Into orbit: Australia to exploit space for defence

The Defence Strategic Review calls for faster action in acquiring space systems, though it's skimpy on details.

Since January 2022, we have had a Space Command. It isn't a full military service, like the army; instead it provides space functions in cooperation with the three services. Because we don't have a lot of those functions yet, much of the command's current task is running projects to acquire capabilities.

There are three main things that armed forces do with space: communicating through satellites; observing things on the earth from orbit, to see what's going on; and observing other countries' satellites, to see what they're up to.

If a country can't do all that and doesn't have an ally that can, it will suffer a huge disadvantage in a war.

Because the US has been such an ally for us, space has traditionally not been a feature of Australia defence policy.

Now we are trying to establish space capabilities that supplement US systems, reduce our imposition on them, and give us some independence.

Since its establishment, Space Command has been under the authority of the chief of the air force, but the review called for increasing the organisation's effectiveness by shifting it to a cross-services support outfit called the Joint Capabilities Group.

The logic of this is not entirely clear, but part of the aim seems to be making the command fully separate from each of the armed services so it can develop a stable group of its own employees who see their careers developing within it.

Still, finding those people will be a great challenge, especially when the major sources of them, the three services, have their own personnel shortages, says Brett Biddington, a defence space researcher and former space policy official in Canberra.

"The commander of the JCG must have enough authority to create and retain a specialist space workforce," he emphasises.

Among the military uses of space, Australia is so far making most progress in the task of observing other countries' satellites from the ground.

On the far west coast, at Exmouth, WA, we have a radar and a telescope, both designed to observe satellites. They were provided to us by the US, which relocated them to Exmouth last decade because it evidently saw that they'd be more useful there.

Our western continental extremity happens to be on about the same longitude as Taiwan and the South China Sea. To observe that area, China uses satellites that go down one side of the earth then up the other. They cross the poles - and unavoidably pass close to Exmouth, from where the radar and telescope can peer up at them, working out where they're going and maybe what they can do.

Also, Exmouth, with fairly clear skies, is a good spot for scrutinising geostationary satellites - high-flying ones that circle the earth at the same rate as the planet's rotation and therefore seem to hang motionless above the equator.

We share data from the radar and telescope with the US.

Space Command's next step in monitoring what's up above will be to buy commercial observation data. Doing so will presumably give the command a wider of view of foreign satellites.

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That program step accords with a recommendation from the review: to put more emphasis on buying space capability off the shelf, getting it into service faster than can be done by the usually slow process of traditional military procurement.

Australia also has a project for putting up its own satellites to watch what's happening on earth - for example, seeing the movement of ships, the construction of bases, or the arrival of bombers at an airfield.

A defence acquisition plan published in 2016 allocated $3-4 billion for that effort, but the program disappeared from the document's 2020 update, and it gets not a whisper of a mention in the defence review.

It's probably going full steam ahead, however, since the Defence Department last year emphasised the project's importance and said work had been accelerated.

As a first step, Australia is acquiring earth-observation data from "commercial and other sources", the department said then.

As for satellite communications, Australia began partly paying its way 20 years ago. In 2003 we put military communications equipment in an Optus civilian satellite and in the following year agreed to contribute to a new American orbital comms system by paying for an extra spacecraft for it.

Now we're moving ahead with a project to launch our own dedicated military communications spacecraft. This is covered by a $4.6-6.9 billion funding allocation in the 2020 defence acquisition plan. The department said last month that US defence giant Lockheed Martin was the preferred tenderer.

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"Once delivered, the new system will increase the resilience, agility and flexibility of Defence's military satellite capability," the department says.

There's no sign of when it will be operational, however.

Australia also has a vaguely described project for what looks like jamming of foreign satellite communications in retaliation for any interference in our exploitation of space.

Peter Dutton, when he was defence minister, said the system would "detect and deter attempts to interfere with, or attack, our use of the space domain".

All these programs sound like great progress towards assembling highly effective military space capabilities, but in fact Australia is only at an early stage on the journey. For example, we're still far from assembling a range of capabilities that would justify upgrading the Space Command to create a Royal Australian Space Force.