NT loses space base after land council ‘failed’ to extend lease

The company behind the Arnhem Space Centre blamed the Northern Land Council for making the project untenable in the NT, with the spaceport to move to a Cape York site.

The Arnhem Space Centre in the Northern Territory will close, with the spaceport to be relocated to Queensland.

The Northern Territory has lost a space base with the potential to generate an estimated $3.6bn in investment from satellite launches.

Proponent Equatorial Launch Australia announced on Tuesday that it would immediately close the Arnhem Space Centre and relocate the spaceport to far north Queensland due to a bogged-down lease approval process overseen by the Northern Land Council.

There were claims and counter claims about who was at fault - the company claimed the Northern Land Council had “failed to meet its own specified deadline for the approval of the head lease for the fourth time over the past 12 months”.

The NLC, an authority on Aboriginal land tenure for the most northern regions of the NT, accused the company of complicating negotiations including with “attempts to circumvent sacred sites protection requirements”.

“Our people will not be pushed into cutting corners for outside business timelines, nor can we jeopardise cultural obligations, our country, or the hard-won land rights of our people,” NLC chair Matthew Ryan said.

Equatorial Launch Australia denied it had tried to get around any requirements. The company has chosen a new site on Cape York. Queensland has had a space industry strategy since 2020. Five of the world’s top aerospace companies have operations in Queensland.

It was intended the Arnhem Space Centre would operate on an area of rehabilitated bauxite mine near Nhulunbuy. Traditional owners of that site - the Gumatj people - were vocally in favour. However, the NLC intended to consult more widely and The Australian has been told this became a point of contention.

The Finocchiaro government, which came to power in August pledging to attract investment to the NT, must now negotiate with the proponent over the NT government’s 5 per cent stake in the project.

“We are disappointed by ELA’s decision but the CLP government remains committed to East Arnhem’s economic future,” a spokesperson for the Finocchiaro government said.

“We continue to prioritise economic diversification, job creation, and partnerships in the region.”

In a statement announcing the closure of the NT space base on its website on Tuesday, ELA said: “This decision has been forced by the inability of the company to finalise a lease for the expansion of the Arnhem Space Centre.”

The company said the lease approval process had been in progress since January 1, 2022.

ELA said the closure decision came after the NLC “failed to meet its own specified deadline for the approval of the head lease for the fourth time over the last 12 months in October 2024”.

“Despite desperate appeals from ELA, the Northern Territory Chief Minister’s Department, and the Gumatj Corporation since February 2024, the NLC would not issue a head lease or provide any official reasons for the delays.

“The Gumatj are ELA’s direct landlord for the existing site and are the traditional owners and operators of the adjacent and disused bauxite mine on the Gove Peninsula, the site that ELA had requested for the spaceport expansion.

“The continued delays from the NLC have made the existence of the spaceport in the Northern Territory challenging, and the most recent delay to late 2025 to allow consultation with traditional owner groups had the potential to put ELA in breach of its contractual obligations with launch clients and jeopardised a previously secured major funding round.

“Accordingly, management and the board of ELA were left with no option other than to act in the best interest of its customers and shareholders and abandon negotiations to seek an alternate equatorial site in Queensland.”

Equatorial Launch Australia's Arnhem Space Centre.

The company announced the potential alternative site was near Weipa on Cape York.

“ELA is saddened that the more than $100m investment that ELA was making in the East Arnhem region, and the projected $3.6bn in direct economic stimulus, local job creation, and support for local and regional students in STEM projects, as well as the long-term opportunities that were forecast over the life of the proposed lease, will now no longer materialise,” the company said.

“ELA would like to thank the unrelenting support of the Northern Territory government and the Gumatj Corporation, who have both been exemplary partners in the spaceport’s eight-year existence and throughout this difficult process.”

In 2019, a report titled Australia Space Launch Assessment found that of the 1645 satellites that were launched globally over the previous five years, 43 per cent could have been launched from an Australian site. The report predicted Australia could theoretically become the launch site for up to 213 satellites between 2024 and 2033.