Failure to launch: The huge rocket ‘stuck’ in a small Australian town

On a day when tens of millions of people around the world watched two American astronauts safely repatriated by a rocket flown by a private company, a key player in Australia’s burgeoning space industry sat, frustrated, on the launch pad.

Adam Gilmour wants to be Australia’s home-grown Elon Musk. But Gilmour Space’s 25-metre Eris rocket has been marking time in the small north Queensland town of Abbot Point for a year, waiting, he says, for government approval to fly.

The only thing ready to ignite, it would seem, is Gilmour himself.

“It’s just insane,” he said on Thursday. “We’re ready to go. We’ve been ready to go for a long time. I don’t think there’s ever been a completed launch vehicle waiting at the pad for a year, waiting for approval.”

If Musk were Australian, he “would have gone bankrupt”.

Such is the nature of Australia’s space industry, which waxes and wanes like the moon.

The Coalition launched Australia’s space agency in 2018, but the incoming Labor government severely cut back its ambitions, leaving the industry unsure of the future – even as our Pacific neighbours (including New Zealand) increase space flight budgets and the United States nears returning astronauts to the moon.

That’s not even accounting for the defence picture. Russian military satellites are “buzzing” other spacecraft while China is practising orbital dogfight manoeuvres. Global government investment in space jumped 10 per cent in 2023, continuing years of sharp increases.

“There couldn’t be a more exciting time for space,” says a space insider who has lobbied government and now works for a key space flight contractor. “I don’t think the public is actually fully across it, and neither is the government.”

To understand the present moment, some history is useful.

NASA put Neil Armstrong on the moon in 1969. But by 1972, the expensive moon landing program was over – a victim, in part, of waning public interest and attention.

The same thing happened to the Space Shuttle program: because we could see a miracle happening, repeatedly, on our televisions, the miracle itself began to seem routine. “It got blasé,” one TV reporter told The New York Times.

In The Simpsons, NASA becomes so desperate to arrest the TV ratings slide for its launches that it sends Homer to space. “The public see our astronauts as clean-cut, athletic go-getters,” one NASA boffin says in the episode. “They hate people like that.”

But with space, there’s always the potential for the blasé to turn spectacular – such as the return of astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams on Wednesday after nine months stranded on the International Space Station.

The landing became a global audience event, covered on every channel and website. As popcorn viewing, it had it all: the narrative tension of the orbital rescue, the drift to earth, the long wait for the door to open.

And there was a great subplot: Boeing, the venerable aerospace contractor, bungling the initial flight and leaving the pair stranded in orbit – only a few months after the company’s 737 MAX aircraft was grounded (again) over safety concerns. Musk’s SpaceX, Boeing’s upstart rival, brought the pair back safely.

Finally, there was the imagery of the splashdown live feed. The glittering blue water off the coast of Florida. The pod of dolphins jumping from the water and circling the craft. Better, surely, than NASA’s PR department could have hoped for.

And it has a lot more that’s just about to roll out. If all goes according to plan, NASA’s Artemis III mission will return astronaut boots to the moon in 2027.

“We haven’t done something like this since the ’70s,” says the space insider. “To think what it might mean to turn on the TV, and in HD – not your grainy Neil Armstrong vision. What is that going to do cognitively to the state of our nation?”

This is the challenge for Australia’s industry: to be ready to capture the coming surge in public and government attention on the final frontier.

At the tip of the Eyre Peninsula in South Australia sits a facility emblematic of Australia’s current space situation.

There, at a place called Whalers Way, launch-service provider Southern Launch has constructed a fully instrumented launch pad complete with a 16.8-metre linear launch rail. The pad offers launchers the ability to fly due south, over the Southern Ocean, before bursting up into an orbit across the north and south poles – a highly sought-after orbit because it allows a spacecraft to cover the entire earth as the globe spins.

Since 2021, three launch attempts have been made from the pad. None has successfully made it into orbit.

“And this is it, right? Space is incredibly hard. You’re dealing with incredibly powerful machines. Lots of launch attempts don’t go according to plan,” chief executive Lloyd Damp says.

Yet, these failures are a necessary step toward success, he says. Southern Launch is now building a larger, permanent launch pad and has so many customers it is already having scheduling difficulties.

“We are being inundated,” Damp says. “It’s the perfect time for space, globally.”

Sally-Ann Williams, CEO of deep tech innovator Cicada Innovations, sees a similar story: an industry on the cusp of success. “I have great hope we are starting to see some real traction.”

Cicada has supported more than 82 space companies, which have raised more than $52 million in funding between them. Most promisingly, she’s starting to see some Australian companies, such as satellite mineral mapper Fleet Space, succeed globally and become “anchor tenants” with long local supply chains.

Cicada runs the National Space Industry Hub, funded with $2.1m from the NSW government in 2022. But taxpayer support for the industry has been inconsistent in the past decade.

The Albanese government has cancelled both a $1.2 billion civilian and a $7 billion military satellite construction program. These cuts “took the air out of the balloon the space industry was growing with”, says the industry insider.

The sector remains uncertain about its future, they say. “This is like a scar that has never healed.”

The decision to cut the military satellite program is perhaps most puzzling to the industry given the increasing likelihood of space-based conflict.

“The Americans call it a war-fighting domain,” defence analyst Malcolm Davis, from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, says. “We have to go down this path.

“The Chinese are busily building a full range of counter-space capabilities designed to attack our satellites. We have to be ready to defend our satellites. Because they will use them from the outset or even prior to a war.”

When John F. Kennedy announced America’s ambitions to land on the moon in 1962, he “vowed that we shall not see it governed by a hostile flag of conquest, but by a banner of freedom and peace”.

That hope is fraying. America claims Russia deployed anti-satellite weaponry to orbit last year; US space command this week accused the Chinese of practising “dogfighting in space”.

“Every country is racing toward establishing space as a higher strategic ground,” says Rajat Kulshrestha, co-founder of Space Machines Company. “The current geopolitical climate, in my view, is going to increase our emphasis on growing sovereign capability and self-reliance.”

Space Machines has developed and launched a “very lean, powerful” satellite, the Optimus Viper, capable of swooping towards and manoeuvring around larger satellites. It has one in orbit and hopes to deploy an entire network. “It can act as a first responder,” says Kulshrestha. “It’s like having a security guard in front of a facility.”

If the industry is going to excite Australians about space – a necessary step if it wants government support – there is an acceptance it needs to do more than build small satellites.

“These aren’t inspirational. They are gimmicks, they are university experiments. It’s not enough,” the space industry insider says.

Australia needs its own rockets. Which brings us back to Gilmour and his Eris rocket.

Eris is a 25-metre, three-stage rocket that sits atop five Sirius hybrid engines – capable of boosting 215 kilograms up into space. Theoretically. Most new space companies take three or four launches to get their first rocket up, Gilmour says.

“It’s very hard to test an orbital rocket without just flying it,” he says. “We don’t have high expectations we’ll get to orbit. I’d personally be happy to get off the pad.

“[Elon Musk’s] Starship explodes, debris rains down. And within six weeks they get another permit to do another one. Here we are, we’ve done all the risk-hazard analysis … we still don’t have the final approval.”

A spokesman for the Australian Space Agency said Gilmour was still working to “close out several licence conditions prior to launch”.

“Global experience demonstrates designing, manufacturing and safely operating a first-of-type orbital space launch vehicle is a complex undertaking, often involving unanticipated delays.”

And without a test flight, Gilmour can’t raise more money. To capitalise on space’s growing momentum, he says, Australia needs to move faster and take more risks. Otherwise, he says, it’s staring at a failure to launch.

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