The Gold Coast company produced a physical, to-scale column of regulation paperwork for the International Astronautical Congress (IAC) 2025 in NSW earlier this year.
IAC 2025 reportedly gathered more than 7,500 delegates from 99 countries to the International Convention Centre Sydney, including a Pacific delegation with ministerial representation from Cook Islands and Solomon Islands. In addition, more than 19,500 space enthusiasts of all ages reportedly attended the congress’ free Space Day on 3 October.
The week-long congress delivered thousands of technical, inspiring and futuristic presentations from more than 450 international and domestic exhibitors. Of note, the Australian Space Agency showcased a 4.6-billion-year-old sample from asteroid Ryugu.
“Essentially, you can see here in front of you a stack of paper. This is a visual representation of one of the sets of requirements and standards that we do. This is the European, it’s called ECSS (European Cooperation for Space Standardization), it’s the European Standards,” according to Starbound chief executive officer and co-founder Dr Sheila Gough Kenyon.
“This is everything that’s currently published, not everything that ever has been published, but everything that’s currently published. And this paper here, this is what tells us how to do things well.
“So ESA have 100 per cent success rate, ESA build things excellently and this tells us how to do it well, but it can slow us down if we’re trying to read through everything, every time, for every mission.
“These need to remain as they are because they’re complete, they have everything we need. We are offering a way to navigate you to the right points that they need to be paying attention to for specific missions.
“We use the term heat mapping. So if you are to upload details of what project you’re working on into our ‘Virgil’ system and Virgil can then heat map to you where you need to pay attention to, to really demonstrate to a regulator or to your customer or to your supply chain that you are compliant with what the best practice is.
“We have recently raised our first institutional funds and to have the backing of Queensland government financially, but also logistically to be here and to be supported by them has really made it possible for us as a small business to be here and to showcase the amazing products that we’ve built.”