Inside Whenuapai: New Zealand's role in a US-led space surveillance network
A space-surveillance hub at Whenuapai Air Force base in Auckland is helping track satellites from Iran and the Chinese military as part of a US-led global network that also monitored the Paris Olympics for GPS disruptions, according to New Zealand Defence Force reports released under the Official Information Act and reported by RNZ.
The Auckland hub was set up in 2023 and is largely funded by the Pentagon. It is one of three nodes in the Joint Commercial Operations (JCO) network — a US-led arrangement where partner countries pool data from commercial satellites and ground-based sensors to keep watch on objects in orbit. The other two nodes are in the United States and the United Kingdom. The network coordinates 24 countries and draws on more than 400 sensors run by private companies, generating up to 800,000 observations of space every day.
In February, the Auckland hub tracked an Iranian television broadcasting satellite launched from Russia. A hub assessment described the event as a significant milestone for Iran's space programme and evidence of continued Russian-Iranian cooperation in space. The same month, the hub tracked a Chinese satellite manoeuvring close to a French satellite. Beijing said the object was an experimental spacecraft; Western analysts suspect it was a military test satellite.
The JCO network's core job is tracking satellites operated by countries of concern — what defence documents call "adversaries" — detecting when they change orbit, and trying to predict what they will do next. A US report in August 2025 laid out those primary tasks. A JCO report in April noted a significant increase in successful tracking of Chinese and Russian launches. US documents show the JCO maintained "secret" and "top secret" communication channels and was expanding what it shared with military commands and with the National Reconnaissance Office, the US spy agency responsible for intelligence satellites.
The network's scope has widened. On 1 July 2024, the JCO gained new powers covering positioning, navigation and timing — the technology behind GPS and similar systems — for what it calls "situational awareness." Within days, those capabilities were used to guard the Paris Olympics against GPS disruptions, according to a US Space Force report titled "Watch, Warn, Win." Around the same time, the JCO took over a large US tactical surveillance programme and assumed responsibility for electromagnetic spectrum operations — meaning monitoring and potentially interfering with the radio frequencies used for communications and sensing. An April report confirmed those new tactical and electromagnetic powers had been used in Somalia.
The NZ Defence Force has pushed back on the suggestion that Auckland is being swept along in that expansion. Last year, the Defence Force denied taking part in the broad growth of JCO activity, saying New Zealand retained sovereignty over what its hub did. Cabinet papers stipulated that the defence minister must be kept informed of any change to what the JCO does. How those oversight mechanisms interact with the network's classified channels and expanding operational scope is an open question for officials and ministers alike.
New Zealand's involvement in space security extends beyond the JCO. NZDF space operators have helped test how to detect an attack on a commercial satellite in a US military-led effort, according to RNZ. Germany and France have joined New Zealand in a separate space network aimed at protecting orbit from threats such as exploding satellites, as RNZ reported in December 2024.
On the counter-intelligence front, New Zealand's Security Intelligence Service disclosed in August that it disrupted an attempt by a Chinese state-linked observatory to install satellite-tracking infrastructure in New Zealand, Reuters reported. That case sits alongside the JCO's growing intelligence-sharing relationship with the United States and frames a broader contest over who gets to watch space from New Zealand soil.
The broader context here is one of competing pressures. The architecture now in place at Whenuapai gives New Zealand a seat inside a network whose tasks range from Olympic GPS protection to electromagnetic operations in the Horn of Africa. The Cabinet-level oversight provisions speak to an awareness in Wellington that the hub's role could expand faster than political scrutiny keeps up. For the defence and intelligence community, the operational value is clear. For ministers, the question is whether the sovereignty safeguards the Cabinet papers describe keep pace with what the network is actually doing, and how much of that the New Zealand public gets to see.
