Table 3: Planning funding for space and spatial initiatives in the 2020 Defence Strategic Update

This funding represents a strong opportunity for Australia’s space industry to participate in the development and delivery of solutions that meet future national security needs.

• The scale of this investment and the stated goals of the government related to Australian Industry impact a wide range of space and spatial technologies and systems. Australia needs to position its industrial sector to ensure these important future capabilities can be delivered, sustained and operated in an increasingly contested space environment.
• The increased funding identified for acquisition and sustainment will require increased employment in a range as space and spatial disciplines related to operation of space systems and data systems supporting geospatial intelligence and space situational awareness.

The Royal Commission into National Natural Disaster Arrangements found that better national coordination in response to natural hazards is needed. A series of recommendations supporting better decision making involve data management as applied to spatial data.

“Australian, state and territory governments should explore the feasibility and practicalities of developing and maintaining nationally consistent assessments and projections of the frequency, intensity and spatial distribution of natural hazards in Australia.”

The source of much of this data is earth observation satellites owned and operated by non-Australian entities . Submissions from every state and territory as well as the Bureau of Meteorology, CSIRO and Emergency Management Australia stated that improved data capabilities from sensors, including satellite-based sensors, was required [page 116 of report].

The report noted that recommendations for nationally consistent data for disaster information has been a recurring theme in reviews and enquiries since at least 2002.

Australia could strengthen and expand its national capabilities and capacity in areas that lead to increased resilience of critical infrastructure and national systems of importance. This growth could lead to greater development and exploitation of national intellectual property and contribute to national security outcomes.

Australia could also make stronger contributions (financial and in-kind) to selected international programs to guarantee access and create opportunities for local industry.

Perhaps one recent and highly relevant example which illustrates a number of the issues outlined above is in the use of information in relation to preparing and responding to bushfires. The National Natural Disaster Arrangements Royal Commission (Bushfires Royal Commission) made the following recommendations in their report, primarily within the chapter on supporting better decisions:

• Rec 4.1: Australian, state and territory governments should prioritise the implementation of harmonised data governance and national data standards.
• Rec 4.4: The National Disaster Risk Information Services Capability should include tools and systems to support operational and strategic decision making, including integrated climate and disaster risk scenarios tailored to the various needs of relevant industry sectors and end users.
• Whilst not a recommendation, the reports states that “Australian, state and territory governments should explore the feasibility and practicalities of developing and maintaining nationally consistent:
  
  • Assessments of frequency, intensity and spatial distribution of natural hazards in Australia, and
  • Projections of the frequency, intensity and spatial distribution of natural hazards in Australia.”
• The report also makes reference to GA’s Australian Exposure Information Platform (AEIP) as a tool to support decision makers understand state based exposure to natural hazards but notes that this tools does not currently provide information through a geospatial mapping layer. This tools and the underlying database, the National Exposure Information System (NEXIS), “.. should be maintained and improved”.
• Rec 4.7: Australian, state and territory governments should continue to develop a greater capacity to collect and share standardised and comprehensive natural disaster impact data.

The importance of GNSS PNT capability to the success of Australia’s future has been noted previously, for example in the Australian Civil Space Strategy, where it was identified as a high priority area for growth and investment, and the Australia Academy of Science’s (AAS) 2017: A vision for space science and technology in Australia.

Positioning data derived from GNSS is considered by ANZLIC as one of Australia’s fundamental data sets, and the AAS has commissioned a new working group for PNT. These all build on previous work started in 2012 to develop the Australian Strategic Plan For GNSS, which proposed a strategic direction for Australia’s PNT that would lead to significant benefits including ‘enhanced productivity, job creation, industry growth, the identification of new export markets, increased competitiveness, improved workplace safety, enhanced national security, strengthened international linkages and a dynamic R&D sector’.

Accordingly, the 2012 Strategic Plan set-out four strategic initiatives:

(1) Ensure leadership for the Australian GNSS community;

(2) Adopt a whole-of-nation approach to a sustainable, multi-GNSS-enabled positioning infrastructure;

(3) Mitigate vulnerabilities in existing and future GNSS infrastructure; and

(4) Capitalise on Australia’s unique geopolitical and geographic advantages.

While there has been significant progress within Australia since 2021 towards achieving these four objectives, there is still considerable opportunity from harnessing the future economic, social and environmental impacts of PNT, especially given the evolution of PNT applications, advances in GNSS constellations and their visibility across Australia, therefore it is felt that the time is right to renew the Strategic Plan.

