To the untrained eye, the 14-second journey of Gilmour Space Technologies’ 23-metre, 30-tonne, Australian-made orbital rocket on 30 July 2025 may not have looked like a major step for the region’s fledgling space sector. But for those in the know, it was cause for celebration.

“That was our first test launch and it got us 14 seconds of flight time,” says Ashley Hasforth CA, CFO of Gilmour Space. “That was a great success to us.

“There are more than 400 sensors on the rocket. So, for every second of flight we were getting so much data back from all the different subsystems within the rocket. We were able to demonstrate performance across more than 60% of the systems in the rocket. So, it was a very good milestone.”

In fact, it is very rare for a private launch company to reach orbit on their first-ever flight, Hasforth says. So, the Gilmour Space team had good reason to be pleased.

In New Zealand, just two hours before her Zoom meeting with Acuity for this story, Saloni Chanday CA, financial accountant at Rocket Lab, was watching her own company make another successful launch.

“Our launch site on the Mahia Peninsula is quite remote, so usually in Auckland everybody gets together for every launch and it’s a wonderful experience,” she says.

The concept of sending a rocket into space has always captured the imagination of people, but in Australia and New Zealand that concept has always been a foreign one. We simply didn’t have a home-grown rocket manufacturing or launch capability. However, with the work of businesses like Rocket Lab and, more recently, Gilmour Space, and the financial, strategic and operational expertise of CAs like Hasforth and Chanday, the local space sector has launched and is now shooting for the stars.

How CAs are entering the space race

As Australia and New Zealand deepen engagement with the fast-growing global space economy, the sector is attracting not just aerospace engineers but also finance professionals. Unsurprisingly, those professionals are stepping into roles that go well beyond number crunching.

“Before applying for the role at Rocket Lab, I didn’t even know any rockets were made in New Zealand,” Chanday says. “This industry really excites me because I like to push my own boundaries and I love challenges, but I wasn’t originally deeply knowledgeable about it.”

Chanday applied for an advertised accounting role, when another job left her feeling unchallenged. She conducted research before applying and discovered a “very fast-paced industry with a lot of variables in every aspect of business”.

“Whenever a rocket is being launched, on that day and in that moment there are so many variables and each can change the whole scenario,” she says. “Plus, each launch is groundbreaking. It’s news. So, I wanted to know more about this industry and how my skills can help.”

Rocket Lab has been executing space launches since 2017, meaning New Zealand is relatively advanced in launch capability compared with Australia.

Hasforth was similarly attracted to a sector he originally knew little about. He had qualified and worked with PwC in Melbourne, then worked at Barclays Capital, Credit Suisse and Caterpillar in Singapore, before becoming deeply involved in the Australian startup world. He guided several businesses from concept to stock exchange listing and/or merger or acquisition.

It was this experience in capital raising and building out finance functions that brought him onto the radar of Gilmour Space. When he was approached, it was an offer impossible to refuse because of both the nature of the business and its location. Hasforth, based at the time in Melbourne, had a young family. Gilmour Space had a head office on the Gold Coast.

“They were looking for someone that had experience in scaling an organisation, which I’d done in the past and I had a lot of experience raising capital. The company is on a trajectory for an IPO in a few years, so they were looking for someone that could help take it down that path,” he says. “They wanted someone who was confident with the numbers and who the board could trust, so they knew the finance side of the organisation was in good hands.

“Nothing in my past directly related to space, apart from loving Star Wars as I was growing up! So, it has been a very steep learning curve.”

What space businesses do

Gilmour Space Technologies is Australia’s leading launch services business. The company builds rockets and satellites to serve commercial, government and defence customers, with its head office and a manufacturing facility on the Gold Coast and private launch facility, Bowen Orbital Spaceport, in North Queensland.

“It’s similar to a lot of startup companies that are in pre-revenue or early-day revenue,” Hasforth says. “Good financial management is crucial, especially in an industry where nothing is cheap. Capex budgets are huge, particularly if you’re in the hardware side of things like we are.

“The other thing you’ve got to get used to in the space sector is working with engineers, who like things to be perfect. Perfection costs time and money, which is probably contradictory to what a finance person wants. So, you need to be empathetic and to have good leadership skills, and the ability to form good relationships with personalities that are potentially quite different to yourself.”

A NASDAQ-listed company valued at US$38.6 billion with operations in New Zealand and the US, Rocket Lab is the world’s most frequent launcher of small orbital rockets. It developed the world’s first private orbital launch site with Launch Complex 1 on New Zealand’s Mahia Peninsula. The company also designs and manufactures spacecraft, satellite components, flight software and more.

Launch Complex 1 supports regular launches of the company’s Electron rocket to deploy small satellites into orbit. Across both its launch sites in New Zealand and the US in 2025, the company launched 21 rockets with 100% success. Eighteen of those launches took place from Launch Complex 1, ranking New Zealand third in the global list of orbital launches in 2025 – more than Russia, France, Germany, India, Iran, Israel, Italy, Japan or South Korea.

“One thing I find unique is the complexity,” Chanday says. “There is an enormous amount of financial analysis and this is a completely different style of financial analysis. There are so many variables in this industry, and the research and development lead time is very long. It’s so important for the finance team to be hands-on and very confident in what they are doing.”

Risk and education

Both CAs highlight the critical nature of risk management in space-based finance roles. When one small error in a launch plan or costing model can affect people and projects across the entire organisation – and when regulatory issues, geopolitical shifts and weather changes can damage even the best-laid plans – the assessment and communication of that risk becomes a priority.

Those in finance roles are also required to play a lead role in educating investors in the many unique characteristics of space business. Projects often require large capital infusions, for example, long before revenues materialise.

Hasforth sees education as one of the most important outcomes of his conversations with investors. “We have had a lot of success with investors that we have been speaking to for a period of time, brought them along for the journey and educated them,” he says. “But if you’re going out to speak with a small asset manager or VC, or anybody who doesn’t yet know much about space or about how you make money out of space, it’s a very hard discussion from an investment point of view. It becomes all about education.”

Having just closed a A$217 million capital raise that brought on board many tier one investors in Australia, including blue-chip superannuation funds, the National Reconstruction Fund and Future Fund – and building on an already strong cap table that includes Blackbird, Main Sequence and QIC – the team at Gilmour Space can now focus on execution.

Space: a dream CA career

A finance career in the space sector, Hasforth says, is anything but average. It constantly tosses up fascinating challenges and vexing problems, and that’s part of the reason he’s so passionate about it.

“Everyone here loves what they do – they love space,” he says. “I’ve been in chartered firms, in big banks, in software startups, and people that work in space are very, very different people. They love it. It’s a passion, a hobby.

“Plus, at the end of the day, the company is making Australian history. I don’t think many people can go to work each day and say they are literally making history. It certainly gets me out of bed, that’s for sure.”

Chanday is similarly passionate. “I joined Rocket Lab a year ago and in that time, I have seen tremendous change in myself,” she says. “You have to be able to adapt to constant changes, and you have to keep pushing yourself and studying various aspects of the industry.

“Because of that, there’s a real sense of accomplishment when a mission is successful. When the rocket lifts, it’s like you are being lifted up as well.”