Reti ShaneDr SHANE RETI (National—Whangarei): It is a pleasure to take a final call on the Outer Space and High-altitude Activities Bill. With this bill New Zealand becomes the 11th country into space and joins an illustrious pedigree that includes the Soviet Union the USA France Japan China the UK the European Space Agency India Israel Iran and North Korea. Indeed some of our larger trading partners were once launch capable—the United Kingdom springs to mind. It is no longer launch capable amalgamated into part of the European Space Agency.The business case for Rocket Lab is in the upstream pathway. This is the pathway that focuses on sending objects into space. The downstream actors are the companies that utilise and provide space-related services to consumers. When we look at the value chain of what is a $300 billion space economy we see that the upstream actors are responsible for 5 percent of that economy satellite operators 10 percent of the space economy and the companies that actually utilise space communications are 85 percent of the space economy.The economic benefits of a rocket launch industry in New Zealand include the direct commercial benefits and also the indirect benefits. Some of those indirect benefits may certainly be less clear and less quantifiable but I would like to briefly highlight some of them. Certainly as a direct benefit there is the additional employment by Rocket Lab to scale up to launch capacity. There is additional activity and employment in supplying industries those that provide components and logistics. There is space tourism—international visitors or New Zealanders watching rocket launches and members of the satellite industry or their clients attending a launch. There are construction and launch activities cluster effects—the development of related clusters for example in the area of satellite manufacture and 3-D printing. There are aspiration effects; achievements in aerospace have been shown to have a significant impact in motivating prospective students and researchers in the field. There are knowledge and technology spillovers—some of my colleagues have talked about that—the benefits from technology information and knowledge that is generated by Rocket Lab being applied in other companies or sectors. There are prestige effects—enhancements to our national prestige from having a space industry. And there are human capital effects—the benefit to New Zealand from an increasing proportion of highly skilled personnel.One of the competitive advantages that Rocket Lab utilises is cost. At a projected cost of roughly US$5 million per launch this is extremely competitive. It is at least less than 50 percent of the current international offerings which include $60 million for the Falcon 9 launch through SpaceX and $200 million through the European Space Agency the Ariane 5 rocket. Our geographical location gives us some advantage. New Zealand provides the opportunity to launch into a wide range of azimuths for satellites especially those that need to go into polar or equatorial orbits. Equatorial launches are desirable. The French Guiana site is a very desirable site for launching a rocket. Of course around the equator you have the largest circumference of the Earth so you have that large circumference traversed in a 24-hour period. That means you get what is called launch inertia—a benefit of roughly 1670 kilometres per hour just by launching at the equator which of course reduces your fuel costs. We do not have that benefit but one of the trade-offs here is air traffic. One of the benefits we do have is that because we have less air traffic we are able to launch more rockets.If we look at year-on-year economic return it is predicted at $30 million to $80 million per year. This is on a base case of one launch per week an 8 percent discount rate for the direct benefits and a 50 percent discount rate for the indirect benefits. This is cost-efficient Kiwi ingenuity making a mark on the international stage and staking out a diversified future economy for New Zealand. I am very proud to recommend this bill to the House.