Defence careers: KBR orbital analyst Bella Hatty was a teenage space nerd – and now her job is out of this world

Bella Hatty used to spend hours gazing at the stars and moon. Now the 26-year-old is loving her “dream job” as a space traffic controller.

Bella Hatty is an orbital analyst at KBR – her job is to support Australia’s defence systems by monitoring movements in space. Picture: Brett Hartwig

Bella Hatty doesn’t remember a time she wasn’t “looking up”, fascinated by the moon and stars.

At 18, while on a trip to Japan, she got a small tattoo celebrating her “love for orbits” –a delicate swirl with a flower bud to capture the connection between orbits, space and Earth.

Now 26, she is an orbital analyst – part of a global team supporting Australia’s defence and security by monitoring movements in space – and smiles as she recalls stargazing as a toddler in the Northern Territory.

She says her fitness instructor mum and landscaper dad would regularly take her and her two brothers camping in Kakadu National Park.

“There would be just the most beautiful dark skies where you could see the stars in all their glory ... I think seeing that over and over again sort of sparked my fascination – it was almost like magic,” she says.

“You know, I’d think ‘what am I looking at? I see some twinkling ... that one is shining brighter than the other one, why is that happening?’

“One of my earliest memories is of being in my bright pink swag and drawing what I could see on its inside ... (today) I can peel back the canvas to see what my little eyes were looking at.”

Bella Hatty has turned her obsession with astronomy into an exciting career. Picture: Brett Hartwig

The delightfully down-to-earth Zoomer (Gen Z) got her first telescope as a teenager with her love for all things astronomical piqued even further by her high school physics teacher.

She studied astrophysics at uni and crammed in as many “space extra-curricular activities” as she could before first landing a role as an intern at a tech consulting company and later the Australian Space Agency.

In December she took up the orbital analyst’s role at Adelaide-based KBR and describes her current work in space domain awareness as her “dream job”.

A proud “space nerd”, who by the way speaks Japanese and Latin – oh, and rock-climbs, treks, camps and runs away from the screen – chooses her words carefully for a non space buff.

“A good analogy (of my job) is, just as we have air traffic controllers at airports to make sure planes are going the right way and flying safely ... an orbital analyst is like a space traffic manager,” she says

“So, it’s making sure satellites and debris are in safe places and behaving safely ... a big part of my job is making sure people are acting safely in space ... tracking satellites, problem solving and applying different techniques (I have learned).”

Interestingly, being an astronaut isn’t on her wish list (she prefers to “look up”) but helping on a spaceflight mission involving Adelaide astronaut Katherine Bennell-Pegg is.

She laughs when asked if strangers’ eyes glaze over when they learn what she does.

“No, as humans, humanity in general, we have such a fascination with space ... everyone’s looked up at the stars, everyone has sort of wondered what’s up there and what’s going – I love that I get to do that as a job,” she says.

“I really see what we do as sort of the enabler for safe space activity; if we want to continue to explore space and understand the mystery out there, we need to have rules in place to make sure that we’re all acting safely.”

Ms Hatty says there’s a real and worsening problem with the amount of debris in space – and the risks it poses are enormous.

“Our dependence on space assets to function is huge ... everything, from GPS on our phones to the technology used by farmers to access precision agriculture relies on satellites; if something goes wrong with those satellites – they collide or break – our quality of life will be degraded,” she says.

“I just don’t think that is properly realised.”

Originally published as Defence careers: KBR orbital analyst Bella Hatty was a teenage space nerd – and now her job is out of this world