James Powell, Co-Founder of Dawn Aerospace

James Powell is a New Zealand aerospace engineer and a co-founder of Dawn Aerospace, where he serves as chief financial officer and chief engineer of the company’s spaceplane programme.

If his brother Stefan brought the rocket expertise, James brought the aircraft. Wellington-born and raised in the Waikato, he studied mechanical engineering at the University of Canterbury and built a career in aviation before Dawn existed, working at an Auckland aircraft-design consultancy, leading a helicopter design team at Airwork, and, tellingly, serving as a Design Engineering Delegate at New Zealand’s Civil Aviation Authority, authorised to approve aircraft design modifications. He also sits on the University of Canterbury’s aerospace industry advisory board.

That background is not incidental to Dawn, it is close to the heart of why the company works the way it does. Dawn’s central ambition is to treat its spaceplane as an aircraft: to certify it, operate it from runways and fly it repeatedly under aviation-style rules rather than one-off launch licences. Doing that requires someone who understands aircraft certification from the inside and when Stefan described the idea of combining rocket propulsion with the operating model of conventional aviation, James’s certification and design experience was what made it credible. He joined to lead the spaceplane’s engineering and the company’s deep ties to New Zealand’s aircraft-certification ecosystem run substantially through his expertise.

As chief engineer of the spaceplane programme, James has helped take the Aurora from the Mk-I prototype, launched and landed near Aoraki/Mount Cook, through to the larger Mk-II that flew supersonic in 2024. As CFO he also helps steer the commercial side of a company now spread across four countries. Alongside Stefan he has become one of the public faces of Dawn’s New Zealand story, the brothers jointly recognised in national innovation awards.

James Powell’s profile is noteworthy because his is the distinctly New Zealand thread in Dawn’s founding: the aircraft-certification expertise, anchored in this country’s regulatory system, that lets a spaceplane be flown like a plane. It’s a reminder that deep-tech breakthroughs often turn as much on regulatory and engineering craft as on raw invention: a theme picked up in the Dawn Aerospace company story and the spaceplane explainer.

Sources: Otago Daily Times · The Org · RNZ