Young Australian Skeptics

So, following on from out discussion in episode nineteen of The Pseudo Scientists, I thought it might be good to talk a little bit more about space science and technology in Australia.

Perhaps you’ve heard of the Australian Space Research Institute, or ASRI, which was established in the early 1990s. Unlike space agencies in most industrialized countries, ASRI is not actually an official space agency — the Institute is a not-​​for-​​profit organisation run entirely by volunteers. Basically, the government says they’re not interested in having a space agency, so some of Australia’s academics, scientists, engineers and technologists with relevant expertise said, screw this, we’ll just go and make our own unofficial space agency with essentially negligible funding. Basically, the objective of ASRI is to work towards obtaining secure and economically accessible access for Australians to space-​​related technologies and services in a way that can be taken seriously in the global space science and technology arena, and to develop opportunities for Australia in space-​​related science, technology and industry.

There is also some research into space technology and advanced aeronautics at Australia’s universities to a small degree, such as the work done in the Center for Hypersonics at the University of Queensland, and the space power and propulsion systems work done at ANU, involving such really cool things as the (for example) Helicon Double Layer Thruster.

There’s also the recently formed Lunar Numbat collaboration, which is sort of a small, unofficial sub-​​fork of ASRI, if you like. Lunar Numbat is a team of Australians and New Zealanders who use their skills to develop technologies, in keeping with open source philosophies, to partner with the Google Lunar X-​​Prize team White Label Space. Why? So as to put a Linux powered robotic Australian marsupial on the moon!
(Well, it won’t really be a numbat; that’s just a symbol.)

The Google Lunar X-​​Prize (GLXP) is US$30 million up for grabs for the first privately funded moon rover to land safely, rove 500 meters across the lunar surface and send high definition pictures and video back to Earth. But isn’t it really, really hard to go to the moon? Yes, but we do not endeavor to do it because it is easy. Of course, if you were to actually go to the moon, you’d be pretty lucky of US$30 million actually paid all your costs off.

Lunar Numbat is developing innovative mission-​​critical technology as a partner to White Label Space, and in the process aims to lower the barrier to entry to space science by using and developing our own expertise in the development of more cost competitive and flexible open-​​source technologies as the technological basis of getting in to space.

Tags: Australia, Politics, Science, Space

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 13th, 2009 at 10:00 am and is filed under Luke Weston, Science, Skeptic, Space. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.