Page 54 - Australian Defence Magazine Sep 2021

54 DEFENCE BUSINESS VIEW FROM CANBERRA
SEPTEMBER 2021 | WWW.AUSTRALIANDEFENCE.COM.AU
VIEW FROM
CANBERRA
As Australia accelerates its space journey, it’s in equal parts amusing and frustrating to look back on what might have been.
A SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT | CANBERRA
THE BIG one is where would we be now if national govern- ments half a century ago had not squandered the national space expertise acquired through participation in other people’s research programs conducted on our turf.
That turf was outback South Australia from where the UK, US and Europeans conducted almost 300 sub-orbital and orbital rocket launches.
Using a leftover US Redstone rocket, Australian defence sci- entists launched WRESAT (Weapons Research Establishment Satellite) in November 1967, making us the seventh nation to launch a satellite and the third to do so from its own territory.
All this gave Australia substantial space expertise but suc- cessive governments declined to take steps needed to con- solidate this advantage.
Example: In 1968 WRE proposed a modest national civil and defence space program, which the then Gorton govern- ment knocked back on grounds of cost.
And again: Australia passed on becoming a full member of the European Launcher Development Organisation (ELDO) which had conducted multiple launches from Woomera. ELDO was forerunner to the European Space Agency.
That doesn’t mean space stuff wasn’t happening.
In the cost-no-object era of US-USSR space rivalry, Aus- tralia became dotted with US space tracking stations, with Honeysuckle Creek and Parkes radio telescope relaying TV imagery of the moon landing.
Most of these tracking stations have gone but the expertise endures at facilities like the deep space tracking station at Tidbinbilla, outside Canberra.
In 1987, the Hawke Labor government demonstrated some vision, founding the National Space Program (NSP). What Labor didn’t display was any huge funding commitment, just $106 million up to 1996 when the incoming Howard govern- ment pulled the plug.
This was the period when various visionary projects emerged, particularly those aimed at creating a local launch capability, of which the most notable was the Cape York space base proposed by Queensland Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen.
Joh was ever one for grand infrastructure projects and plenty of people sneered at this one, which actually came from Stan Schaetzel of Hawker De Havilland who floated the idea of a commercial launch facility on Cape York to the Queensland Government.
Joh conducted feasibility studies, with one commentator noting that what surprised many sceptics was that these studies produced many arguments in favour and few against.
North Queensland geography, its proximity to the equator and absence of nations to the east which would need to be overflown were all big pluses.
What Joh proposed was a $500 million commercial facility with most of the money stumped up by investors – he was only ever going to put up $500,000.
But this was the era when space was seen as the province of government.. Launch facilities were large and expensive. A commercial space sector was couple of decades off. We also know now that a launch facility need not comprise much more than an area of hard standing.
In October 1987, Joh visited Canberra and put to Labor Defence Minister Kim Beazley that the spaceport could be incorporated into the proposed Cape York RAAF base, now RAAF Scherger, rather than the initial location at Temple Bay on the eastern side of the cape.
Looking back from 2021, Labor’s disinterest looks like a massive failure of vision and a lost opportunity. From the perspective of 1987, it’s more explicable.
Commonwealth priority then was to create facilities for the defence of the nation, not indulge the vision of the man whose loathing of Labor did much to bring down the Whit- lam Labor government. Plus he fancied himself as PM – re- member Joh for Canberra.
It was very expensive, though Joh might have agreed to drop the tourist facilities if it was to be located on a defence base. Cape York is also a long way away – Queensland’s new spaceport is planned for Abbot Point, a whole lot closer to the state space industry in the south-east.
Yet Joh’s scheme persisted, backed by the new Queensland Labor government and Labor in Canberra, with two com- mercial consortia vying for the deal.
It was only declared dead in 1995, killed by the absence of commercial funding and victory in the High Court by in- digenous landowners who had challenged Queensland’s pro- posed appropriation of their land. ■
ABOVE: During the US-USSR space rivalry, Australia became dotted with US space tracking stations.