• “Good, fast and cheap” MethaneSAT tried for all three and got none.
• MBIE and the New Zealand Space Agency missed red flags in the initial bid.
• The MethaneSAT project did not keep promises of open and honest communication.
• Government officials supported claims that MethaneSAT was a success.
• We got a “participation trophy” instead of a space strategy.
• Good news – not all is lost.

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What Happened?

At $30 million dollars, MethaneSAT was easily New Zealand’s largest ever investment in “space”. It is also by far our biggest disappointment.

Developed by US-based non-profit the Environment Defence Fund [EDF], MethaneSAT aimed to detect methane leaking from oil and gas facilities worldwide. New Zealand’s participation in the MethaneSAT mission was framed as a “flagship” for our fledgling national space programme.

First mooted in mid-2018, our involvement was formally announced in late 2019. New Zealand agreed to take a supporting role in the MethaneSAT project, putting in $30M to cover “mission operations” as well as an add-on effort to track agricultural methane emissions from space.

The spacecraft launched from the US Pacific coast at 2:05pm local time, on the 4th of March 2024. Roughly an hour later MethaneSAT, one of 50 separate payloads on board, was ejected into space. Its orbit covered the Earth from pole to pole, its daily track wrapping the planet like a ball of twine.

Over a year later, on the 20th of June 2025, New Zealand’s early afternoon found our little flagship sailing north in its orbit above nighttime Africa and Europe. At 1:44pm our time, MethaneSAT made a scheduled connection to a ground station on Svalbard Island, in the high Arctic. Minutes afterwards it reached the northernmost point in its trajectory, nearly 600 km above ice bathed in the midnight sun of the polar summer.

The next scheduled contact was an hour later with Troll Station on the Antarctic Coast, at the other end of the world. However, that appointment, along with all future check-ins, passed in silence. MethaneSAT still orbits the Earth, but as just another piece of space junk – more Marie Celeste than flagship.

There was no warning of the shutdown, which suggests that MethaneSAT suffered a sudden and catastrophic failure. A postmortem is a standard practice after the loss of a spacecraft, and we were told that:

The engineering team is conducting a thorough investigation into the loss of communication. This is expected to take time. We will share what we learn.

MethaneSAT statement

Months later nothing has appeared on the project’s news page. The word is that an investigation was completed, but reached no definitive conclusion. However, whatever was learnt has not been shared, a situation that comes as no surprise to those of us who watched this saga play out.

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The Iron Triangle: Good, Fast and Cheap

The detailed answers to “what happened?” are mainly of interest to insiders and nerds. For New Zealanders, the bigger question is “how did it happen?”

It is an axiom of project management that you can choose only two of “good”, “fast” and “cheap”. Unfortunately, it looks as if the EDF might have compromised on quality in order to keep to some semblance of its original schedule. If true, they would have been chasing all three corners of the iron triangle and wound up with none.

Space missions typically schedule a post-launch shakedown phase, during which controllers check out the spacecraft and learn to work with whatever quirks it might have. The EDF claimed to have no “concrete” timeline, but pre-launch presentations put this commissioning period at three months, which would be typical for this sort of mission. However, MethaneSAT was in orbit for well over a year without ever graduating to operational status and, as time passed, it became clear it was a lemon, with multiple glitches and faults.

A key challenge was that MethaneSAT repeatedly went into “safe mode”, at times on a daily basis. Recovering from each event required a time-consuming reboot with input from operators on the ground. Their cause was never fully revealed (and there may be more than one) but several statements implicated space weather:

… the onboard fault detection software places the spacecraft into safe mode for the ground operators to assess and reset the required electronics. These … events continued throughout the life of MethaneSAT as the high solar activity continued. MethaneSAT was not designed with the costly radiation-hardened components found, for example, on military spacecraft.

MethaneSAT spokesperson

This is not so much an excuse but a confession, to the extent that colleagues of mine literally laughed out loud when they saw it. Yes, solar activity (which produces charged particles that are mostly blocked by the atmosphere but cause problems for spacecraft) was at the peak of its 11 year cycle in 2024. But it is a well-known feature of the space environment. It makes no sense that any satellite, military or otherwise, would not be built to withstand the expected conditions.

And, for the most part, they are – the number of failed spacecraft in the last year is no larger than normal. But for whatever reason, MethaneSAT could not cope with the harsh but easily foreseeable environment it encountered in space.

