Page 55 - Australian Defence Magazine November 2022

NOVEMBER 2022 | WWW.AUSTRALIANDEFENCE.COM.AU
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a former chief operating officer of Virgin Galactica with wide space experience, and a change in focus.
“The regulator has started to employ engineers; discus- sions have been able to move away from legalistic argu- ments on safety to practical issues,” Damp commented.
“And because we now have such a good relationship with the ASA we’ve been able to get a better understanding of how they want to assess launch permit applications, and this has greatly reduced some conflict between industry more broadly and the agency.
“Getting approvals is still a question of months; we’re hopefully going to see a new approach to some of the regu- latory processes and put forward an argument that we can actually get it down to six or nine weeks for orbital launch- es. We have to compete on the global landscape.”
For Gilmour, the ASA now had sufficient resources to ef- ficiently handle both programs and launch approvals.
“They’re very open to feedback on where things could be done better and they work very collaboratively with us. En- rico Palermo understands what start-ups are like and he understands that space is a risky business,” he stated.
LAUNCH FEES SCRAPPED
The nascent launch industry received a welcome boost in March when the then-government announced that fees for space launch applications, after previously being deferred twice, would no longer be introduced.
Had such a cost recovery model been introduced, Aus- tralia would have become the first OECD nation to apply an equivalent tax on launch operations, potentially pric- ing Australian launch companies out of the international market and driving domestic satellite providers to overseas locations, such as the Rocket Lab facility in New Zealand.
Further, fees of as much as $200,000 per launch could have doubled given an ASA statement two years ago that complex applications could require consideration by a tech- nical expert independent of the launch contractor.
That potential requirement for both orbital and sub-or- bital launches is also understood to have been has been dropped and this will be noted in future legislation.
OPPOSITE: Gilmour Space Technologies has announced plans to launch its innovative three-stage Eris rocket early in 2023
LEFT: Southern Launch
operates the only two facilities currently licensed by the Australian Space Agency for sub-orbital launches
BELOW: Sirius is Gilmour Space’s large hybrid rocket engine, which will power the first and second stages of the Eris rocket
Defence interest in Australian launch capabilities in- cludes its potential agility to rapidly replace vital satellites knocked out by enemy action.
According to Adam Gilmour, an agile launch is closely defined as one within 24 hours’ notice, a difficult deadline to meet.
“Some of it is regulatory, it takes a while to go through the paperwork in any country to get approval for a launch and then some of the capabilities obviously take time to spool up – put the payload on, get the launch vehicle out to the pad, get fuelled up, pressurised etc,” he explained.
“But I’m very confident that once we’ve got a few launch- es under our belt we’d have that capability. Obviously, we’d need to have a launch vehicle ready to go and we’d also have to have a payload ready to go as well, so you’d have to pre- position. It’s not a big ask, it’s just money.”
And what about the future?
“The only place in Australia where you can launch to just about anywhere is in northern New South Wales, Gilmour told ADM. “We’ve been talking to the NSW government but so far it’s been slow.” ■
GILMOUR SPACE TECHNOLOGIES
SOUTHERN LAUNCH