New Zealand may be a relatively small country, but no one appears to have told its aerospace and security innovators. Congratulations to Dawn Aerospace New Zealand Ltd, winner of the Defence, Space and Security with the USA Award - and the Supreme Award winner at the 27th AmCham–DHL Express Success & Innovation Awards, celebrating New Zealand companies succeeding in the United States. Dawn Aerospace was recognized for its technological innovation, international ambition, and growing commercial presence in the United States, including plans to establish spaceplane operations in Oklahoma. Apparently, aiming high was taken literally. Congratulations as well to fellow finalists Gallagher Security, Hirtenberger Defence Technology Ltd, and Merlin Labs NZ Ltd. Together, these companies demonstrate the depth of innovation and ambition connecting New Zealand and the United States in some of our most critical sectors. Winner: Dawn Aerospace Finalists: Gallagher Security, Hirtenberger Defence Technology Ltd, and Merlin Labs NZ Ltd. 🇺🇸🇳🇿 @AmchamNZ

how can you not believe in God when octopuses DREAM and otters have a favorite rock they carry around in a little SKIN POCKET and cows have BEST FRIENDS and bees are out there communicating the coordinates of flowers through INTERPRETIVE DANCE and they have REGIONAL DIALECTS?? cats are PURRING at frequencies associated with bone healing??? forests get absolutely incinerated and respond by growing FLOWERS??? dolphins literally invent NAMES for themselves and yell them across the ocean??? penguins are waddling around Antarctica looking for the PERFECT LITTLE ROCK to give their beloved??? CROWS REMEMBER YOUR FACE. THEY TELL OTHER CROWS ABOUT YOU. THEY TELL THEIR CHILDREN ABOUT YOU. YOU CAN HAVE GENERATIONAL BEEF WITH A BIRD. goats have ACCENTS. rats GIGGLE when you tickle them. elephants mourn their dead. whales make SONGS and then OTHER WHALES LEARN THE SONG and suddenly everybody across the ocean is singing the new hit single. monarch butterflies are born knowing how to fly thousands of miles to a place THEY HAVE NEVER BEEN. sea turtles hatch out of an egg, immediately sprint toward an OCEAN they have never seen, disappear into it for like THIRTY YEARS and then somehow come back to THE SAME BEACH??? birds can see COLORS THAT WE CANNOT SEE. there are colors happening RIGHT NOW that we don’t even get to know about. there are sea slugs that eat algae and STEAL ITS CHLOROPLASTS and then are just like great thanks I’ll be PHOTOSYNTHESIZING NOW. there are mushrooms communicating underground. there are seeds sitting in the dirt for DECADES like no actually I will wait. squirrels plant MILLIONS OF TREES because they simply cannot remember where they put their snacks. A CATERPILLAR GOES INTO A LITTLE BAG, DISSOLVES MOST OF ITS BODY INTO ORGANIC SOUP, REARRANGES ITSELF, GROWS WINGS AND LEAVES. and you’re telling me a tiny acorn knows how to become a 70-foot oak tree??? nobody tells it what to do??? it just has TREE INSTRUCTIONS INSIDE IT??? your body started as ONE CELL. ONE. and that cell divided itself into a brain that can think about its own existence and eyes that can look at stars and hands that can hold somebody else’s hands and a heart that runs on ELECTRICITY without you even asking it to??? the iron in your BLOOD was made inside a STAR. I’M SORRY????? we are walking around on a wet rock covered in bioluminescent oceans and singing whales and laughing rats and birds holding lifelong grudges and flowers exploding out of FIRE and somehow we’re supposed to act like this is a normal place to live?????????

What an incredible few days at #MumbaiWood! 🇮🇳🇳🇿 India showed strong interest in NZ’s premium, renewable wood products. With the NZ-India Free Trade Agreement set to make 95% of NZ wood products tariff-free, the road ahead is bright for deeper NZ-India partnerships in forestry.

"This isn't a one sector deal. It's a platform for a much broader economic relationship." #INZBC Chair @chawlabharat18 speaks with @radionz on the ratification #NZIndiaFTA rnz.co.nz/news/indonz_featur… @IndiainNZ @NZinIndia @MFATinAuckland @NZTEnews @EdwinPaul @SameerHandaNZ @nzindmgt

The FTA creates the framework. Businesses will still need market knowledge, trusted relationships and the right partners to turn preferential access into actual trade. #INZBC #IndiaNewZealand #NZIndiaFTA #TradeAndInvestment #IndiaNZ inzbc.org/post/india-new-zea… @IndiainNZ @NZinIndia

