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The CSIRO’s Parkes radio telescope, which helped to broadcast the moon landing – and continues to communicate with the Voyager 2 spacecraft, which is now outside the solar system.
The CSIRO’s Parkes radio telescope, which helped to broadcast the moon landing – and continues to communicate with the Voyager 2 spacecraft, which is now outside the solar system. Photograph: CSIRO/PR
The CSIRO’s Parkes radio telescope, which helped to broadcast the moon landing – and continues to communicate with the Voyager 2 spacecraft, which is now outside the solar system. Photograph: CSIRO/PR

From the moon to deep beyond: Australia’s future in space exploration

This article is more than 4 years old

What Australia’s fledgling space agency lacks in size it hopes to make up for with a smart operating strategy and a bold vision

On 20 July 1969, when Neil Armstrong first stepped onto the surface of the moon, the footage was relayed to 600 million viewers – about one-fifth of humanity in 1969 – from Nasa’s Honeysuckle Creek tracking station on the outskirts of Canberra.

It was a big achievement for a small country with no space program of its own. Now, 50 years on, Australia has a fledgling space agency – a minnow compared with the US’s Nasa, Europe’s ESA and Japan’s JAXA – but what it lacks in size it is hoping to make up for with a smart operating strategy and a bold vision of what it might be able to achieve.

The Australian Space Agency (ASA) deputy director, Anthony Murfett, says that the anniversary provides a chance to look back and be “proud of the role we played” but it’s also a good time to be “looking at what the next 50 years will mean.”

Australia’s role in the moon landing was almost a gift of geography. Nasa was using a series of large dish-shaped antennas – in California’s Mojave Desert, central Spain and south-eastern Australia – to receive the signals from the Apollo lunar module. A global network was needed as the moon was only above the horizon and within the sights of each dish for half of every day.

California’s 64m Goldstone dish and Australia’s 64m dish at Parkes, about 400km west of Sydney in NSW, were the ones intended to relay the footage back to Houston and the world, but an over-eager Armstrong and fellow astronaut Buzz Aldrin decided to skip a rest break and prepare for their moon walk five hours earlier than expected.

How live images of the Apollo 11 moon landing came via Australia – video

“The fact that they elected to go early meant that the moon hadn’t risen on the US facility and so there was no alternative but to go through Australia and Honeysuckle Creek,” says Professor Fred Watson, a former astronomer at the Australian Astronomical Observatory in Coonabarabran, NSW, and now Australia’s government-appointed astronomer-at-large. “The Parkes dish couldn’t get down to sufficiently low elevation to pick up the moon, whereas Honeysuckle Creek could.”

That smaller 26m dish was better positioned to point itself towards the horizon and was therefore the source of much of the first eight minutes of footage, including Armstrong’s first steps. Once the moon began to rise in the sky, Parkes took over providing the footage for the next two-and-a-half hours of lunar exploration.

Buzz Aldrin pictured during the Apollo 11 moonwalk. Photograph: NASA/Reuters

Watson describes the moon landings as a monumental achievement and one of the defining moments in the history of our species. The crucial role Australia played in receiving and relaying the footage has everything to do with our unique position in a relatively remote spot of the southern hemisphere, and this is why we will continue to play a vital role in exploration and observation of space in the decades ahead.

A ‘privileged position’

“In Australia we have a privileged geographical position, being in the southern hemisphere, which is mostly ocean. There are only a number of places you can place antennas at particular longitudes – not just radio antennas, but also optical telescopes as well,” explains Watson, who is also the author of upcoming book Cosmic Chronicles: A user’s guide to the Universe.

This is one reason why the former Australian Astronomical Observatory – now the Siding Spring Observatory with the Anglo-Australian Telescope – has been a lynchpin in many research programs. “You’re filling a gap in the longitude distribution of facilities. And being in that region on Earth is exactly what allowed Australia to play a crucial role in the lunar landings,” he says.

Is it precisely this fact the ASA is leveraging as it encourages collaborations with industry and space agencies across the world, Murfett explains. “Australia played an instrumental role in broadcasting that signal of Neil Armstrong and his first steps on the moon – and that signified a role that Australia can play with its unique location in the southern hemisphere.”

