Dr Katherine Bennell-Pegg

So the real philosophy is

as commercial as possible, as government as necessary, because that's how you get the best use of the tax dollars.

When private industry is able to deliver a service and they can do it more efficiently, the same as the industries on Earth, that tends to make sense in a lot of cases.

So what we're seeing is in orbits closer to Earth, which are a little bit easier to handle because it's lower radiation, we're seeing a lot more commercial activity, particularly from Elon Musk.

When we're going further afield out to the moon, it's still very much a government domain because it's so new.

The commercial benefits are going to come, but in time, once a lot of the technology risks have worked out, government, no, is still the primary customer of most things in space, even of things like Starlink because they're used to support countries and militaries as well, versions of them are.

Yeah.

government is still the market maker around the moon, even though private companies are being funded to develop capability.

So when we look at Artemis, right, this is looked at as a government program, but it was prime contractors that developed the vehicles.

When we look at more commercial activities like SpaceX, and SpaceX will be involved in Artemis, they are involved and they are involved in the space station.

As soon as they're able to deliver a service, then government would prefer to pay for that service.

But at the moment, this is the US government, right?

So it's not really a private or public.

It's private and public.

And I see it more as the industrialization of space rather than the commercialization of space.

What I find particularly interesting, though, is that here in Australia, we have startups that have found purely commercial markets from space.

Now, that's quite rare globally.

And I think it's because our space sector has really emerged over the last decade or so in a way that we've had to draw in talent from other industries.

So we have a good product market fit.

One example is Fleet Space Technology here in Adelaide.