OPINION
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Since the 1960s, space has been a militarised environment, with major powers using the high frontier to support military operations on Earth. As the cost of accessing and using space has fallen, primarily due to innovation generated in the commercial sector over the last 20 years, more actors are now able to develop and use space capabilities to support their defence and national security activities.
More broadly, space has become an essential component of modern information-based economies and continued freedom of access to space is vital to the success of globalisation.
For Australia, there is a marked shift in recent years on how we think about the role of space.
For most of the period since the 1960s, we've provided a ground-segment of facilities for managing access to satellites, and more recently we have begun playing a very important role in space surveillance with the establishment of Space Situational Awareness facilities in Exmouth, WA. Yet we've eschewed the local development of satellites and the space launch capabilities to put them in orbit - until now.
The establishment of the Australian Space Agency in July 2018, to be headquarted in Adelaide, has transformed the debate about space in this country.
The space agency is not a mini-NASA that is building its own rockets and launching its own missions. Its primary task is to support the rapid growth of an Australian space industry sector, embracing what is known as Space 2.0 in which commercial sector space leads over government-run space activity. That sector is now includes many new space startups including companies building low-cost small satellites and even smaller cubesats.
Others are developing launch vehicles designed to put satellites into orbit and two prospective launch sites near Nhulunbuy, NT and Whalers Way, SA are being built.
The prospect of Australia building and launching its own satellites using its own rockets from its own spaceports is now very practical, and affordable, and will likely be realised within the next few years.
For defence, that opens up some interesting new possibilities. Rather than only providing ground facilities, the Australian Defence Force of the 2020s can develop its own space segment and begin to launch its own satellites on Australian launch vehicles from its own territory.
At the heart of this approach would be a move by the ADF to acquire a responsive space access capability, rather than rely on others to launch its satellites. Commercially provided launch vehicles and satellites both developed locally, and launched from Australian launch sites, would mean an ADF joint task force can be directly supported by sovereign Australian space capabilities on an as needed basis to boost operational capability and provide mission assurance.
Small satellites quickly developed using advanced 3D printing and mass production, could be launched in a matter of days once a mission requirement is determined.
That enables us also to burden share in orbit with allies, including the United States, and regional partners, by providing additional space capability to support expeditionary coalition operations.
In terms of understanding our air and maritime approaches, sovereign space capability will give both the ADF and Australian Border Force a much better ability to undertake the vital maritime domain awareness task of understanding shipping activity including to counter illegal fishing and people smuggling.
At a more fundamental level, there is a growing need to boost the resilience of space capabilities in the face of adversary anti-satellite capabilities emerging in China and Russia. Australia needs to support the US and its allies in the space deterrence mission, through augmenting existing US capabilities by deploying additional satellites, and secondly, through reconstituting lost capability in the event of an adversary using ASATs to deny the US and its allies, including Australia, access to space prior to, or at the outset of a future military conflict.
Having a sovereign responsive space capability, and a local satellite manufacturing industry, allows defence to play an important new mission alongside the US within the US-Australia alliance by strengthening deterrence against the use of space weapons by an adversary.
At the same time as boosting credible space deterrence, it's important for Australia to take the lead on strengthening space law and regulation to constrain the legal space that would enable would-be adversaries to use space weapons. The University of Adelaide's Woomera Manual project is one of the key global efforts underway to restrain the risks of space weaponisation.
Finally, it's important that the Department of Defence to reorganise with space in mind. The US has begun this process, re-establishing a US Space Command within the US Air Force, that is likely to become a Space Corps, in the same way the US Marine Corps exists within the US Navy.
Whether this ultimately then becomes an independent US Space Force - a concept favored by President Trump - will depend on whether Trump survives into a second term, but the US efforts are inspiring other allies to follow suit.
Both the United Kingdom and France are establishing their own defence space organisations, and Japan is moving down this path as well.
China has had its own form of a space force since 2015 with the PLA Strategic Support Force predating President Trump's proposed Space Force (announced in 2018), and Russia has similarly established an Aerospace Force.
With those shifts in mind, its time for Australia to reorganise defence and the ADF to recognise the importance of the space domain. Space is no longer merely a secondary enabler to traditional air, sea and land domains, but a warfighting operational domain, of equal importance other domains, including cyber.
Australian defence policy must explicitly recognise this - and the next defence white paper must make this reality crystal clear. That means there will need to be organisational restructuring within the Department of Defence to create a coherent and joint ADF Space Command, probably located within RAAF HQ.
An ADF Space Command should build upon links already established within the 2014 Combined Space Operations (CSpO) initiative within the five eyes community, and extend closer defence space cooperation to Japan, and potentially India and France.
Within an ADF Space Command, the collective expertise of defence space thinkers should be then be concentrated to shape a new defence space strategy document that is delivered at an unclassified level. Such a space strategy, alongside the Australian Space Agency's existing civil space strategy, would better enable Australia's commercial space sector to engage with ADF space needs in coming decades.
- Malcolm Davis is a senior Analyst in defence strategy and capability at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute.