Registration and exhibition open
Welcome remarks from MC
Welcome remarks
Welcome remarks
Opening address
Opening address
Morning tea
Registration and exhibition open – breakfast/networking
Welcome remarks from MC
International keynote address
Ronald Caton, Space Security and International Partnerships Mission Area Lead at the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL), will present an overview of the AFRL’s space science and technology portfolio. This address will highlight how the AFRL is postured to support the United States Space Force’s technical requirements, and outline key opportunities for collaboration and international engagement across the space domain.
Main stage individual address
From opportunity to imperative: The critical window for a strategic approach to Australia’s risks and opportunities in space
Morning tea
As global defence demands rise, sovereign capability has become a national priority. While Australia's space manufacturing sector is maturing, scaling local manufacturing, securing critical inputs, and strengthening SME pathways remains a critical challenge.
This session sets forth specific priorities for manufacturing and integrating space systems.
You'll leave with a clear understanding of how to position your organisation for growth as the industry moves to reduce its foreign dependencies and build a reliable, sovereign supply network.
The AUKUS alliance is set to redefine Australia's defence and space landscape, creating new opportunities for technology transfer, capability building, and industry collaboration. But lingering indecision in the US has injected anxiety into the relationship.
This session addresses how Australia is navigating these consequential international partnerships.
You'll gain insight into the challenges and opportunities that these alliances bring to bear on local industry.
Australia's unique geography has positioned it as a potential launch leader, but reaching this level of influence requires ecosystem-wide collaboration and investment. Ground segment infrastructure, from spaceports to connectivity hubs, is critical to building this national capability.
This session weighs the drivers for demand against barriers in Australia's launch economy.
You'll leave with a better understanding of the market opportunities that are emerging as our launch and supporting infrastructure hungers for growth.
Rapidly evolving macro-economic trends – geopolitics, geoeconomics, ESG, trade and digitalisation, along with an increasingly complex regulatory environment, are having a big impact on decision making and legal analysis in the space industry.
Mallesons legal experts, Annabel Griffin and Lauren Bourke will unpack how national interest themes are influencing the current regulatory environment surrounding the space industry and how that can impact your business, including:
As Australia's space sector scales, legal frameworks, finance access, and sustainability standards are becoming key enablers of sovereign growth. These ancillary services must be capable of supporting complex, high-value programs with global accountability.
This session asks how legal, financial, and ESG frameworks are evolving to enable global competitiveness.
You'll learn how to better leverage regulatory, financial, and ESG tools to unlock growth, secure investment, and build more resilient operations.
Breakthroughs in propulsion, hypersonics, and advanced materials are challenging military assumptions and reshaping the strategic potential of Australia's space sector.
In this session, we'll unpack the latest critical technical developments and their near-term application pathways.
You'll leave with the latest insights from frontier and be better equipped to align your R&D and technical programs with national capability priorities.
Autonomy and onboard intelligence are essential as missions extend in complexity and distance. From in-orbit servicing through to lunar operations, this session explores how AI is being used to manage mission planning and real-time decision making beyond human oversight.
You'll leave with a clear understanding of how to integrate autonomy into upstream design and operations, and where the most investable use cases are emerging.
Talent shortages remain a critical bottleneck to Australia's space sector growth, with competition intensifying across technical, engineering, and defence-adjacent roles. Addressing this challenge requires co-ordinated action across education, industry, and government.
This session sets out the practical steps required to expand the space workforce.
You'll leave with actionable workforce strategies to help you attract, develop, and retain the next generation of space professionals.
The year 2015 saw the final test of Einstein's theory of gravity, general relativity, with the direct detection of gravitational waves by the LIGO interferometers.
In the decade since, gravitational waves have become an important part of the astronomer's toolkit, especially as a way to detect and study merging black holes.
In this address, Sharan Banagiri traces that explosive decade of discovery, summarising the detections of gravitational waves and black holes and all that we have learned from them.
Sharan will highlight Australia's pivotal role in the detection of gravitational waves and its deep involvement in this research, before leaving you with a vision toward the future: space-based gravitational-wave detectors.
The convergence of defence and commercial space technologies brings both enormous opportunity and complexity. While dual-use innovation accelerates capability, it also raises ethical, security, and market challenges.
