Space is open for business: so who’s cashing in?
The space launch industry is a star on the rise, particularly in South Australia where progress is skyrocketing.
This time 18 months ago the Adelaide-based satellite and rocket launching company Southern Launch had just five staff and worked out of a cramped office inside the University of Adelaide’s start-up precinct.
Since then, it has more than quadrupled its headcount, moved office once and is looking to move again, and launched two test rockets from the Koonibba launch site in far western South Australia. It is now firing up to launch a whole lot more from its new Whalers Way Launch Station which is awaiting official clearance to blast commercial satellites into space.
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The rapid growth of what was a tiny start-up is a symbol of how rapidly the space industry is taking shape in Adelaide, where the federal government chose to headquarter the Australian Space Agency in 2018.
While the scope and potential of the industry is as vast as space itself, Southern Launch chief executive officer Lloyd Damp explains that the future of the industry is actually small, and lies in the increasingly affordable and adaptable micro-satellites that have myriad civilian and corporate applications.
Far from being an industry for governments and massive telcos and media giants, the type of satellites Damp will be launching involve enterprises as modest as stock feed management for Australian cattle farmers.
“This is where everyone is starting to get really excited,” Damp says. “The accessibility of the industry will be one of its biggest changes in the coming years as it becomes more affordable and easier for people to get into space.”
Damp says the onset of the pandemic and the focus on self-reliance and sovereign capacity is also giving fresh impetus to the industry, as governments and the community recognise the need for Australia to stand on its on two feet while reaching for the stars.
“The pandemic has really underscored how important all this is,” he says. “There is an understanding now that you can’t have satellites or an Internet of Things without having space capability in the current global pandemic.
“If Australia is not a sovereign space launch country we will not control any of those capabilities. We will have to rely on someone else’s capability, someone else’s manufacturing and someone else’s launch to enable things like our GPS. It’s a very nice coming of age right at a time when Southern Launch is growing the way it is.”
Having launched two test rockets in 2020, the next stage for Southern Launch is the formal go-ahead of its Whalers Way Launch Station, located near a majestic but treacherous stretch of coastline best known in SA as a tourist destination where school groups learned about the whaling industry.
Today it will be home to an industry of a different kind, with Southern Launch lodging its environmental impact statement in June to satisfy noise and vibration concerns before seeking the formal green light from the Australian Space Agency to secure launch permits.
It is the kind of work that other Adelaide-based companies are already doing, albeit overseas as we do not yet have the approved capacity for such micro satellite launches in Australia.
Fleet Space Technologies is the Adelaide nanosatellite manufacturer for the Internet of Things and has now launched its sixth nanosatellite, Centauri 4, aboard SpaceX Falcon9 from the US launch site Cape Canaveral.
Delivered into orbit at 450km above Earth, Centauri 4 is only the size of a shoebox, and in a world first has been integrated with digital beamforming technology, making this Fleet Space’s most advanced payload yet.
Fleet Space CEO Flavia Tata Nardini says the company now has the ability to reduce interference by shaping and steering multiple beams in their micro satellites, meaning the satellites can perform more work and transfer more data.
Applications for these satellites include tracking power outages, receiving alerts of unwanted encroachments along easements and bushfire risks, through to use in defence, mining and logistics.
“Space is no longer the sole domain of governments and multibillion-dollar satellites. Space is open for business, and we’re only just starting to tap into what is possible,” Tata Nardini said.
“With our digital beamforming technology, we are changing space and making it accessible. Our engineers have managed to fit this incredible technology in the vacuum of space on a tiny nanosat. This is where Fleet Space’s technology makes it world first.”
SA Treasurer Rob Lucas is a 39-year political veteran who entered politics in 1982 back in what was very much the analogue age. He says South Australians only now are realising the scope of the space industry and the importance of creating an Australian Space Agency.
“Winning that agency has been hugely important for SA, more so than anybody recognised at the time,” he said. “The space industry dovetails perfectly with defence and will provide so many of the jobs of the future.”
Back at Southern Launch, Lloyd Damp says the breadth of the industry now goes far beyond defence and its historic ties in SA to the Woomera rocket facility.
“Defence is obviously shrouded in secrecy,” he says. “There is a supply chain that feeds into defence and the general population can gain very little insight into the defence industry. In contrast the space launch industry is fully accessible.
“For kids it’s a case of: ‘Who wants to go and see a rocket launch?’ Or when you grow up and go to university: ‘Who wants to work in the space industry?’ We have got budding astronauts here in SA as we speak. Most kids want to be an astronaut at some stage and that’s something that’s going to become a reality down the track. There is not only the potential for manufacturing, in the not too distant future Australia will be building its own orbit-capable rockets. Then there is the whole social aspect of uplifting a nation as we show we can operate at the very edge of technology.”
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