Innovating new capabilities

• Developing a sovereign capability to monitor and assess both the state of error sources affecting GNSS (as will be realised through the Positioning Australia program) and its inherent integrity is critical not only for positioning and navigation but also for the multitude of applications requiring the timing component currently supplied by GNSS.
• Delivering novel GNSS products that further contribute to our understanding of the dynamic atmosphere for weather forecasting, climatological studies, and the behaviour of the ionosphere and space weather. These products, such as GNSS derived models of atmospheric density, could afford greater resilience to our sovereign PNT capabilities. Additionally, the dynamic impacts of atmospheric effects on PNT are also experienced by other sectors within the growth pillars (Earth Observation, Satellite Communications and Space Domain Awareness (SDA)), so clear collaborative partnerships and knowledge exchange pathways are required to ensure that findings are benefitted across all industry sectors.
• Developing products and services essential for ensuring assured GNSS information for mission-critical and safety-critical PNT applications such as automated industrial machines, robotics, driverless vehicles, aircraft and infrastructure dependent on timing. Inventing, developing and delivering Australia-specific critical PNT integrity messages especially ones pertaining to high accuracy PNT services (such as RTK and PPP), could later become an industry-leading innovation to export regionally and globally further raising Australia’s PNT reputation.

Improving infrastructure, mitigating vulnerabilities and assuring access

• Development of assured PNT capabilities for Australia – meaning one that is suitably protected and secured (with authentication and possibly encryption) – to deliver the required PNT performances under adverse conditions. Assured PNT impacts all aspects of space (both downward and outward looking), and the growing spatial sector.
• Cultivating resilience across our PNT capabilities to better protect against both unintentional and purposeful interference and spoofing across all segments, including but not limited to known incidents such as solar flares, cybersecurity breaches, erroneous almanac uploads and unlikely ‘black swan’ events.
• Design and implementation of sub-metre (and even decimetre-level) accuracy GNSS systems based on low-cost mass-market GNSS receivers, enhanced via emerging terrestrial 5G telecommunications infrastructure delivering augmentation information for enhanced accuracy and integrity. Ideally, these GNSS products would be developed locally and be fully compatible with Australian PNT information and services.
• Developing and facilitating the integration of space-borne GNSS receivers aboard Australian satellites to support more applications of small satellites for communications, earth observation and PNT, and even on missions beyond Earth orbit, for so-called space service volume navigation.
•  Augmenting the GNSS space segment, for example using select LEO satellites equipped with appropriate payloads, could provide increased availability of the more advanced PNT techniques (RTK, network RTK, SSR and PPP-RTK). Indeed the provision of sovereign PNT integrity messages (determined for Australia by Australia) transmitted by Australian space infrastructure, must be complemented by simultaneous transmission through secondary terrestrial communications as a robust delivery method.
• Collaborating across federal and state governments to incorporate PNT infrastructure (terrestrial and orbital) and generated services (corrections, integrity, interference) within the Critical Infrastructure Network as part of an ongoing Risk Assessment and Mitigation program.
• Develop real-time capability to detect, measure, geolocate and ultimately mitigate sources of interference and spoofing to GNSS across Australia and realise it as a ‘Nationwide GNSS Interference Monitoring Infrastructure’. Such an infrastructure could be hosted and coordinated between federal government and Defence, and report incidents of interference alongside ongoing integrity messages to the wider community, further facilitating the adoption and trust in PNT for Australia, by Australians.
• The successful augmentation of current GNSS with alternate (non-GNSS) PNT coming from emerging technologies promises even greater levels of resilience, robustness and trust around assured PNT for space and spatial sectors.

Australian expertise in reliable, power and bandwidth efficient satellite communication is contributing to new thinking about this legacy search and rescue system. The intent is to develop a new satellite communications protocols for a third-generation system featuring increased capacity, greater service reliability, two-way connectivity and improved location estimation.

There are opportunities to explore utilisation of emerging Australian technology through existing Cospas-Sarsat infrastructure and extension to new satellite developments and safety of life for space exploration, in partnership with the Australian Space Agency and NASA.

For example, it was recently announced that Australian research into advanced search and rescue technologies would contribute to the NASA Artemis LunaNet architecture .
Future phases of the SmartSat CRC collaboration could support exploration initiatives like the Artemis missions, which will return humans to the Moon for the first time since Apollo. NASA will equip Artemis astronauts with second-generation beacons for use if needed for egress from capsule after splashdown or a launch abort scenario. The Search and Rescue team is working to extend beacon services to the lunar surface with the LunaNet communications and navigation architecture.

