As this project for Hina emerges from the lands of Taipōrutu, we are holding this page as a space to gather knowledge, insights, and reflections that can support the Māhia community if they are called to respond further to government proposals to increase rocket launch limits at Māhia Peninsula to ten times the current amount.

The NZ Ministry for the Environment is consulting on a plan to raise Rocket Lab’s annual launch cap from 100 to 1,000 launches. This could mean as many as twenty launches each week.

See the NZ Gov info on “Reviewing regulations for space vehicle jettison debris in the Exclusive Economic Zone”

For local communities, this raises serious concerns around noise, marine impacts, governance, and Te Tiriti o Waitangi obligations. The current framing of the consultation leaves little room for cautious, evidence-based discussion and gave limited time for public input, and yet these decisions carry implications for the health of the environment, the sea, and the communities who live and work around the launch site.

Taipōrutu / Hina Wānanga has made a submission responding to these proposals. Taipōrutu is the ancestral land of Desna Whaanga-Schollum, and her community in Māhia may be called upon to speak directly. In many public consultations, community members are invited to attend hearings or present statements, so it is vital that we help strengthen the expert information available to the community should that occur.

Our aim here is to support local representation, uphold care for place, and contribute to informed advocacy for the lands and waters of Māhia and beyond. While we cannot guarantee that we will be asked to give formal evidence, we do encourage you if you have expertise in space policy, environmental law, marine science, governance, or mātauranga Māori, to add to the nput. We are collecting notes, context, case examples, and expert commentary to grow collective understanding and strengthen the community’s case.

Please drop us a line using our input form if you are able to contribute evidence or relevant insight that may strengthen the community’s case, or make contact with a team member directly.

This year’s International Astronautical Congress (IAC) saw a flourishing of initiatives concerned with the Moon’s protection and governance. The conversations unfolded with respect for the sudden passing of Dr Claudio Maccone, who relentlessly pushed for United Nations agreements for the protection of the lunar far side for scientific use. His absence lent gravity to debates on stewardship, a stark reminder that while lunar advocacy depends on sustained cooperation among many, it also owes much to particular humans whose life’s work keep advocacy alive in the face of systemic neglect and disinterest.

          Many of the delegates in Sydney remarked that this IAC felt different. Hosted on Gadigal Country, the meeting opened with ceremony and welcome from the traditional custodians and Torres Strait Islander representatives, and signalled a broader shift in the atmospheres of global space discourse. In celebrating the Southern Hemisphere’s growing role in space research, the meeting certainly held a more nuanced attention to how locality, culture, and place shape the ethical contours of planetary and lunar futures than previous years.

          Indigenous research was more visible than ever before as a body of scholarship contributing to how the field might conduct research and conceive of desirable futures, insisting on attention to relationships, reciprocity, and accountability, both on and beyond Earth, too often neglected by the space industry.

          Indigenous scholars and artists presented vital perspectives on cosmological ethics. In the SETI 2 session, for example, which highlighted societal approaches to the discovery of life beyond Earth, Alvin Harvey’s contribution from MIT’s Space Enabled group proposed reframing the search for life in the Universe and extraterrestrial intelligence through Diné principles of kinship and responsibility, a conceptual move that reorients SETI away from a concept of “intelligence” in the Universe and towards relationality.

          A vital alternative event ran alongside the Congress, responding to the IAC’s censorship of the Palestine Space Institute’s paper that was initially accepted and then later rejected. This event addressed the militarisation of space and its role in enabling genocide worldwide and brought together speakers like Nelly Ben Hayoun and Juan Francisco Salazar.

           Interestingly, and unusually, many of the discussions platformed joined forces in critiquing exclusionary practices and conveying that the future of space research will depend on cooperative transformations and plural epistemologies. Whilst the meeting unfolded within an environment dominated by epistemic imbalance and institutional silencing,  extractive habits of industry and engagement in the service of the major industry and government interests, it was special to participate in a more life-giving dialogue around care, reciprocity, and relational knowledge growing in the gaps that demands that the field reckons with its own conditions of authority and possibility. Sydney’s IAC gestured toward forms of space governance grounded in responsibility and care, while acknowledging, with some humility, the many who will stand together for the work of decolonising space.

Perspectives on the Rights of the Moon from Oceania was presented as an interactive presentation exploring lunar ethics and governance through Pacific worldviews, epistemologies, and eco-poetics. This introductory work brought together Indigenous, artistic, and scientific approaches to share an understanding of the Moon as kin, and consider how ways of knowing the Moon’s relational presence, woven with tides, time, and ancestral relations, may guide future lunar governance.

          The presentation featured Desna Whaanga-Schollum’s animation work “Sentient Place”.  The graceful and meditative movement of this video work slowed down the rhythm of the conference’s busy interactive area in Milan, and managed to open a space for reflection and connection.

          As new laws for the Moon are being envisioned and proposed, the work emphasised the expertise and leadership of Pacific and Indigenous leadership for shaping the moral and legal foundations of lunar activity.  It was a good opportunity to join in the global dialogue on celestial rights and protection, and to receive contribution from lunar scientists, NASA researchers, and lawyers working across Africa and beyond, interested in learning more about approaching lunar stewardship through kaitiakitanga and relational ethics.

          The presentation itself became a meeting point for a growing trans-oceanic network, with a cluster of space lawyers around the presentation spot, eager to further contribute to defining lunar governance in a spirit of reciprocity and care that protects life across worlds.