In this session, we look at the complex interchange of transitioning defence technology for commercial markets and vice versa.
You'll leave better equipped to navigate the commercialisation pathways, compliance risks, and investment trends that are shaping Australia's dual-use future.
Space-based technologies are increasingly central to Australia's defence and national security strategies, from SATCOM to real-time surveillance. But gaps still remain in our sovereign SATCOM capability and resilience – gaps that Defence is actively seeking information from industry to address. This session weighs our current capabilities against emerging and future needs to identify commercial pathways to support defence and security.
You'll gain a clear view of where market opportunities lie in supporting defence objectives and enhancing Australia's security posture.
In May 2026, a team from the Queensland University of Technology's Aerospace Society successfully developed and launched SATypus-ONE, a fully undergraduate student-built CubeSat carrying a host of sensing systems and dual gamma-ray spectrometers aboard a suborbital rocket with the Swedish Space Corporation. In this talk, Luc Fichera will present the mission's biggest successes and the lessons learned along the way. Through this story, Luc hopes to share insights on what this mission means for the next generation of students, both at tertiary and secondary level, who are considering a career in space, and how we as an industry can better support them.
As the global space sector becomes increasingly internationalised, collaboration is no longer optional — it is essential. In an increasingly contested and technologically competitive
environment, trusted international partnerships are becoming a critical enabler of sovereign capability, innovation, and participation in the global space economy. From Earth observation
and climate resilience to lunar exploration, advanced manufacturing, and sovereign capability, international partnerships are shaping the future of the global space economy.
This session will explore how Australia can leverage international partnerships to accelerate sovereign capability, commercial growth, research collaboration, and participation in global
supply chains. Moderated by Lisa Vitaris, the panel will bring together international representatives from key partner nations to discuss:
Importantly, the discussion will focus on practical outcomes and opportunities for the Australian ecosystem — particularly SMEs, researchers, startups, investors, and government stakeholders looking to expand internationally.
In an increasingly complex global environment, national security has become a topic of growing interest and importance for Australians. Find out how the National Security TAFE Centre of Excellence collaborates with industry, TAFEs, universities, and government to develop training solutions to build a national security mindset and build the workforce to manufacture critical technologies and capabilities.
Australia’s space economy is gaining momentum, with growing private investment, new market entrants, and expanding export potential. But scaling requires more than technical capability.
This session is designed to build your commercial readiness.
You’ll leave with practical strategies to attract investment, access global markets, and grow your organisation’s position in the expanding space economy.
The rapid expansion of space activity is escalating congestion, debris risks, and regulatory complexity. Without co-ordinated action, these threats will undermine commercial operations and national interests.
This session shares risk management strategies and commercial obligations for operating sustainably in space.
You’ll gain critical knowledge on evolving regulatory frameworks and the commercial implications of responsible space operations.
Space-enabled monitoring, communications, and data services are revolutionising disaster response, environmental management, and critical infrastructure resilience. But to realise the potential of earth observation data, including wider business applications, we need to find ways to democratise access to this vital resource.
In this session, we look at ways to bring together a fragmented EO landscape to better frame co-ordinated responses to societal challenges.
You'll learn how to secure access to critical EO data, and gain a deeper understanding of the market opportunities in space-enabled services
Despite strong technical capability, Australia's downstream space sector faces a coordination challenge: data, developers, and end-users need to align, but the connective tissue between them remains weak.
This session maps the partnerships, platforms, and incentives needed to scale impact across Australia's EO, communications, and analytics markets. We'll explore what it takes to build the connective infrastructure that links innovation to scalable delivery.
You'll discover where market-building initiatives are most needed, and what work is being done to connect the downstream ecosystem.
AIAA is a globally recognised aerospace technical society with a growing presence in Australia through its local sections and volunteer-led activities. This short session will introduce AIAA’s role as a professional community connecting industry, academia, government, students and early-career professionals across aviation, space and defence.
The focus will be on how AIAA supports knowledge sharing, technical exchange, mentorship, and meaningful professional connections, while contributing to a stronger and more inclusive aerospace community in Australia.
