Hervé Astier

Chief Executive Officer, Neumann Space
Launching New Ventures
Harvard Business School, USA, 2020

Leveraging top international tech experience, Hervé Astier has strategically guided the swift ascent of Neumann Space – evolving the company from a four-man band in a Brompton garage to industry trailblazers soaring new heights in electric space propulsion. For this startup CEO, the sky is literally no longer the limit.

“I landed a helicopter on Mars and have the logbook to prove it,” chuckles Hervé Astier, CEO of cutting-edge space tech company Neumann Space.

While a cheeky claim playing off the rural French hometown’s name of his family, Hervé has steered South Australia’s Neumann Space to achieve firsts seemingly unfathomable when he began working in their then Brompton garage in 2019.

“I always wanted to be a fighter pilot but it turned out my vision wasn’t good enough, so I went for recreational aviation, learning to fly single engine aircraft and helicopters instead,” Hervé explains.

“Landing at the family farm back in a village called Mars was one of the cool moments of my experience as a pilot,” he says.

New frontiers

Growing up in the countryside village of Valence along the Rhône River, Hervé graduated with an industrial engineering degree from SIGMA Clermont (the former French Institute for Advanced Mechanical Engineering) in 1999 and later with an Executive MBA from EM Lyon.

He then spent the next 15 years working internationally for Fortune 500 and Silicon Valley tech corporations in roles spanning consulting, project management, account management and product management.

In late 2013, Hervé and his wife, Ingrid, took a leap of faith and migrated to Adelaide following the birth of their first daughter. Ingrid, an ER specialist who ran two emergency room practices in France, had to retrain to become a specialist GP, while Herve was faced with the daunting task of restarting his career in a new country.