the ensuing silence from Minister for Space, Judith Collins, has resonated louder than the roar of the rocket that launched it into orbit.
“Collins has repeatedly refused to comment and referred all questions, including questions about whether the government would hold a review, to the Ministry for Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE), which houses the country's Space Agency,” RNZ reported this week.
MethaneSAT, which New Zealand committed to under the Labour Government prior to Collins taking up the portfolio following the election, was no ordinary satellite. Built in partnership with the Environmental Defense Fund and supported by $32 million in government funding, the satellite was designed to track and quantify global methane emissions with unprecedented precision. It would serve as an eye in the sky, naming and shaming large emitters of methane.
New Zealand saw great potential for its use to better understand emissions from agriculture too, though when I interviewed scientists involved in the mission at the time, they told me that we have a very good handle on our methane emissions via ground-based monitoring.
Nevertheless, from the outside, it looked like a worthy project. But once in orbit, the mission ran into problems, which delayed its planned handover to the University of Auckland which was lined up to manage it via its mission control. The satellite went incommunicado on June 20.
Questions have been raised in the wake of MethaneSAT’s loss about just how high-quality a project this was. As University of Auckland physicist Professor Richard Easther told The Guardian last week, it had become “clear they haven’t been able to keep to schedule and deliver a functional spacecraft”.
“To what extent are we happy with the explanation that much information was veiled owing to confidentiality or commercial sensitivity?” Auckland University associate physics professor Nicholas Rattenbury asked in the Sunday Star Times last weekend.
“We as investors in the project are entitled to an explanation.”
He’s right. Did we do adequate due diligence on MethaneSAT? What does it mean for lending backing to future space missions? It warrants, as Richard Easther put it, a “no blame” review to establish what we can learn from the failure.
If sound due diligence was done, then lessons should be shared widely and immediately. If not, the questions multiply: Are procurement and oversight processes robust enough for such high-stakes, high-cost ventures? Who is ultimately accountable? With government-backed projects becoming a trend, whether in satellites, AI, or digital infrastructure, this kind of transparency is not just a virtue but a necessity.
$221 million for advanced tech institute
The same goes for the New Zealand Institute for Advanced Technology (NZIAT), which Prime Minister Christopher Luxon announced this morning will have its headquarters in Auckland. That’s a sensible decision given Auckland’s strengths in areas the institute will focus on, including artificial intelligence, quantum computing, and synthetic biology.
The city hosts incubators spun out from world-renowned faculties, thriving start-ups, and a significant base of international tech giants. Critics will argue that the rest of the country deserves a stake, and they are absolutely right. The institute will apparently have smaller centres around the country. I suspect they’ll probably be virtual in nature hosted by universities, rather like the current Centres of Research Excellence model.
The institute will be funded to the tune of $221 million over four years, which sounds like a lot but is actually very tight in the scheme of things, given the ambitious remit the institute has to help drive economic development.
It looks like some of that funding, which comes from reallocations from other parts of the science system announced in the Budget, has already been committed to the Robinson Research Institute, which specialises in high-temperature superconductors, magnets and materials technologies.
Again, a worthy area of research to back, but a significant funding announcement that again seemed to come from out of nowhere. How are we making these decisions? It’s not quite clear. At least the NZIAT will be “supported by strategic advice from the Prime Minister’s Advisory Council” according to science and tech minister Dr Shane Reti.
Backed by the right policies, transparency, and a commitment to excellence, New Zealand can punch above its weight in global technology. But we need more transparency into science and tech decision-making. We should insist on openness, whether a mission soars or falls back to Earth.
