Dr Katherine Bennell-Pegg

And everyone wants to work with us.

I can tell you that when I went to train as an astronaut, that all the other space agencies were so excited about

that Australia was stepping up in its space ambition.

I mean, this is just the beginning for Artemis.

We've just had the first manned mission of many to follow.

And it's also the beginning of Australia's role in it.

For Artemis 2, which just went around the moon, just like in Apollo, Australia was critical for communications and tracking.

So when the astronauts went around the far side of the moon and then re-emerged, they were actually above Australia, right?

It was Australian operators that were waiting to reconnect and re-communicate with them.

During that blackout period you're talking about?

The Australian Space Agency co-funded with $4.5 million a new kind of space laser through ANU that is able to get lots more data down.

It's kind of like going from dial-up internet to broadband internet to get the data down.

So when we got those beautiful images back from the moon, they were sent through optical communications, which we did not have in Apollo.

But for future missions for Artemis, we're sending up hardware, a small rover, a

to the moon, which is going to showcase the best of Australia's robotics up there and set us up, if we wish to, to be able to provide a lot of scientific and industrial services on the moon.

We're the best in the world at operating complex mine sites here on Earth, lots of robots and automatic trucks and trains around each other and safely around humans.

And that's something that NASA's interested in having on the moon, not to mine it,

but to help set up a man base and do exploration safely.

And by being involved, Australia gets to show in a really visible way how good we are at building things and our science and gets to integrate with other global ecosystems and supply chains in ways that permeates across the full economy.

Apollo was the engine room for innovation of its era and