The NZ India FTA is now ratified. INZBC was at Parliament as Hon @toddmcclaymp & @IndiainNZ HC @MuanpuiiSaiawi exchanged the formal documents. The FTA enters into force on 20 October 2026. Now the focus shifts to business beehive.govt.nz/release/new-… @chawlabharat18 @chrisluxonmp

#INZBC welcomes @NZParliament passing #IndiaFTA. When in force, 57% of NZ exports to India become duty free from day 1. The agreement creates access. Now businesses need to turn it into trade. @chawlabharat18 @EdwinPaul @SameerHandaNZ @nzindmgt @bakshiks beehive.govt.nz/release/indi…

HC @MuanpuiiSaiawi met with Edwin Paul, Chair, @inzbc and Mr. Phil Robson, CEO, Total Sports Tours. They exchanged views on various aspects of India–New Zealand Trade relations, including sports diplomacy and the 100-year sporting relationship between the two countries. @MEAIndia @PMOIndia @DrSJaishankar @diaspora_india @mygovindia @IndianDiplomacy @PIB_India @DDNewslive @airnewsalerts @PIBCulture @MuanpuiiSaiawi @DoC_GoI @DPIITGoI

INZBC has signed an MoU with @Guidance_TN in the presence of Chief Minister Hon @TVKVijayHQ. Built on years of engagement, it gives Kiwi firms a stronger pathway into TN, with INZBC helping connect them to gov support, local partners & investment opp. Now the focus is business.

Join us online on 28 July as we discuss how #NZIndiaFTA has opened the gateway for new opportunities between 🇮🇳🇳🇿 A joint partnership between INZBC & @Sepc_India @EdwinPaul @NZTEnews @CimGOI @IndiainNZ @NZinIndia @nzindmgt

Mesopotamia was never the cradle of civilisation. India was. I spent forty years in international shipping, not academia. When I began researching the history of maritime trade, I had no orthodoxy to defend. I followed the evidence, and it kept arriving in the same place: the Indian subcontinent. Nineteenth century archaeologists dug in Mesopotamia because the climate preserved artefacts, the biblical sources pointed them there, and the Ottomans allowed the excavations. That is the entire basis for the myth of Mesopotamia as "the cradle of civilisation." Nobody applied the same rigour to India. Mohenjo-daro was not discovered until 1922. By then the narrative had already hardened. What was actually there was the largest civilisation of the ancient world. Three hundred cities. Fifty thousand people in each, by 2600 BC. Two thirds of them stood on the banks of the Sarasvati, the central and greatest of the seven rivers described in the Rig Veda, flowing down from the Himalayas before the river vanished entirely by 1900 BC. The Vedic kings claimed territory stretching "sea to sea," from Afghanistan to Maharashtra, some 1.5 million square miles, against Egypt's 13,000. A dock at Lothal built to handle thirty ships of sixty tons, unmatched in Europe for four thousand years. When it was first excavated, it was recorded as a bathing pool. When the scale became impossible to dismiss, the theory was not corrected. It was replaced with a story of pale-skinned nomads from the steppe who supposedly arrived around 1500 BC and brought civilisation with them. There is no evidence. The chronology doesn't work. The Vedas describe no invasion. In 2019 a Harvard-led genetic study revived the claim, and the press reported it as confirmation. It was not. The same study found the builders of these cities were indigenous. The Sarasvati river that the Rig Veda described had already dried up before these newcomers arrived. What the study also found is that a small group of men, arriving after the Sarasvati had already dried up, interbred with the existing population and left a genetic signature. That is all. So, where they chose to dig was mostly an accident of climate and access. The Aryan invasion theory was constructed because an Indian civilisation that owed nothing to Caucasians was a fact the late nineteenth century could not accommodate. Link to full Substack essay with sources in the comments below.

