The Bogong Thruster is designed and manufactured by researchers at The Australian National University and Boswell Technologies.For years, the private sector has envisioned an illustrious future in space - an extraterrestrial playground with tourists flying to and from orbiting hotels and the occasional trip to Mars being as easy as a transatlantic flight.īut if the space economy is to become a $1 trillion sector by 2040, as one Citigroup report suggested, not all of its enterprises will be so grandiose. “I’m proud that I helped towards this goal.” “It’s going to improve the footprint of Australia in space,” he says. “Now that it’s in orbit, we have a flight heritage, which means we can sell it to other companies and other companies will be happy to use it.”įor the newest space thruster on the market, the best is yet to come. “When you see it detach from the SpaceX rocket and tumble into the darkness, that was really exciting for me. After 87 minutes, the final payload is deployed, and the team hear what they have been waiting for: Skykraft separation confirmed.ĭr Davoodianidalik can now reflect on a job well done. (Nic Vevers/ANU)Īfter the noise and excitement of the moment of launch, the team continue to watch on in anticipation.Īside from intermittent voices from SpaceX mission control, the live stream is now eerily quiet. Professor Boswell says that new versions of the Bogong Thruster will “improve performance by a factor of two or three, and perhaps fuel efficiency by two and a half times, making it a lot more cost-effective.”ĭr Mahdi Davoodianidalik gets a Bogong Thruster ready for space flight. “Over the next few years, the Bogong Thruster will be included in a regular launch of satellites.” “It’s wonderful that we now have a very robust thruster that can work in space,” says Professor Boswell. The team are now working to make the technology even more appealing to industry. They will monitor global air traffic, helping to develop more efficient travel routes and to avoid mid-air collisions, and will also address gaps in surveillance and communications across remote areas. ![]() More than 200 Skykraft satellites are set to orbit the Earth. In comparison, the science behind the Bogong Thruster “can be understood by anyone in the pub”. Professor Boswell says that this can be because buyers do not understand what the technology is. “There are a lot of things going on in Silicon Valley that fail.” “Trying to sell high tech is not that easy,” says Boswell Technologies CEO Professor Rod Boswell. The low-tech simplicity of this new spacecraft propellant system, first developed by Dr Dimitrios Tsifakis as part of his PhD with Professors Charles and Boswell at the ANU Research School of Physics, is one of the reasons it has proved successful for commercialisation. ![]() “And having financial and motivational support from Boswell Technologies means we can work much faster as we don’t have to go through the grant system.” “It’s wonderful because Skykraft are just five kilometres away,” she says. Enter Canberra-based start-ups Boswell Technologies and Skykraft. The solution was working with the burgeoning space industry here in Australia. But this is the simplest concept, and we developed it here in the laboratory at ANU.”Īfter developing contacts within European and Japanese space agencies, she discovered that doing this type of work remotely has its challenges. “Everyone is trying to develop propulsion systems based on different concepts. “Space is an emerging technology sector,” says Professor Charles. Professor Charles has been working on and testing different spacecraft propulsion concepts for the past 20 years. ![]() By emitting naphthalene gas into space, you create thrust, pushing your spacecraft forward in the opposite direction.” “When heated, the propellant goes directly from a solid to a gas. ![]() “With the Bogong Thruster, you essentially have a box and fill it with naphthalene, mothballs,” says Professor Christine Charles, who leads the Space Plasma Power and Propulsion Group at ANU. The Bogong Thruster formed part of the largest satellite stack that Australia has ever sent to space, and will be used to manoeuvre one of four mission satellites manufactured by Canberra-based company Skykraft. Aptly named the Bogong Thruster, it is propelled only by mothballs. The SpaceX rocket may have been fuelled by a mix of kerosene and liquid oxygen, but the piece of ANU equipment it took with it was fuelled by something quite different.
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