Australia: Watch This Space

Over the last few years, I’ve been doing a monthly commute between SEAsia and Australia. From 40,000 feet, the sky goes on forever, the vast, dry continent stretching out below. Staring out of the window on those long North-South flights, I’ve always wondered why we don’t have a more dynamic and visible space industry. The place seems tailor-made for it.

Australia’s scale is staggering. We’re responsible for managing 1/6th of the world’s airspace and 1/7th of its oceans. NASA, the European Space Agency, the Square Kilometer Array project, and the Five Eyes intelligence alliance all use our remote (and electronically quiet) Southern Hemisphere location to complete their deep-space tracking and signal intelligence networks. And we have Woomera, the western world’s largest land-based rocket testing range (it’s bigger than North Korea).

Yet despite all this, despite our advanced developed-world economy (3% of global GDP), a highly-educated populace and large, growing markets for space-enabled applications in our region, Australia relies almost completely on foreign satellites.

OK, it’s true that we do have an extremely active space science community, with major contributions to physics and astronomical programs around the world. We’ve also developed powerful “spatial” applications – integrating positioning and Earth observation data from space to solve big problems on Earth. Still, most of our young, aerospace graduates leave for greener space pastures overseas, a path already well-worn when I did the same back in 1988.

It turns out, there’s a simple reason.

“Australia has actually done a great deal over the past 60 years,” explained industry veteran Brett Biddington at the beginning of a recent national space policy workshop in Melbourne. “Its just all been classified.”

Wow. We have been doing lots in space after all, just none of us knew about it. This narrative of a long and secret history of space projects down under (and its accompanying, tantalizing vision of hidden and underused space infrastructure) both explains the lack of visible Australian space activity, and also sheds light on how it is that our relatively small nation, with a population of 25 million people, has attracted most of the western world’s major international defense primes — think Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Airbus, Thales, Boeing, Saab, Raytheon, and many others.

Hearing Biddington publically reveal this truth in a room full of local governments, politicians, research agencies, universities, eager startups (like me), and those same tight-lipped defense primes was pure catharsis.

Later in the workshop, almost as an aside, Biddington again took aim at the status quo: “We need deep cultural change in our defense sector, we need to lower the veils of secrecy and start leveraging the infrastructure we’ve invested in for so long.”

And there it was. A simple, bold acknowledgement by an industry veteran that if we are to become a serious commercial player in what the UK Space Agency predicts will be a $1 trillion sector by 2030, if we are to get behind an ideas-driven high-tech economy rather than continuing to buy overseas; we need a major shift in policy.

Looking out of my plane window, I feel like we’re finally getting set to join the new space era. We’re pushing for concrete targets, access to infrastructure via our agile defense sector, smart corporate partnerships, and open industry experimentation, with the prize a new and exciting growth trajectory.

Watch this space!