What Skyroot pulled off this morning is genuinely stunning. Most people think a rocket's job is to go up. It is not. Going up is the easy part. The hard part is going sideways fast enough that you never come down. Let me explain this one idea in simple words. So orbit is not a height. It is a speed. Throw a ball. It falls. Throw it harder, it lands further away. Now imagine throwing it so hard that as it falls, the Earth curves away underneath it at exactly the same rate. It keeps falling forever and never hits the ground. That is orbit. So a satellite is not floating up there. It is falling around the planet, endlessly, because it is moving sideways at about 28,000 kmph. That is roughly 25 times the speed of a passenger jet. So a rocket does two jobs. It climbs out of the thick air near the ground, then it tips over and spends most of its fuel building sideways speed. Almost all of the energy goes into that second part. Now let's understand what Vikram-1 has achieved. It lifted off from Sriharikota at 12:05 pm today. The launch got held for 35 minutes at the T minus 5 minute mark because of a navigation issue. They fixed it and went. Fifteen to sixteen minutes later, the payloads were in a 450 km orbit. Fifteen minutes from a launch pad in Andhra to a stable orbit around Earth. :) The rocket is 24 metres tall, about a seven storey building. It is built from carbon composite instead of steel, which makes it far lighter, since weight is everything in this game. Every kilo of structure you save is a kilo of satellite you can carry. Now, Vikram-1 has four sections stacked on top of each other. Three solid fuel stages named after Dr Kalam. Kalam-1200 at the bottom, then Kalam-250, then Kalam-100. On top sits a small liquid engine called the Orbital Adjustment Module. As in most rockets, once the bottom stage has burned all its fuel, that huge empty tube is just a heavy metal shell you are dragging along. So the rocket throws it away mid flight. Lighter rocket, same engine push, faster acceleration. Then the next stage lights up. Think of a runner carrying three water bottles. He drinks the first one and throws it away instead of carrying an empty bottle for the rest of the race. Today all three stages fired and separated cleanly. First stage pushed it through the thick lower atmosphere. Second stage took over higher up. Third stage, the smallest, pushed it further. Then came the clever bit. The top module runs on liquid fuel, and its engine is 3D printed. Liquid engines can be switched off and started again. Solid fuel cannot. Once you light a solid motor, it burns till it is done, like a firecracker. You cannot stop it or restart it. So the liquid module is the precision tool. It fired for about six minutes, adjusted the path, and placed the satellites exactly where they needed to go. That start, stop, restart ability is what turns a rocket from a big firework into a delivery vehicle. But why this is a massive deal? Rockets have been doing this for years. See, in 2022, Skyroot flew Vikram-S. That was suborbital. It went up and came back down. Impressive, but going up is a fraction of the energy. Reaching orbit needs roughly 30 times more energy than just touching space. Today they crossed that line. India is now the third country in the world where a private company has put something into orbit. Only America and China had that before. Skyroot is a Hyderabad startup. Founded by Pawan Kumar Chandana and Naga Bharath Daka, both ex ISRO engineers who quit to build this. They raised $60 million in May. They have been test firing motors in Nagpur since 2020, one stage at a time, for six years. So, six years of quiet, unglamorous testing for fifteen minutes of flight. And they did it because ISRO opened up Sriharikota to a private company. IN-SPACe cleared the way. A government space agency handing its national launch pad to a startup is not a small cultural shift. Ten years ago that was unthinkable. The payload list is lovely too. Two cubesats, one from Skyroot and one from another Indian startup, Grahaa Space. A lab grown diamond from a Bengaluru company. A handwritten postcard from Modi Ji reading Vande Mataram, along with handwritten notes from the team and their families. Somebody's handwriting is circling the Earth right now at 28,000 kmph. :) Now, yes this was a test flight. They have said more test flights come before commercial launches, with up to two more Vikram-1 flights planned this year. First success is the hardest, but the real business is doing this again and again, cheaply and reliably. Still. A private Indian company built a rocket from scratch and reached orbit on the first try. Learn the name. Skyroot. :)

ORBIT ACHIEVED. 🚀 Vikram-1 Test Flight-1 has reached orbit. India's first privately developed orbital rocket has completed its final burn and injected its payloads into a ~450 km orbit, making India the third country in the world with private orbital launch capability. History is made. 🇮🇳 #Vikram1 #JourneyToOrbit #SkyrootAerospace

@EdwinPaul spoke with @nzherald this morning on the historic visit of 🇮🇳 PM @narendramodi @chrisluxonmp @toddmcclaymp newstalkzb.co.nz/on-air/earl…

The PMs also joined the business delegations to share the road map for the next stage. INZBC is ready to help businesses build the right connections and succeed in India. @EdwinPaul @chawlabharat18 @nzindmgt @bakshiks

INZBC welcomes the @ficci_india delegation to NZ on this historic visit of Indian PM @narendramodi @EdwinPaul @chawlabharat18 @nzindmgt @SameerHandaNZ @NZTEnews @NZinIndia @indiainnz @indiainauckland

Kia ora and Welcome to New Zealand Prime Minister @narendramodi

#NZIndiaFTA showing early signs of growth hear @EdwinPaul speak with Ryan Bridge on @NewstalkZB newstalkzb.co.nz/on-air/earl…

@EdwinPaul spoke with @NewstalkZB about the #NZIndia relationship @chrisluxonmp @toddmcclaymp newstalkzb.co.nz/on-air/the-…

The importance of #NZIndiaFTA is how much it will lift a little nation like NZ on the global front - @BradOlsenNZL @VangelisVNZ @toddmcclaymp @inzbc @EdwinPaul @NZTEnews @IndiainNZ @NZinIndia