Space: playing catch-up in the final frontier

It may surprise some readers, given its low profile, to know Australia has a space industry. What the industry lacks, though, is a coherent strategy to ensure that the services it supplies to this country are secure in increasingly turbulent times. That is now to be rectified, with the announcement this week that the government will set up an Australian space agency to guide the development of local space technology and industries. Well handled it should be a good move – but it comes rather late in the piece.

Australia was a partner with the United Kingdom from the 1950s in space research. This country was the third – after the United States and the then USSR – to launch a satellite built locally. Following that launch in 1967, though, Australia gradually lost interest in maintaining a comprehensive effort to develop space technology. We have kept our capabilities in some areas but let them lapse elsewhere, so that we now rely on others to design satellites which will serve Australian purposes, or to launch the satellites we have designed for ourselves.

Space is thus another in that mournful list of fields of expertise – photovoltaic cell production is another – where Australians have engaged early, innovated and progressed, but have lacked the support to maintain the effort and so have fallen behind the rest of the world. The reason often cited for our loss of interest is cost. With this week's announcement – made in time to avoid too much embarrassment at an international space conference in Adelaide – we are about to find out how much more it costs to catch up once an initial lead is lost.

Over the decades as Australia has marked time, other countries have seen the value of space industries, and have set up agencies to develop theirs. And the nature of the space industry has changed. Once it was the exclusive preserve of governments, for whom space technology was to a great extent a by-product of weapons research. Increasingly, though, commercial applications for satellite data have given the space industry far wider relevance within the national economy.

Australia already has more than 140 programs which rely on satellite data specifically about this country and its region. They cover areas such as weather forecasting and climate analysis, geographic observation, ocean monitoring, and natural disaster monitoring and mitigation. The data obtained is used by farmers, miners and government agencies which regulate their activities or respond to disasters, as well as researchers.

The economic benefits from just knowing what is going on in this vast continent are huge. One study (now seven years old) estimated that for a cost of about $104 million, the space programs then active returned about $3.3 billion to the economy. A more recent analysis by the ACIL Allen consulting group estimated the contributions, direct and indirect, to gross domestic product in 2015 were about $5.5 billion, and had generated about 15,000 jobs. Those figures would rise to $8.8 billion and 80,000 jobs by 2025. Worldwide the space industry is estimated to be worth more than $400 billion. We are yet to find out how Australia's space agency will work, or how it will be funded. But if it helps Australia obtain a larger share of that, it should be money well spent.