By Adam Gilmour There is a space treaty being proposed in Parliament right now that sounds innocuous, but has the potential of being the biggest speed-bump/handbrake or ‘own goal’ for the Australian space industry. Tabled in Parliament on 28 February, the Technology Safeguards Agreement (TSA) between Australia and the United States essentially allows US rockets…
Orbital expects new drone engine model production in FY24 Drone engine manufacturer Orbital Corporation (Orbital UAV) has reported a fall in revenues in athe first half of FY24 however directors revealed a new engine model could be manufactured as early as April, 2024. The Perth company reported a net loss of $425,000, down 76 percent…
Australian satellite communications business Quasar Satellite Technologies is among seven companies selected to participate in the 13th Catalyst Accelerator, a program run by the US Air Force Research Laboratory Space Vehicles Directorate (AFRL/RV). Quasar has developed a technology based on CSIRO’s phased array research and is able to communicate with thousands of nanosatellites through one…
Agrimin’s $1 million tax rebate Minerals business Agrimin has announced receipt of a tax refund worth $1.0 million under the Research and Development Tax Incentive program, related to R&D expenditure incurred for the Mackay Potash Project during the year ended June 30, 2023. The refund includes eligible overseas R&D expenditure. Debbie Morrow, Managing Director and…
Not every mechatronics engineering student gets to have a billion-dollar idea. Xavier Orr did. It was the second-half of the 2000s, before the explosion in machine learning led by AlexNet and Google Brain. Rather than image classification, Orr was studying a neural network alternative to the Kalman filter. Kalman is an algorithmic technique used since the…
Sydney based space computing manufacturer Spiral Blue has announced a partnership with the University of Sydney for the ground-breaking TOLIMAN Space Telescope Mission – Australia’s largest space-based astronomical observatory. Now under construction, TOLIMAN is a 12.5cm space telescope that will be carried by a 16U CubeSat bus to a 550km sun-synchronous orbit when launched in…
The local space sector was shocked when the federal government cancelled the National Space Mission for Earth Observation (NSMEO). However, industry understands the government’s pivot, and still has a critical role to play in lessening Australia’s dependency on foreign countries for our space services, writes Andrew Mannix. Space underpins our technologically advanced way of life.…
The federal government recently cancelled a number of key space initiatives, including funding for the Access to Space and National Space Mission for Earth Observation programs. Rather than assess the merit of these decisions, I’d rather emphasise the importance of space to our country. By Adam Gilmour. You’ve probably heard this before… but space technology…
The new iLaunch (Innovative Launch, Automation, Novel Materials, Communications, and Hypersonics) Trailblazer, linking three universities with private businesses to commercialise space-oriented R&D, will be launched by federal assistant education minister Anthony Chisholm on Thursday. The Trailblazer initiative was part of the previous federal government’s efforts to increase commercial returns from university research, and was awarded…
QuantX Labs is leading a consortium of industry and academic teams in the KAIROS mission which will see a next-generation optical atomic clock launched into space. The clock, originally demonstrated at the Institute of Photonics and Advanced Sensing at the University of Adelaide, will be converted into a space-ready payload, thanks to new investment from…
