'We’re back': rocket launch licence gives Australia's aerospace sector high hopes
Australia is one giant leap closer to becoming a space-faring nation again, with the first licence granted to establish a civilian rocket launch facility.
The federal industry minister, Karen Andrews, announced on Thursday that South Australian company Southern Launch will be able to launch suborbital satellites from its Koonibba test range site.
“For decades it was received wisdom in the Australian space community that we would never launch again,” Dr Alice Gorman said. The space archaeologist at Flinders University said it was “amazing that we’re back in the launch business”. “This is so important for Australia,” she said.
Southern Launch’s chief executive, Lloyd Damp, told Guardian Australia the company intended to start launches before the end of 2021.
Damp described the process of obtaining the licence as “uncharted waters”. “Because this has never been done before we needed to understand what the regulator required,” he said.
Damp said that obtaining the licence and the ongoing operation of the facility would not be possible without the support and involvement of the Koonibba Community Aboriginal Corporation. “It was critically important to work with Koonibba to understand how we could use the land.”
Enrico Palermo, who became the head of the Australian Space Agency in January, said: “We are committed to providing a supportive environment … including for the innovative space start-up community, while ensuring the safety of space activities.”
Corey McLennan, the chief executive of the Koonibba Community Aboriginal Corporation, said “being a part of this program inspires our next generation as they get to see our people being at the forefront of Australia’s journey into space”.
The Koonibba test range is located on the north-western edge of the Eyre Peninsula and is surrounded by desert.
The facility is designed for suborbital launches. Damp said Southern Launch will send rockets and payloads into space to gather data before “the payloads fall back into the earth, usually on a parachute and then land in the desert … at which point we go out and collect the payloads”.
“There’s so much you can learn from putting your eyes on to a piece of a rocket.”
The company will work with other space start-ups to help them test their technologies, and in 2023, it is scheduled to host a rocket reusability experiment for the German aerospace program DLR. “They will be launching a rocket up into space and it’ll reenter like an airplane [and] land in the desert, where it will be recovered,” Damp said.
Putting the project into historical context, Gorman explained there had been “a long drought” in Australian space innovation “punctuated by major events”.
“From the 1940s to 1970s Australia was a very busy launching nation,” she said. The Woomera prohibited area, in the South Australian desert, “was launching things left right and centre” for both military and civil purposes.
While military projects continued, the civil industry went into decline. By the time a new Australian satellite, FedSat, was developed in 2002, Australia had to turn to Japan to launch it into space.
In 2008, a Senate inquiry into Australia’s space sector found “Australia’s involvement in space science and industry has drifted and the sense of purpose has been lost … The committee believes it is not good enough for Australia to be lost in space.'”
A decade later in 2018, the Australian Space Agency was established, with a focus on the civil space sector, which the government believes could grow into a multi-billion-dollar industry.
Gorman believes the current regulatory environment still has barriers to competition, particularly around licence fees and cost recovery, but said being able to launch locally “is definitely part of strengthening Australia’s position as a space-faring nation … It gives us capacity to have our opinions heard because we have skin in the game.”
“We’ve had to pick ourselves up and try to begin again so many times. Now it looks like we’ve started and we’re going to be able keep going again. As they say in Legally Blonde 2: ‘It’s a huge biggie’.”