AUSMIN Announces Space Cooperation between the United States and Australia

As discussed in my previous article Space Surveillance Site to be Built in Western Australia, as part of the 25th Australia-United States Ministerial Conultations on the 8th of November 2010, Minister for Australian Foreign Affairs Kevin Rudd, Australian Minister for Defence Stephen Smith, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, and U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, have discussed the possibility of cooperation in Space Surveillance and Security.

In a sign of the increasing importance of Space in Australia - the "Joint Statement on Space Security" indicates "Australia and the United States both recognise that space systems have become critical national infrastructure."

"Australia intends to work with the United States to progress efforts to prevent long-lived debris-creating behaviour, and develop and implement transparency and confidence-building measures for enhanced stability and safety in space activities."

During the AUSMIN, Australian Defence Minister Smith and Defence Secretary Gates signed a "Space Situational Awareness Partnership Statement of Principles". This is also seen as a strengthening of Australia's already close relationship with U.S. Defence on issues of Space.

In practice, the US and Australia are considering a joint Space Surveillance facility which is likely to be built at the Harold E. Holt communications base at Exmouth in Western Australia. At the moment, it is likely that the facility would use Radar technologies, but may also include a component of Optical tracking. Australia is actually very well positioned, as there are likely some technology parallels with the Jindallee Over the Horizon Radar Network (JORN), and even more importantly, the technology that EOS has been working on would be an obvious candidate for development and inclusion.

What this will mean is the US will get much better tracking of Space objects in the Southern Hemisphere - currently underserved within the Space Surveillance field. Secondly, better tracking will in theory lead to fewer collisions in space, as well as better transparency of space objects internationally. Thirdly, it will give Australia a major boost in Space Survellance knowledge, as well as major developments in both technology and personnely related to Space. If such a facility is built, Australian defence will be significantly boosting their space capabilities, a good sign for the future.

In an interesting footnote, the joint statement includes " Complementing this work, Australia and the United States also noted the ongoing discussions on developing an Australia-United States Civil Space Cooperation Framework Agreement to take the long-standing civil space cooperation between the two countries to a higher level, strengthen collaboration and provide opportunities for early discussions on new developments. Australia and the United States reaffirmed their commitment to intensify space cooperation across a range of common interests and decided to review progress in this field at AUSMIN 2011."

Perhaps this is tied together with the current Australian Space Policy that is under development, or a broader cooperation framework with the US on Space. I guess we'll have to wait and see on that one.

More information about AUSMIN and the recent announcements can be found here.