Speaking as commander of Space Command, MAJGEN Novak wove together historical pride, doctrinal maturity and the hard fiscal and operational realities of a deteriorating strategic environment, framing space not as a niche capability but as a pillar of Australia’s national power.
MAJGEN Novak opened with a deliberate appeal to institutional memory, arguing that Australia’s space credentials are deeper than the sector often acknowledges. He traced the lineage from the 1967 Weapons Research Establishment Satellite (WRESAT), which he noted made Australia “the third country in the world to design, build and launch a sovereign satellite into orbit”, through Australian support for the Apollo program and on to Katherine Bennell-Pegg’s astronaut qualification under the Australian flag in 2024.
The historical canvas was not nostalgic but purposive: a foundation from which to press the urgency of contemporary action.
“Space is already critical to Australia’s economic prosperity, its security and its connection to the world,” he said, citing everything from banking networks and agricultural global positioning system (GPS) to the Canberra Deep Space Communication Complex’s unique role as the only ground station capable of communicating with Voyager 2 in interstellar space.
The operational achievements MAJGEN Novak catalogued – the publication of Concept SELENE, a standing Space Component Command within Joint Operations Command, Final Operating Capability for the Australia-US Space Surveillance Telescope in north-west Australia, early operation of the Deep Space Advanced Radar Capability (DARC), and the transfer of No. 74 Squadron into Space Command – collectively signal a force that has moved from aspiration to execution.
Most significantly, the September 2025 establishment of Specialist Space Workforce categories, with the first cohort graduating from the Defence School of Space and Cyber in May 2026, addressed what MAJGEN Novak identified as a foundational risk: “None of this will amount to anything without our dedicated, trained and professional people to assure, operate and sustain our growing space capabilities.”
Against this backdrop, the 2026 National Defence Strategy (NDS) and 2026 Integrated Investment Program (IIP) provide the resourcing architecture to sustain momentum.
MAJGEN Novak was direct on the numbers: “A source of great opportunity, with $9 to $12 billion identified for investment in the enhanced space capability under the Integrated Investment Program.”
The 2026 IIP commits between $9 billion and $12 billion over the coming decade to strengthen resilient space domain awareness, geospatial intelligence and space control-focused warfare systems, areas MAJGEN Novak specifically identified as the IIP’s focal points alongside resilient communications and space patrol.
The 2026 NDS’ reaffirmation that “the ADF core structure must be integrated across all five domains” provides doctrinal backing for Space Command’s insistence that space is not an adjunct to joint warfighting, but intrinsic to it.
MAJGEN Novak’s four priority lines of effort – advancing space as a domain in its own right, building a resilient multi-orbit architecture with genuine deterrent posture, developing a specialist workforce, and deepening cooperative relationships across industry, government and allied partners – align closely with the IIP’s investment logic.
His warning against a “fragile” architecture with “single points of value” echoed the strategic document’s own language around resilience and redundancy in a contested and congested orbital environment.
The address was ultimately a call to confidence. In MAJGEN Novak’s framing, Australia enters this period not as a space power in the making, but as one with a track record to match its ambitions and a strategic document, a funded program, and an emerging specialist workforce to give those ambitions operational teeth.
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