Australian launch company Southern Launch<\/b> recently completed two back-to-back suborbital launches, marking Australia\u2019s first commercial launches, a milestone that brings Australia closer to having access to space.<\/p>\n
On Sept. 19, Southern Launch launched a DART rocket from the Koonibba Test Range northwest of Ceduna in South Australia at 10:09 a.m. local time. Less than two hours later, a second launch was completed at 11:49 a.m. These were the first launches to take place from the range. <\/p>\n
The DART launch vehicle was built by rocket manufacturer T-Minus Engineering<\/b>, which is based in the Netherlands. It is about 11 feet long (3.4 meters) and weighs about 75 pounds (34 kg). The rocket carried a prototype radio frequency receiver for the Royal Australian Air Force<\/b>, developed by Australian company DEWC Systems<\/b>. According to a release from the Australian Minister for Defence, the rocket launch is part of the Air Force\u2019s Plan Jericho, a sensing program to detect and track challenging targets. The program also includes high altitude balloon launches. <\/p>\n
A recovery effort is currently underway to locate the DEWC-SP1 payloads and DART rocket stages.<\/p>\n
Southern Launch CEO Lloyd Damp said this was a first step toward Australia once again being a space-capable nation. <\/p>\n
\u201cToday Southern Launch demonstrated our ability to launch our first space capable rocket, and within two hours, launch another rocket. This demonstrates our ability to provide a future responsive space access to DEWC Systems and our broader customer base,\u201d Damp commented. <\/p>\n
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Australian launch company Southern Launch recently completed two back-to-back suborbital launches, marking Australia\u2019s first commercial launches, a milestone that brings Australia closer to having access to space. On Sept. 19, Southern Launch launched a DART rocket from the Koonibba Test Range northwest of Ceduna in South Australia at 10:09 a.m. local time. Less than two […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":58957,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-58956","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58956"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=58956"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58956\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/58957"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=58956"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=58956"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=58956"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}