Australia’s “unique view into the galaxy”, gives us a significant competitive advantage over other regions and this is why – through the work of the CSIRO – Australia has continued to play a role in many space programs, and dishes including Parkes and another at Tidbinbilla, near Canberra, are still today critical parts of the Nasa’s Deep Space Network, an international array of giant radio antennas which allow communications with interplanetary spacecraft.

Australia, for example, now has the only stations that can still communicate with the Voyager 2 spacecraft, which was launched in 1977, but has now passed well beyond the bounds of the solar system, being around 18bn kilometres – or 120 times the distance between Earth and the sun.

In addition to the relative radio quietness of the location, this is also why the Square Kilometre Array – which will be the world’s largest radio telescope once completed – is partly based in Western Australia.

The Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder telescope in Western Australia’s mid-west region. The project is starting to yield tantalising results, capturing a signal emitted before our solar system was born. Photograph: Dragonfly Media/PR

The Australian Space Agency, launched in July 2018, has an incredibly modest budget – around A$73m over the next six years, compared with Nasa’s annual budget of about US$20bn. But it is leveraging Australia’s unique geographic position to foster links with international space agencies and the aerospace industry via its International Space Investment Initiative and providing funding for entrepreneurs and start-ups through its Space Infrastructure Fund.

Commercial focus

Described by its director, Dr Megan Clark, as the most industry-focused of all the world’s space agencies, the ASA has a stated goal of growing Australia’s space industry from a current $3.9bn to $12bn by 2030, hopefully creating 20,000 new jobs in the process.

The approach is different from most agencies. “Rather than running big research and development programs, we are looking at ways to grow the space economy as an industry to be self-sustaining,” Murfett says.

While there was already a lot of great space flight-related research in Australia, the ASA is now a much-needed umbrella organisation that provides a “one-stop shop” to focus and galvanise our efforts, Watson says. Nasa, too, has begun to increasingly work with commercial providers, such as SpaceX, whose reusable Dragon spacecraft delivers cargo and astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS).

It is not just Australia’s geographic position that the agency is leveraging – Australian universities and aerospace companies already excelled in a number of space-related areas.

The launch of a hypersonic HIFiRE 5b rocket at the Woomera Test Range in SA in 2016. The launch was part of research into scramjets for orbital launches. Photograph: CPL Bill Solomou/PR

Watson says that one area where “people beat a pathway to our door” is the development of hypersonic, air-breathing propulsion systems for rockets – supersonic combustion ramjets that could burn oxygen during their passage through the atmosphere, and which have yet to be properly exploited by the space industry.

Another is the identification of space junk in orbit around the Earth, and possibly the future use of lasers fired from Australia to shift objects into safer orbits. “We need to understand what’s in orbit, and again [because of its unique view into space] Australia does have a role it can play in space situational awareness and debris tracking,” says Murfett.

Suborbital space tourism launches from Australia is another future direction that has been mooted. There are already plans to launch sounding rockets – to perform scientific experiments in the upper atmosphere – from Arnhem Land. Nasa is in talks with Aussie firm Equatorial Launch Australia about the possibility of launches in the near future, and other kinds of launches will soon follow.

Two further companies – Gilmour Space Technologies in Queensland and Southern Launch in South Australia – are developing opportunities for commercial launches

Three CubeSats pictured shortly after being ejected from a Japanese spacecraft in 2019. Photograph: HANDOUT/AFP/Getty Images

CubeSats, mining and robotics

Another area where Australia leads the world is robotics and remote operation of robots, particularly in mine sites, such as Western Australia’s Pilbara. Earlier this month, Clark announced a joint commitment of $8m from the federal and WA governments to develop a WA-based mission control centre for controlling robots and autonomous systems in space.

“Not only do we have a geographic competitive advantage … we also have a technical competitive advantage based on some of the other things we’re seeing in the economy,” Murfett adds.

The University of Sydney is also partnering with a Japanese startup to launch two CubeSats – miniature satellites that operate in low-Earth orbit – from the ISS.

These are just a smattering of some of the future projects under way. “The future for Australia in space is pretty bright,” says Watson.

“We’re at a very exciting time for the Australian space industry,” Murfett says. “The 50th anniversary of the moon landing gives us a chance to reflect … and is now an opportunity to look forward to what can be achieved next in our space activities.”

John Pickrell is a science journalist and author based in Sydney. He was the editor of the 2018 edition of the Best Australian Science Writing.

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