Separately, persistent rumours cite problems with the thrusters, made by Austrian company Enpulsion. (A media release trumpeting the MethaneSAT contract was scrubbed from their website at some point but lives on via the Wayback machine.) Their products have contributed to other failures, and it seems MethaneSAT used a new model with little “flight heritage”.

This choice clearly added risk. There are many suppliers of thrusters but an educated guess is that Enpulsion’s competitors may have charged a stiff premium for quick delivery and so the EDF opted for “cheap” and “fast”. The shutdowns are also likely to have involved the main body of the spacecraft, known as the “bus”. Built by Blue Canyon, it was also said to be relatively untested.

Finally, Rocket Lab was contracted to manage the spacecraft through to the commissioning phase. During this time their people often seemed frustrated, but omertà largely held. The one exception was an eye-popping LinkedIn post by an insider who had moved jobs – he slated MethaneSAT for “failure to select the right spacecraft manufacturer, and a failure to focus on the right level of technical rigor pre launch and during AI&T [Assembly, Integration and Test]”.

Those allegations paint an unacceptable picture and go to the heart of the EDF operation. For what it’s worth they also jibe with rumours that the MethaneSAT team was under the pump to deliver the satellite for a March 2024 liftoff. Its launch vehicle was shared with multiple payloads so would not have been held for MethaneSAT and the next available ride was likely to be many months away.

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Red Flags

The picture painted by these events is the antithesis of “NASA quality”. However, this was the standard that MBIE officials promised their then-Minister in a December 2018 briefing on MethaneSAT that was obtained under the Official Information Act:

That phrase “currently on the market” in 2018 is hard to square with key components that apparently had minimal flight heritage in 2024.

MBIE repeated the NASA-quality assurance in the 2019 “Budget bid” (also OIAed) for the project’s funding:

The EDF did hire excellent people. But that is not enough. Space is unforgiving and, beyond good people, complex projects need organisations in which shortcuts are unacceptable. A working hypothesis is that the EDF lacked the experience to appreciate the consequences of decisions it made. Worse, by stressing their individual expertise, the EDF risks using its industry veterans as human shields to protect it from questions about its own competence.

Cabinet votes are political decisions and the current government is not responsible for the actions of its predecessor. However, events have revealed that MBIE’s advice on MethaneSAT was weak, and that should be an ongoing concern.

Mixing inexperience and ambition in space is a huge red flag and we blew past it. 

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Open and Honest?

On top of “NASA quality” risk management, the EDF (and the subsidiary it set up to operate MethaneSAT) committed to “open and honest communication” in a Memorandum of Understanding with the Government.

Despite this, the New Zealand space community was exasperated by the ongoing lack of transparency as MethaneSAT suffered repeated delays. The original 2022 launch date came and went without comment until a journalist asked questions. The EDF blamed “Covid-19 and supply chain issues” but nonetheless rockets continued to launch through those years, just none of them with MethaneSAT on board.

There was no shortage of bad news, but transparency was an ongoing challenge for the EDF. To give just one example, after MethaneSAT’s failure there were repeated claims by project participants that it had returned a “year’s worth” of data. See this Harvard Gazette piece, this Tweet and this New York Times article, for example.

Exactly how much is a “year’s worth”? In its sales pitch, MethaneSAT aimed to image up to 20 “scenes” each day – so, many thousands of snapshots a year. However, the project website speaks of “hundreds” of unprocessed observations, which looks more like maybe one month’s worth of data gathered over the course of a year. 

As one colleague put it, “You can’t polish a turd, but you can roll it in glitter.” Less colourfully, carefully constructed talking points are the polar opposite of “open and honest”.

However, the most serious issue was an October 2024 email to Radio New Zealand’s Eloise Gibson, asserting:

We have been collecting images since May and have been in nominal operations since June when commissioning completed and we turned it over to New Zealand to operate

Within the space community, “nominal” is shorthand for everything operating as expected. The terminology comes straight from the crew-cut and pocket protector era of the 1960s and offers no scope for dissembling or ambiguity. Its misuse by a professional – claiming that something was working well when it very much wasn’t – would be close to blasphemy. But it seems that MethaneSAT was “off-nominal” for almost all of its life.

