Framing the Futures of Australia in Space: Insights from Key Stakeholders

This report is a core output of the project Australia a Spacefaring Nation: Imaginaries and Practices of Space Futures, funded under the Australian Research Council’s Future Fellowship scheme (ft190100729) led by Juan Francisco Salazar, at Western Sydney University. This arc project investigates the challenges, opportunities, and implications of outer space as a site of economic, political, environmental, and cultural interest for Australia. This report presents key messages derived primarily from a set of 39 semi-structured interviews undertaken between October 2020 and May 2021 with 41 key actors in the Australian space sector. These actors represent a diverse range of perspectives from government, industry, science, law, and culture that constitute the space sector. The report explicitly aims to respond to the challenge of how to bring together the diversity that makes up the sector into a meaningful collective dialogue. The interviews were analysed between June and December 2021 together with a selection of relevant literature consisting of key industry reports, technical documents, and relevant opinion pieces. The writing and synthesis took place between October 2021 and February 2022. Following the ethics protocols of the project, all interview transcripts were anonymised and all selected extracts from the interviews have been de-identified in the report. The idea that guides this report is that space is a site of political, scientific, commercial, environmental, and cultural interest for Australia. Therefore, it is not a single domain of activities, nor there is a single collective vision about it. However, more than simply stating that space carries different meanings for various actors, our goal is to characterise that diversity and to provide elements to map it with the goal of enabling conversations across those meanings