Wolfpack Space Hub lands in Waterloo

WATERLOO: The soft opening of Wolfpack Space Hub’s new facility in Wellington Street was on April 19, 2022.

Wolfpack was jointly set up in December 2019 by Australian space engineering firm Saber Astronautics (2008) and TCP the first Australian-owned IT company (1971).

It presently has five members. All are space-tech start-ups which manufacture in Australia. They benefit from being co-located to, as the name suggests, “hunt-as-a-pack” to service customers that are looking for locally produced technologies to supply as the Australian Space Agency develops.

Sperospace manufactures robotic arms for small satellites which allow the satellites to be repaired, upgraded or assembled in space, rather than having to be returned to Earth for reconditioning and maintenance or just be written off as space junk.

Metakosmos designs and manufactures space suits. Maria Xygkaki, the Senior Business Developer at Wolfpack Space (Saber), noted on the opening night their space suit range is a great leap forward to help democratise space exploration, as the suits are produced to accommodate a wider range of body types and sizes, so overcome one barrier for female astronauts.

Space Industries is focused on creating energy efficiency for industries on Earth by sourcing elements in space that are not available on the planet; particularly Helium-3 which creates fuel for nuclear fusion. In the process it has developed ways to produce water in space for use on our moon and Mars.

Dandelions produces small payload scalable “Gyrochute” platforms which reduce the return-to-earth costs by 10 times to allow in-orbit manufacturing of products that require low gravity processes.

Esper Satellite Imagery aims to develop space-based monitoring of the efficiency of a range of industries on Earth to reduce their environmental impact.

Spiral Blue develops on-board systems technology that allows much of the processing of collected images for marine, forestry, agriculture and defence purposes to be done in space rather than having to transmit large quantities of data back to Earth for interpretation.

After Spiral Blue’s three previous successful launches, in October this year a new generation Australian Earth observation mission “Over the Rainbow” will be conducted in conjunction with other Wolfpack Space Hub members Esper Satellite Imagery, Sperospace and Dandelions to test “a new approach to collection of high definition satellite images and their transmission back to Earth”.