NO MORE NO. 8 WIRE
The Kiwi inventions changing the world
Move over Kiwi ingenuity based on the old No. 8 wire mentality. Now’s the time to celebrate cutting- edge Kiwi technology enhancing the lives of people around the world. Some of the best developments have been celebrated in the new book by Auckland University nanotechnologist and Weekend Herald Nanogirl columnist Michelle Dickinson ( pictured), and David Downs, No. 8 Recharged — 202 World- changing innovations from New Zealand.
The book profiles a range of worldbeating innovations — from drones to electric farm bikes, medical breakthroughs, online gaming and much more. In this edited extract we profile some of the Kiwi innovations. First up, Rocket Lab, the Auckland- based space company that could bump up to $ 1.55 billion into our economy over the next 20 years. “Made it to space, team delighted. More to follow!” — so read the tweet on 25 May 2017 that announced New Zealand had entered the community of countries who had successfully sent a rocket into space.
Rocket Lab is based in Auckland. CEO Peter Beck is an engineer with no university degree who has learned rocket science by doing it. At 18, Beck left his home town of Invercargill to work for Fisher & Paykel in Dunedin. He set up Rocket Lab in 2006 with funding from rocket- mad angel investor Mark Rocket ( not the name he was born with). Now, barely 40, Beck already has a long history of innovation, multiple awards and a good reputation in the aerospace world.
Since the first test launches in 2009, Rocket Lab has begun to make world- first technologies. In late 2012 it demonstrated a rocket to representatives of its US military clients. The rocket runs on a viscous liquid monopropellant ( VLM) fuel, which is thixotropic — neither a solid nor a liquid.
It has all the best properties of both sorts of fuel, and will be a major advance in rocket science.
Rocket Lab has continued to innovate with its rockets. The latest, the Electron, is the cheapest rocket per launch. As Beck says, “Space, like business, is all about time and money. The space shuttle cost $ 1b per launch. It still costs $ 130 million per [ traditional] rocket and needs a two- year wait.” Until now.
The Electron costs just $ 4.9m on average per launch, and is largely reusable. It’s serious business, too — a recent report found Rocket Lab’s establishment of a rocket- launch industry in New Zealand would contribute between $ 600m and $ 1.55b to the economy over the next 20 years.
Perhaps just as impressive as the rockets, however, are the business and logistics behind it. Creating a rocket that can go into space was only part of the challenge Rocket Lab faced — another part was the need to convince the New Zealand Government to set up what i s basically a space agency under the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment ( MBIE — nearly as catchy as Nasa). New Zealand had to accede to a number of international treaties on space, joining a pretty exclusive club.
Yes, in what might have seemed worthy material for Flight of the Conchords just a few years ago, New Zealand now has its own space agency.
Rocket Lab then needed a permanent launch site — and again, New Zealand proved to be the ideal place. The established site is on the Mahia Peninsula, on the East Coast — somewhat poetically the location is also known as “Te Matau a Maui“, the fish- hook of Maui.
In the legend, it was this hook that the demi- god Maui Potiki used to fish up the North Island of New Zealand. Mahia gives clear skies and a large ( empty) sea to launch above -
although it did need extra roads and other infrastructure, as well as a launch pad. It’s the world’s first commercial orbital rocket launch site. In Mahia.
Beck says that although New Zealanders are often bemused about a Kiwi space programme, it isn’t hard to interest overseas companies in his developments. “If you’ve got a technology that’s superior, people will listen.”
After their successful pilot launch, two additional test flights are scheduled for 2017. During these flights, Rocket Lab’s engineers will look to optimize Electron’s performance for delivering commercial satellite customers to space.
The Electron launch vehicle will allow constellations of small satellites to provide services like affordable internet from space, more accurate weather data and live- Earth observation for activities such as environmental monitoring, naturaldisaster prediction, up- to- date maritime data and search- and- rescue services.
