Australia’s recently confirmed space agency now has an officially announced home: Adelaide!
Specifically, the former site of the Royal Adelaide Hospital on North Terrace! Right opposite the new tram stop! Nice!
Adelaide might seem like a weird place to base the national space agency but there are a bunch of reasons why it got chosen – some more obvious than others.
Adelaide, this morning.
Yes, Australia’s only astronaut – Andy Thomas – called the city home. Yes, the only launches that Australia ever carried out were done in SA (in the isolated township of Woomera, to be specific, although that site is now unsuitable for a bunch of largely tech-related reasons and is now a RAAF site in any case).
And yes, new electoral boundaries and the federal government’s unpopularity has made Defence Minister Christopher Pyne’s margin rather less comfortable than he’d like in the seat of Sturt, so a bit of pre-election pork barrelling isn’t going to go astray.
National Space Agency announced by Scott Morrison pic.twitter.com/V11UZu8iE5
— James Jeffrey (@James_Jeffrey) December 12, 2018
But one other little fun fact of which people are not necessarily aware is that Adelaide’s also home to most of the big players in the military tech industry, which will have a lot of space biz applications.
Yeah, that’s right: Adelaide’s the city equivalent of a super-spy, seeming all nondescript and yet full of secrets and able to kill you without breaking a sweat. That’s how A-town rolls, fam.
Adelaide, this afternoon.
In any case, the new site will be operational as of mid-2019 and also house a bunch of other tech and science organisations including the CSIRO and Geoscience Australia.
So it’ll be a pretty nice little science-hub, really – and so conveniently close to the zoo, in case they want to launch any more monkeys into space!