Director, Australian Centre for Space Engineering Research; Professor, School of Electrical Engineering and Telecommunications, UNSW "The fact that High Earth Orbit Robotics can do this work without its own fleet of satellites says a lot about the nature of the new space industry in Australia today.The demand to see and control what’s going on has grown more important as waves of new, smaller and low cost satellites populate low-earth orbit.Australia is moving into this role with Sydney-based Saber Astronautics this month chosen to design the county’s space control room to complement the Space Agency in Adelaide.The Responsive Space Operations Centre will be funded by a $6 million grant from the Australian government’s Space Infrastructure Fund. “These are the first Australian satellites to go into space in 15 years,” said Andrew Dempster, director of ACSER at UNSW, and a member of the advisory council of the Space Industry Association of Australia. "The shift in thinking around space benefits Australia because of the nation’s relatively young commercial industry. "No longer is space a battle between super-powers, but a battle between start-ups," Duffy says.Orbiting success: Australia races to join new space economySaber Astronautics uses 3D gaming technology to visualise satellites in low Earth orbit. Unlike the enormous satellites Australia uses for telecommunications, each of these new satellites is the size of a loaf of bread. Moreover, they make it easier to stay across the increasingly congested orbits above us.The company has 25 staff and will be hiring six more for the contract who will helm a "satellite office" in Adelaide.Held says that Saber will now be in a position to help "drive the direction of where we think Australian space can go". "Why not have this sort of innovation in the operations centre as well? ""It’s a challenge from control and risk perspective," he says, adding that Saber, for example, "realised this would be an issue years ago".Technology is "leapfrogging" the old and space companies can now be "more experimental because it costs less".In turn, the space industry "can be more aligned to the Silicon Valley ‘fail fast’ approach", which encourages rapid innovation which can be perfected on the go.This means the data provided from space for, say, insight into climate for farmers, or for traffic patterns in a city, can be marketed and put to use in new ways.