Page 48 - Australian Defence Magazine June 2019

Space beginning to take off
ANOTHER $130 million in cash and kind from industry, academic and research or- ganisation participants makes SmartSat CRC the largest ever Australian investment in space industry research and development.
Commercial launch facilities aren’t far off and neither are plans by Australian com- panies for constellations of small satellites, providing a range of services such as Earth observation and fast broadband in competi- tion with the NBN.
Australia is really blasting off into the space business, as are many other countries, such as NZ, now regularly launching satellites from the Rocket Lab facility on the Mahia Pen- insula. Rocket Lab is a US company but was founded by Kiwi Peter Beck in NZ in 2006.
So, why the heck didn’t we start doing what the Kiwis are doing a long time ago? There have been various proposals plus peo- ple willing to put up substantial amounts of cash but all fell by the wayside.
There appear to be a range of reasons why not, but central is conceptual - a tacit belief that space launch was something only done by national governments with established aerospace industries, at vast cost and there was finite demand for commercial and other launches, which in any case could be
handled by existing facilities. Yet even to that backdrop, there have been a succession of schemes for domestic spaceports, going back to the 1960s when we did launch (Brit- ish and American) rockets from Woomera.
In November 1967, the Australian WRE- SAT satellite (Weapons Research Estab- lishment Satellite) was launched atop a US Redstone, making us just the third nation to launch a satellite from its own territory.
The 45-kilogram WRESAT orbited 642 times before re-entering in January 1968.
This plus the various weapons trials gave Australia a cadre of skilled personnel and from it, our very own space industry could have emerged.
There have been various proposals to launch commercially from Woomera, as it had been done and the infrastructure existed.However it’s not the best place in Australia from which to launch. That was recognised in a 1965 re- port of the Department of Supply, itself an as- sessment of a report by the European Launch- er Development Organisation (ELDO). That said the best site was near Darwin.
That’s for immutable reasons of basic physics and geography. The closer you are to the equator, the more an eastwards launch benefits from the Earth’s spin, translating
into less fuel and a greater payload. The ge- ography means rockets don’t overfly much of the Australian mainland or any other na- tion before they reach orbit.
In 1987, the NT government considered three sites – Darwin, Point Stewart and Nhulunbuy – for a spaceport. It conclud- ed none were really suitable and decided to go no further. This hasn’t gone away. A site on Aboriginal land near Nhulunbuy could become Australia’s first commercial spaceport under a proposal by the company Equatorial Launch Australia, backed by the NT government.
Back in 1987, the NT government may well have considered they couldn’t compete with another proposal, the Cape York com- mercial spaceport backed by Queensland Premier Joh Bjelke Petersen. Joh was cer- tainly noted for his big infrastructure plans and many dismissed his spaceport as gran- diose pie in the sky. Yet it had plenty going for it. The proposal initially came from De- fence and Hawker De Havilland.
Joh was thinking big – this was to be a $500 million project on a 200,000 hect- are site. Ultimately it’s not completely clear which was more fatal; the shortfall in com- mercial backing or a court case launched by Aboriginal landowners, which the High Court decided in their favour in 1992.
At one stage Joh even proposed that the spaceport be incorporated into what is now RAAF Base Scherger on Cape York. That cer- tainly would have given the Commonwealth an early stake in Australia’s space business.
There was yet another spaceport propos- al, Christmas Island, better known for its red crabs and immigration detention cen- tre. That emerged in 1997 and as a launch site the island also has geography in its fa- vour, including proximity to the equator and nothing but ocean east or south.
The plan was to use Russian rockets able to place satellites into low earth or geo- synchronous orbits. The first launch was planned for 2004 but this never eventu- ated, principally it seems because the Rus- sians opted to launch their rockets from the Arianespace site in French Guiana.
48 | June 2019 | www.australiandefence.com.au
DEFENCE BUSINESS
VIEW FROM CANBERRA
A SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT | CANBERRA
As of July 1 last year, the Australian Space Agency came into being. Now, the federal government chucked in $55 million to launch the new SmartSat Cooperative Research Centre (CRC).
JEFF SPOTTS UNITED LAUNCH ALLIANCE