Any child who has gazed up at a star-filled night sky can sense a call to explore. Why should we answer it?
Space exploration is a crucible for human development.
It cultivates valuable qualities: curiosity, ingenuity, resilience, cooperation, imagination, endurance. It requires we build great observatories on Earth and in orbit, deploy robotic investigators to the surface of neighbouring planets, and send human explorers – human minds – ever further into the cosmos. Through space exploration, we enrich ourselves, deepening our understanding of the universe and our place within it. From our deeper understanding, we derive meaning and purpose.
Space exploration is a fundamentally optimistic enterprise. It poses lofty goals, challenges us to excel, fosters peaceful international collaboration, and rewards those who dare. It provides impetus for technological innovation at the cutting edge of human capability. Through exploration, we expand our potential and find solutions to problems here on Earth. A society that encourages and supports young people to pursue their ambitions in space will benefit from a generation that is more ambitious, more capable, and ever more confident in the future.
We must connect aspiring young Aussies with the right education and career opportunities, and nurture their drive to do great things on Earth, in orbit, and on the surface of other worlds.
Right now, in Australia, we are well positioned to embark on this effort. Activity within our home-grown space community is rapidly expanding and diversifying. In the Civil Space Strategy 2019 – 2028 the Australian Space Agency anticipates a tripling in the size of the national sector, generating somewhere in the order of 20,000 additional jobs by the end of this decade.
Already, we are witnessing orbital launch capability return to Aussie soil; beneath starry Murchison skies we are hosting the world’s largest radio-astronomy observatory; new research centres are advancing off-Earth habitation (e.g. ARC Centre of Excellence Plants For Space); and, very recently, astronaut Katherine Bennell-Pegg has made history in completing her training under the Australian flag. International agreements have aligned us with humanity’s imminent return to the Moon and ambitions to reach Mars. Soon, an Australian industry consortium will build and operate a robotic rover to explore the lunar surface.
Essentially, local opportunities in the space domain have never been more numerous and more varied, so it is an exciting time to be a young person seeking a career in this field. We are at a crucial point in history for the next generation of Australians to make great strides in space. The Southern Skies Project is a small but important part of the effort to let them know.
Featured image: credit NASA / JPL-Caltech. Saturn photographed by the Voyager 1 probe in 1980. Voyager 1 was the first human-made object to cross the heliopause and enter interstellar space. As of April 2025, on dwindling power, it continues to report data, travelling ever deeper into the cosmos.
