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A new space race is underway in a quiet corner of Western Australia as the Mid West town of Mingenew moves to establish an international space industry.
Key points:
- Space organisations find WA Mid West town of Mingenew to be the ideal location because it's a declared radio quiet zone
- This means there's no background interference, which helps satellite tracking
- The local council says, for the area to really lift off, the local fibre-optic cable needs to be upgraded
Capricorn Space is the latest major space organisation to be based on the outskirts of Mingenew in a bid to capture information from the sky.
Chief executive Mark Thompson said the commercial ground station downloaded data from orbiting satellites, selling the information to other companies.
"When your satellite passes over our station we have the ability to track that satellite as it comes above the horizon, as it passes overhead and goes down the distant horizon, and we can take the data off your satellite and ship it to you via the internet, and provide that as a service," he said.
"So that's ground segment as a service and we'll provide that to a number of operators around the world.
"It enables the tracking of aircraft and marine activity in all parts of the world."
For companies like Capricorn Space, Mingenew is an ideal location to access satellite data because it hosts a declared radio quiet zone stretching for hundreds of kilometres.
"Mingenew has been designated a satellite park by the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA), so it's a go-to location for people like Capricorn Space who want to establish a ground segment service," Mr Thompson said.
"It's radio quiet, there's no background interference, and it's very easy to get licences also from the ACMA because we're going to the region they've decreed."
Space base in the bush
Mingenew Shire chief executive Nils Hay hoped the radio quiet zone will attract other stargazing and data-sourcing companies to create a space-based industry in the region.
"There's actually some nationally, internationally significant work happening up there, which often goes unnoticed," he said.
Nestled among wheat paddocks, the region already hosts a number of space organisations.
The Australian Maritime Safety Authority has a facility in the radio quiet zone that receives emergency beacon signals via satellite that are fed through a computer network to its headquarters in Canberra.
Mr Hay said the Swedish Space Corporation is located in the area servicing several international government agencies, including NASA.
"Geoscience Australia also have a facility out there that celebrated its 40th birthday this year … it's actually the most productive facility of its type in the world."
The region is traditionally known for grain crops, but Mr Hay said Mingenew Shire was looking to diversify the local economy to ensure the sustainability of the town.
"I think like a lot of small towns in our position, if you look at historical growth figures, a lot of us are in decline," he said.
"Agricultural technology has improved and farms have grown over the past few years, so that has brought with it the unfortunate side effect that … the number of people you need to run a farm is going down and that has a knock-on effect on the size of the community.
"That radio quiet zone and that space and satellite-tracking facility is something that is uniquely ours and we are keen to capitalise on it."
Community benefit
Mr Hay said it was hard to put a dollar figure on the economic benefit of the region's space industry.
"You can probably measure in terms of the number of people — for us one family in town is significant," he said.
"That means it's a couple more people who are shopping at the shop, it's potentially a couple of children in the school, a couple more people playing football or netball in one of our local teams."
But before the industry can really lift off, Mr Hay said the local fibre-optic cable, which is critical for data transport, needed to be upgraded.
"There's an existing fibre-optic cable, which runs near the facilities and effectively it's at capacity," he said.
"When you consider you have facilities for NASA, when you consider we are firing lasers off of things thousands of kilometres into space and back, it's almost a bit embarrassing that we don't have better comms out there."
Mr Hay said the shire was working with the Mid West Development Commission to determine the infrastructure needed to build the industry.
"Then obviously it's a case of working with and lobbying the State and Federal Governments to try to find ways to fund that."
Topics: science-and-technology, astronomy-space, space-exploration, regional-development, local-government, human-interest, geraldton-6530, mingenew-6522