In particular, in February 2025 control was transferred to Blue Canyon to “address challenges which are affecting its operation”. MethaneSAT was clearly not “nominal” then and it seems the problems were present from launch. Ironically, the team eventually did find workarounds for the issues in the weeks before the satellite’s demise. However, claims that the spacecraft was “nominal” in October are hard to square with the facts.

During this period our Space Agency was repeatedly asked whether the EDF was being straight with the New Zealand public. They replied with variations on “communications are the responsibility of the EDF”. We took that as a “No”.

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Declaring Success

Shortly after the loss of contact with MethaneSAT, the Space Agency’s deputy head Andrew Johnson declared success on Morning Report, saying that MethaneSAT had delivered its goals, namely

Contributing to the overall mission to detect oil and gas [emissions] … contributing a science program to see if the satellite sensor could be applied to agriculture, and then standing up our own mission operation control centre.

Yes, MethaneSAT helped understand methane leaks from oil and gas facilities but it gathered only a few percent of the data it would have managed if it had completed its five year mission. Giving that a passing grade is exceptionally generous.

Yes, measurements of agricultural methane have value. However, that programme was created to strengthen New Zealand’s connection to MethaneSAT so it is undercut by its loss. Moreover, the team doing this work has pivoted to the European TROPOMI instrument, which also senses methane from space. TROPOMI and MethaneSAT have different strengths and are not interchangeable but the inference is that similar work could have been done without MethaneSAT.

Yes, the University of Auckland established a “Mission Operations Control Centre” (MOCC) that would have managed MethaneSAT’s routine operations. However, the centre was scoped to support a complex, five year mission. Nothing approaching this scale will now happen here for years and smaller missions can often be run off a laptop. Likewise Rocket Lab was already managing missions more complex than MethaneSAT by the time that it launched. As a consequence, the value of this facility in 2025 is not what was hoped for in 2019.

The fact is that our engagement with MethaneSAT only gets a pass because the organisation responsible for the investment is getting to assess its performance.

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The Participation Trophy

The glamour of space makes it easy to forget that the space age began almost 70 years ago. Once upon a time any space-based activity was remarkable but those days are long gone. As a result, many apparently exciting space missions can only ever be participation trophies, rather than genuine opportunities to move the dial.

Separating the wheat from the chaff is a skill and one imagines that the conversation with MethaneSAT would have gone differently if it had not been driven by policymakers and civil servants with little involvement from independent technical experts. Moreover, while the EDF may have done a poor job of building the spacecraft they certainly knew how to sell it. MethaneSAT was unveiled to the world in a stemwinder of a TeD talk, Jeff Bezos was the primary funder, the Harvard affiliation of key players added lustre, and the EDF apparently treated our team to memorable hospitality in Manhattan. So it is easy to see how they came to swallow the spiel.

And, in fairness, missed turns are always easier to spot in the rear view mirror. I gave an entirely positive interview when our involvement with MethaneSAT was announced. I can tell myself that resistance would have been futile because it was approved by Cabinet before I ever heard about it, but I still regret not taking my doubts more seriously.

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Good News

The one piece of good news is this: New Zealand can still extract a return from our investment in MethaneSAT.

The first thing to do is to admit that MethaneSAT was a disappointment. Beyond its nominal goals, our involvement with MethaneSAT aimed to kickstart the growth of the space sector. A kickstart that arrives years late can never been counted as a success, so this should not be controversial.

The next task is to investigate this saga, starting from the first discussions through to the ways the news was shared with the public. The point is not to hold individual people responsible but to understand how we can do better next time.

The Government is still thinking about space projects – just this week Judith Collins talked about a mission to spot “illegal fishing” and coordinate “disaster response”. Just like MethaneSAT this proposal sounds great, but it has all the ingredients needed for the same sort of shambles, and it would be put together by the same agency.

The lesson from MethaneSAT should be that any future “national missions” cannot be designed by administrators and politicians without meaningful input from the science community. We have complimentary skills and we should work together to realise our ambitions.

If we learn that from MethaneSAT it will have been well worth the $30 million.

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HEADER IMAGE: Not the beacons of Minas Tirith, but Troll Station, Antarctica.

NOTE: This blog is part of a series on the status of New Zealand’s space sector. See earlier pieces on our world-leading status as a launch provider and our biggest successes. Next up will be a bingo card for all the different ways in which you can make bad decisions about space projects.