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Download AudioA Māori businessman is keen to build an innovation centre in Gisborne to encourage Māori into the space industry.
Stu Potter, of Ngati Awa, says the global aerospace industry is forecast to be worth a trillion dollars a year by 2040, so now is the time for Maori to get involved.
Gisborne is close to Rocketlab’s Mahia launch site, it has an overwhelmingly youthful Maori population … and all it needs is a critical mass of skilled, educated, future-focused workers.
“Can we create that critical mass here in Tairawhiti? And I’m pretty sure we can. The second part to that would be ‘what sort of capability-building do we need to do for those types of vocations?’ So looking at the education that comes through from the universities, including that Te Pukenga space in terms of trade-related training,” Mr Potter says.
He says his company StardustMe – which he set up as a test case – is attracting international attention for its model of taking a gram of a person’s ashes and putting them into orbit for a decade via Space-X.
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