Page 47 - Australian Defence Magazine April 2020

APRIL 2020 | WWW.AUSTRALIANDEFENCE.COM.AU
SPACE GOVERNMENT 47
SPACE SUPPORT FROM STATE GOVERNMENTS
As the Australian Space Agency (ASA) finds its feet in a new Adelaide headquarters, the Australian space sector has been moving from strength to strength.
EWEN LEVICK | SYDNEY
THIS was the message from Minister for Industry, Science and Technology Karen Andrews at the opening of the head- quarters at the Lot Fourteen Precinct in February.
An accompanying release emphasised the ASA’s goal of tripling the size of Australia’s space economy and creating 20,000 new jobs by 2030. Those job figures are roughly half the size of employment levels in Australia’s coal sector, cur- rently our second largest export.
The ASA itself has generated plenty of headlines with a range of commercial and international partnerships in the last year. Big names include Thales and EM Solutions. Other trea- ties of note include an MoU with the Italian Space Agency on projects in space policy, law and regulation, space weath- er, space education and health care, and with the NZ Space Agency on a ‘trans-Tasman space innovation ecosystem’.
These successes appear to be largely claimed by federal politicians. Minister Andrews accompanied Prime Minis- ter Scott Morrison to the opening of the ASA office in Ad- elaide, which despite its location is a federal body under the Department of Industry, Science, Energy and Resources. That chain of command is made clear on the ASA’s web- site, which appears to be a single web page under the De- partment for Industry’s ‘Strategies for the Future’ section.
So as the ASA continues to find its feet, for small space start-ups and research centres it is often territory and state
governments, rather than their federal counterparts, that do much to get Australia into orbit.
ACT
The ACT in particular has hosted much of Australia’s space presence, including famous contributions to the Moon landing and the touchdown of the Phoenix rover on Mars. The Canberra Deep Space Communication Complex is one of only three such facilities globally, and is run by the CSIRO on behalf of NASA. The complex, along with track- ing and data relay satellite equipment in Alice Springs and Dongara, WA, are covered by Australia’s Space Tracking Treaty with the US.
The ACT government also jointly funds the Australian National Concurrent Design Facility (ANCDF) at UNSW Canberra in partnership with the French Space Agency CNES (Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales).The ANCDF and ANU’s National Space Test Facilities within the Ad- vanced Instrumentation Technologies Centre are the only facilities in the country capable of end-to-end designing, building and testing spacecraft.
ABOVE: Australia has well and truly entered the space race with activities everywhere.
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