Among Rocket Lab’s clients are Nasa, Planet Spire and Moon Express. Beck says Americans often introduce Rocket Lab’s electron rocket on the launch pad ( main); Sir Ray Avery and his lifepod incubator; Volpara’s breast screening technology. him by saying, “This is Rocket Lab, the New Zealand space industry!” Then they laugh because they think one company is our whole industry. We laugh, too, because it might be at the moment, but the sky is a big place and the only way is up. Sir Ray Avery — Kiwi inventor, scientist and social entrepreneur — is on a mission to save lives. On a visit to Nepal, he was dismayed to learn that, every year, millions of babies die, particularly in developing countries, in their first few weeks of life.
Premature babies in Nepal were struggling to survive, placed into plastic boxes with only a blanket for warmth. These babies don’t have access to incubators to help them survive when they are so vulnerable. Avery decided to do something about that, and set about finding a way to improve the incubator and make it more cheaply available.
Incubators allow premature babies, or those needing extra support, to have a safe, warm, sterile environment to protect them. In developing countries, these devices are often expensive, and prone to failure. They get old and dirty and often don’t work effectively, breaking down and rendering them unusable.
Avery’s improved incubator i s called the Lifepod — it’s a futuristic egg- shaped device, which can be manufactured at a fraction of the cost of a traditional device. In creating it, he set about solving all the issues he saw that made other incubators unsuitable for developing countries — he created air and water filters, more reliable hinges and moving parts, built- in power backups and improved humidity controls.
Best of all, the Lifepod can be manufactured for around $ 2000, or about a twentieth of the normal cost. Having invented the Lifepod, Avery’s company Medicine Mondiale went about fundraising $ 2m to get the first batch produced, which will be sent to the Pacific Islands.
Medicine Mondiale have other social medical innovations in their sights, too, as they believe it is possible to use technology to bridge the gap in delivery of affordable, highquality healthcare. Volpara Health Technologies is a Wellington- based health software company. Volpara’s patented software technology takes breast mammograms and analyses the images, looking for abnormalities in the breast tissue. Volpara can supplement the skills of specialised radiologists by scanning every mammogram image, flagging suspect areas for further analysis, providing secondary checking mechanism. Their software can detect the density of the breast tissue and point to where there is an increased density — a possible marker for cancerous cells. Over 500,000 women a year die of breast cancer globally — thousands of them in Australia and New Zealand. Breast- scanning helps prevent that by finding abnormalities in the breast or a tissue, but previously the technology had only worked reliably in certain t ypes of breast: those without too much glandular tissue ( the part that makes milk).
In 2009 four of the world’s top breast- imaging scientists joined together to work out a way to personalise breast- cancer scanning, and Volpara is the result. The company benefits from being in Wellington, too, because some of the world’s experts in image analysis now live and work there, thanks to the film industry around Miramar.
It’s what economists would call an “adjacency“— expertise in one area ( creating high- quality images of orcs) leads to a whole new area of expertise ( detecting cancer cells in images of breasts).
Volpara recently listed on the Australian Securities Exchange, valuing the company at $ 61m, and that allowed it to create a new product range, based in the Cloud, which helps with assessment of the effectiveness of the breast scanners and the technicians who operate them, based on the data they capture.
The technology also promises to make the process of mammography more efficient — mammograms are at best unpleasant, and at worst highly painful. The breast has to be compressed between metal plates in order for the scanning to work, so maximising the data captured by the process is important.
Volpara’s software can tell if the machine i s overcompressing the breast, as was the case in one set of machines they checked, which had been calibrated to the average Western woman, but was being used in a hospital in Asia where breast size is typically smaller. This was resulting in an unnecessarily painful procedure for the patient.
Volpara’s technology is approved by the US FDA ( Food and Drug Administration), which has opened the US market for it. Its range of software solutions is helping clinic managers understand the effectiveness of their breast scanners, and whether machinery is operating as designed.
Here is a great example of a hightech New Zealand company leveraging off strengths gained in one field to become a world leader in another, and saving lives along the way.