As Australia considers the opportunity to send Australian astronaut Katherine Bennell-Pegg on a future mission with the European Space Agency, this session explores a far bigger question: how can human spaceflight be leveraged to accelerate Australia’s sovereign capability, research excellence, workforce development, and global competitiveness?
With the rise of the Artemis era, commercial space stations, lunar exploration, and growing geopolitical competition in advanced technologies, human spaceflight is increasingly becoming an economic and strategic capability issue — not simply a scientific endeavour.
This panel will explore how Australia can maximise these opportunities and ensure the benefits extend far beyond a single mission. This is not simply about sending an astronaut to space. It is about determining whether Australia intends to participate in the next generation of the global space economy – or watch it from the sidelines.
Moderated by Lisa Vitaris, the discussion will bring together leaders from academia, government, industry, and workforce development to unpack how human spaceflight can act as a catalyst for:
Importantly, the session aims to move beyond inspiration and provide attendees with a practical, cross-sector call to action — outlining how organisations can position themselves to participate in and benefit from the momentum generated by human spaceflight.
Satellite networks are evolving rapidly, driven by mega-constellations, real-time data, and closer integration with terrestrial systems. As capability expands, so does complexity.
This session explores the growing challenge of interference across space-based communications and sensing systems, from broadband LEO networks to navigation and radar payloads, unpacking why interference in orbit behaves differently to terrestrial environments and why traditional approaches to spectrum management are no longer fit for purpose.
Led by Professor Akram Al-Hourani of RMIT University, a recognised leader in satellite communications, radar, and spectrum sensing, the session will also examine the next frontier of space situational awareness, including spectrum sensing, RF fingerprinting, and Doppler-based techniques to identify and authenticate spaceborne emitters.
Drawing on more than two decades across industry and academia, the discussion will highlight the role of advanced modelling and simulation in enabling resilient, secure, and scalable satellite operations.
Australia’s space sector can only reach its potential with a workforce that reflects the full diversity of its society.
This session isn’t about establishing the need – we know that building inclusive pathways is both a social and commercial imperative for the industry. It’s about testing strategies to attract, support, and retain the diverse talent needed to future-proof the space industry.
You’ll leave armed with practical strategies for building diverse, sustainable talent pipelines in your organisation.
Beyond launch: Building a resilient space ecosystem through technology acceleration, collaboration and shared capability
The global space sector is entering a period of profound transformation. While technological innovation continues to accelerate, many emerging space economies face increasing challenges from geopolitical uncertainty, shifting government priorities, constrained investment environments, supply chain vulnerabilities and growing international competition.
For Australia, the question is no longer whether we can participate in the global space economy. The question is how we build an ecosystem capable of sustaining growth, innovation and sovereign capability over the long term.
In this address, James Palmer, CEO of Space Centre Australia, bridges perspectives from commercial aerospace, scientific research, launch infrastructure and advanced technology development to show how nations, organisations and research institutions can create interconnected capabilities that are greater than the sum of their individual parts.
The new industrial frontier: Low Earth Orbit, commercial manufacturing, and Australia's moment
Over the past two decades, low Earth orbit has undergone a quiet but profound transformation — from a domain of national space agencies conducting scientific experiments to an emerging industrial platform where companies are designing, manufacturing, and validating products that can only be made in microgravity.
Dr. Ioana Cozmuta has witnessed this transition firsthand: from her work on NASA missions including Stardust, Mars Science Laboratory, and ISS commercialization, to becoming a serial entrepreneur who has built two companies spanning the full arc of in-space manufacturing — from actual production of materials in orbit to the AI-powered platform that helps industry design, optimize, and scale microgravity manufacturing processes.
In this address, Dr. Cozmuta will map the arc of LEO's industrial expansion, identify where the next decade of opportunity lies, and make the case for why the international community — and Australia in particular — must act now to secure its place in this emerging economy. With Katherine Bennell-Pegg qualified and ready for an ISS mission, Australia stands at a rare inflection point: the chance to not just participate in the LEO economy but to shape it.
Closing remarks from MC
Post-event networking
Keynote address
Closing remarks from MC
Event close
If you're interested in speaking at the event, please contact Jack via email.
*Agenda subject to change