Page 72 - Australian Defence Magazine November 2022

72 FROM THE SOURCE ADAM GILMOUR
NOVEMBER 2022 | WWW.AUSTRALIANDEFENCE.COM.AU
I’d be very happy with a 50/50 split of commercial and Defence revenue 10 years from now. I definitely wouldn’t want to start a company that focuses only on defence, but we’re in this great position of having dual use technology. I can launch a defence satellite or a commercial satellite on the same rocket. The fact that a lot of space technology is dual use is good for the industry.
ADM: What advice would you give to new companies looking to get venture capital investment?
a lot of things in space that if you make an order now, it’s a year before you get it, which is insane. Avionics systems, electro-mechanical systems, machines, even composite pressure vessels have a nine-month lead time. If somebody enters the market at the same price point but says, hey, I can do it in six months, they’re going to get a lot of business.
ADM: Do you have difficulty finding the right people? GILMOUR: Yeah, and that’s been an ongoing learning experience for us. When we first started, we didn’t have a lot of credibility for attracting overseas space engineers. We do now; but hiring from overseas will only help so much. We’ve learnt a lot ourselves hiring graduates, going through the R&D process, failing, learning, and doing better. We’re quite resigned to the fact that we’re going to be bootstrapping knowledge for a long time to come.
Where we struggle to hire is say a five-year veteran engineer from other engineering fields. A lot of engineers go into mining, oil and gas, and it’s hard to pull them out because they get paid so much money.
ADM: How do you think Australia’s space sector is competing internationally?
GILMOUR: It’s positive, but the sad reality is that many other countries – like France, Europe, UK, US – invest far more money into building their domestic space industry than Australia does. We are competing in a global
“WE’RE ALSO NEAR THE FINISH LINE WITH OUR ENGINE TESTING”
GILMOUR: They should do a lot of research on the market. One of the biggest failings I see with start-ups is that they have an idea, they do a little bit of market research on it, and then they think, oh my idea’s innovative, it’s brand new, no one else is doing it. What they don’t realise is somebody else is. You’ve got to be aware of the competition.
A second thing is, just talk to existing space companies and ask them what’s your ‘pain point’. If people want to come and talk to us about our ‘pain points’ on particular core technologies, I would gladly tell them to go develop some tech that we don’t want to develop
ourselves, but we and other space companies would use.
ADM: Define pain point.
GILMOUR: The cost or availability of parts. There’s quite
GILMOUR SPACE