Developing a contemporary implementation of a safety of life personal device that can be mass produced at low cost and with high reliability will create scope for Australian industry to lead international production and supply regional countries with personal beacons. Increased capacity in the overall system will enable new applications for emergency services and remote workforce. The ability to integrate contemporary consumer devices could allow Australian developers to generate new business models and identify new markets/customers.

Australia currently relies on about 20-25 remote sensing satellites for its imagery and sensing needs from space. None of these are Australian owned. With the nascent but growing space start-up industry in Australia now comprising at least 80 companies and the Australia SME sector set for substantial growth there is the opportunity to facilitate a coordinated dual use (civilian – defence) approach to the strategic design and deployment of a constellation of satellites that are built up over the next decade to service the high priority, sovereign needs of Australia.

For example, what is the optimum combination of optical, Near- Infra red (NIR), mid infra-red (MIR) for fire detection and monitoring both now, based on current capabilities, and over the next decade? Continuous monitoring of fires, at operational resolutions, inter-jurisdictionally and nation-wide during catastrophic fire seasons has proven a challenge for Australia. Could this be addressed by a geo-stationary satellite with optical, NIR, MIR and hyperspectral capabilities, with sensor(s) of sufficient ground resolution and signal to noise ratios, coupled with next generation on-board and terrestrial analytics? This is but one of many examples that can be put forward to illustrate the opportunity before Australia of moving from an opportunistic user of the satellites that others choose to launch and operate to a nation of strategic, long term intent.

There are many adjacent defence industries in electronic warfare and cyber defence that are well positioned to enter the space sector with the required skills, knowledge and clearances to make an impact by developing solution to protection Australian space systems. This will require acquisition of additional skills in space systems and technologies, potentially leading to employment growth.

Growth opportunities are expected for industry in protecting commercial infrastructure in Australia and internationally arising from skills development in response to Critical Infrastructure Protection legislation update.

The application of Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Deep Learning and Data Analytics in detecting anomalous behaviours, modelling system resilience and predictive management of complex systems to mitigate “grey-zone” operations in space.

By virtue of its geographic span from coast to coast and southern hemisphere location, Australia is uniquely placed to make valuable contributions to global efforts to better characterise objects in space (operational satellites as well as inactive satellites and space debris).

The establishment of a network of ground-based systems including optical (narrow field of view and wide field of view) sensors and radar (active and passive) systems which are tasked by a mission control system would be of real value. The observations would be stored in a unified data lake where they would be available for object characterisation, orbit determination and conjunction analysis.

This Space Domain Awareness (SDA) system would provide situational awareness for Australian space objects, allowing operators to manoeuvre satellites to avoid collisions with other resident space objects such as uncontrolled space debris. The network of sensors could form a dual use system which would meet Australian Defence and civil space requirements (thus addressing Australian space agency goals for SDA). Australia would also be able to contribute observations to international partners to assist with global efforts to improve SDA and contribute to efforts to better manage space debris.

The launch market is dynamic with continual efforts to improve access to space with more reliable and cost-effective launch capability. A key target is the small satellite market where a race to develop cost effective access to space is underway including by Australian companies.

Geography is a key factor for launch sites with proximity to the equator and ability to safely launch over open water or unpopulated areas to all launch azimuths from 0 to 98 degrees while minimising overflight of neighbouring countries. Australia is among the few nations that has this capability and is a good location for launch and testing of new vehicles. Australian companies are currently developing launch sites to capitalise on these advantages.

Another emerging opportunity is space tourism and point-to-point travel. Australia is well positioned to become the space tourism hub for Asia and be involved in the development of sub-orbital point-to-point travel, first for fast package delivery and subsequently for human travel around the globe in less than 90 minutes. SpaceX is well advanced with this concept with Australia considered a key initial location and the US military is now evaluating this as means of rapid supply and potentially troop movements globally. No country will benefit more from rapid intercontinental travel than Australia.

Finally, the US plans to return to the Moon, the goal being to harvest and transport space materials as well as the desire to reposition satellites to specific orbits are driving developments of orbital transport systems to move objects to and from LEO to MEO and GEO orbits, beyond GEO, Cis-lunar, Trans-lunar, the Lagrange Points and others. This includes the ability for subsystem recovery/re-use, space vehicle servicing, orbital transfer, orbital debris collection, and replenishment of consumables and expendables on spacecraft that cannot be recovered back to Earth (e.g., spacecraft inspection/servicing, refuelling, hardware maintenance, and technology upgrades) as well as on orbit assembly and sustainment of spacecraft. Australian companies are among many that are actively involved in these developments.