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.

“I was fortunate to receive honest feedback about my resume,” Hervé recalls.

“I was told that my first name and accent were immediate indications I was not from here and that my degrees, although from top European schools, were not providing much value either. I had spent most of my career in the semiconductor industry which does not exist in Australia, and finally, told that nobody knew me!

“Not willing to change my name, and unable to hide my accent, I was left with the task to reinvent myself.”

From start-up specialist to space entrepreneur

Undeterred by initial setbacks, Hervé quickly discovered the power of networking in Adelaide’s tightknit business community. Guided by the mentorship of local leaders, he invested in his personal development, graduating from the Australian Institute of Company Directors in 2014 and landing a pivotal role at TechInSA, the former State Government innovation agency.

After more than four years helping entrepreneurs and start-ups secure seed funding on the road to commercialisation, Hervé seized the opportunity in 2019 to join Neumann Space, a fledgling start-up with big dreams of revolutionising space propulsion technology.

Fuelled by passion and determination, he embarked on a journey that would see the company grow from a four-man band in a Brompton garage to a respected player in the global space industry.

Guiding Neumann Space’s ascent

Having attended an ILF award’s ceremony as a proxy guest back in 2014, Hervé said “the seed was planted and it got me thinking, could I also become an ILF Scholar and contribute to my new home?”

Six years after that first chance encounter with the Fund, Hervé went on to graduate from Harvard Business School’s Launching New Ventures program – as an ILF Scholar.

As CEO, Hervé has been instrumental in strategically leading capital raises to finance Neumann Space’s growth, building its specialised engineering team to 15-strong and establishing facilities at Lot Fourteen allowing the business to build initial prototypes right here in South Australia.

For Hervé, the journey from rural France to the forefront of Australia’s space industry has been one of innovation, discovery and determination.

As he continues to lead Neumann Space into new frontiers, one thing is clear: the sky’s no longer the limit.

“Ten years after setting foot in Adelaide, I am proud to call Adelaide home, proud of the many milestones and achievements made possible by the many, many people I’ve met along the way.

“I am immensely grateful to the numerous business leaders who collectively make it possible to create opportunities, to take risks and to succeed, leading to a great future for the next generation.”

Q and A with Hervé Astier

As CEO, what have been your focus areas to scale Neumann Space from a garage startup to a respected player in the space industry?

The challenge was to grasp a space hardware innovation nested in the brain of a scientist and transform it into a product manufactured in a proper environment for a global fast-growing market. My immediate focus was to get enough funding to get us out of the garage and to assemble a team. We moved to Lot Fourteen, got initial equipment and built the core of our engineering team to develop a first working prototype for testing. After that, the key focus was to get access to Space. With substantial funding from the Schultz family and support from the Australian Space Agency, we secured our first two missions and have two more this year. In the end, the focus is this continuous cycle of getting funding, building the right resources at the right time (equipment and people), adapting the strategy to the market and ensuring we have the means to execute. Our focus in the last five years was to go from lab to space which we achieved in 2023. Now, the focus is to keep the momentum going, to invest in the development of our Manufacturing, Assembly, Test and Integration (MAIT) capability in Adelaide while continuing to grow our team and turning towards international business development to export our products while continuing to invest in R&D.

Where do you see Neumann Space’s technology and customer impact evolving in the next five years?

We see the Neumann Drive® as the new standard for in-space electric propulsion, with adoption on satellite constellations, especially in the US and in Europe, for commercial and defence applications. We plan on manufacturing our products in Adelaide with local partners. As part of our development strategy, 2024 will focus on increasing our manufacturing, assembly, test and integration capability with a new facility close to the CBD, more product development and testing, with several deliveries to local and international early customers. In the next 18 months we will confirm our initial success in orbit, acquiring more space heritage and demonstrating the robustness of our solution with early adopters, followed by full commercialisation and further development of our product offering.

What unique value does the Industry Leaders Fund provide by enabling senior executives like yourself to access world-class education? What benefits does this bring to South Australia?

For me, the unique value is the distributed knowledge and experience it creates within a group of connected business leaders in South Australia surrounded by international peers. The ILF brings numerous benefits to Australia via its Scholars, including among others:

• A network of experienced and skilled leaders willing to share their knowledge and support to each other locally, each with a global network of peers
• A pool of leadership talent to create, run and grow local businesses, creating jobs and increased economic returns to the state
• An opportunity to showcase to the world what is and can be done in South Australia.

Can you share some key lessons from your diverse leadership roles that guide how you lead and make decisions as CEO?

• Lesson 1: Believe it can be done. Bringing new technologies to new fast-growing markets is a massive challenge with many bumps on the road. I have seen that in previous roles, so I understand the importance of being laser focused and resilient. From a decision-making perspective it means having consistency towards the objective (without being blind to market evolution) and from a leadership perspective it means showing relentless confidence in the future success.
• Lesson 2: Don’t forget the big picture. Even when you know it can be done, it’s easy with a small team in the early stages to get dragged into operational details and to make short-term decisions that can be misaligned with the end game.
• Lesson 3: Build and trust your people. The engineer in me has sometimes made the mistake of getting involved to try to help… this hasn’t always been productive. I’ve learnt to let the engineers engineer!
• Lesson 4: Understand the market dynamic. With 25 years in high-tech, fast-moving environments worldwide, I have seen how markets can change, impacted by technological development, regulatory environment, business decisions, geo-political factors and now even pandemics. Understanding this dynamic is essential to business decisions and to leadership