Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese (L), US President Joe Biden (C) and British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak (R) during the AUKUS summit on March 13, 2023 in San Diego. (Photo by Leon Neal/Getty Images)
CANBERRA — The Labor government of Anthony Albanese today cancelled Australia’s largest space program ever, almost 18 months after killing the main civil space program, drawing sharp criticism from analysts and industry experts.
The satellite communications program, known in typical Australian military fashion as JP 9102, was projected to be worth at least $7 billion AUD ($5.3 billion USD).
The government began the project in 2021 and eventually chose Lockheed Martin’s Australian arm to see it through, but the Department of Defence said in an announcement today that due to the “acceleration in space technologies and evolving threats in space, Defense has assessed that a single orbit GEO-based satellite communications system would not meet strategic priorities.”
“Instead of a single orbit solution, defense must instead prioritize a multi-orbit capability increasing resilience for the Australian Defense Force,” the department said. “Defence’s current satellite communications capabilities support the immediate needs of the organisation. This decision allows Defence to prioritise emerging needs, mitigate capability gaps and continue to support our transition to an integrated, focused force.”
News of the cancellation was broken by The Australian newspaper, which said the decision was based on budget issues. After The Australian broke the story, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese spoke with Australian Broadcasting Corp. radio and offered justification for the government’s defense planning and spending.
“We’re busy prioritizing all of our purchases when it comes to defense assets. We’ve got a considerable increase in our defense budget and we’ll make sure all of the decisions that we make are in our national interest,” the prime minister said. “We are not only seeing advances with the AUKUS arrangements being on track and on time and on budget, we’re seeing our capabilities increased with increased asset purchases. We are also very much interested in this being part of our ‘Future Made in Australia’ agenda.”
But the cancellation was cast as a broad example of the Albanese government’s unwillingness to increase defense spending beyond inflation and currency changes and its lack of commitment to space programs.
The Space Industry Association of Australia (SIAA) noted the government’s decision with “profound disappointment.” Its chairman, Jeremy Hallett, said in a statement, “While other OECD [] nations see sovereign space capability as critical to creating high-tech, high-value jobs and a military advantage, in our own backyard we seem to be doing the exact opposite.”
Lockheed Martin Australia said it would try to keep the jobs created so far: “We are committed to preserving our sovereign workforce with impacted staff being redeployed across other existing and emerging programs where possible.”
Malcolm Davis, a defense expert with The Australian Strategic Policy Institute, told Breaking Defense in an email that If the government offers no alternative to JP 9102, it will mark “a retreat back to dependency on foreign actors to provide our crucial upstream space segment.” Australia has already experienced this.
It discovered the limits of access to the Boeing-built WGS defense constellation, even after paying to build one of the satellites. During the massive bushfires here in 2019 and 2020, the Aussies asked the US military for WGS coverage to help with command and control; US Army Pacific reportedly turned things around within 24 hours, but that was time lost and highlighted the limits of Australia’s access even during a time of peace.
“In the meantime, government doesn’t send any signal of confidence to the Australian commercial space sector and that will only see that sector seeing greater risk,” Davis said. “At a certain point, companies begin to close doors and relocate over to the US, or elsewhere. Jobs are lost, financial returns decline, and it snowballs.”
Davis said the government is trying to cover the high cost of AUKUS and the Navy’s surface fleet expansion, without making a “real increase in defense spending.” He notes that “other key projects” have been redefined, reprioritized, delayed or cancelled by Labor. “And now, as the cost of AUKUS continues to increase (as it always was going to) they are having to continue to make cuts to avoid spending more on defense,” he said.
Hallett of the SIAA ticked off space programs either cut or in limbo. “We’ve seen a change in direction for Space Domain Awareness under JP 9360 after industry being led along for many years. We have the media-reported cancellation of the Resilient Multi-Mission STaR Shot program by DSTG, we have heard nothing public on Assured Positioning, Navigation and Timing under JP 9380 even though that tender closed over a year ago, and now this news on JP9102 — not to mention cuts to civil space programs,” Hallett said in the SIAA statement.
“I am sure some companies will seriously consider the business case for dealing with defense as a customer in the future, which I worry will mean our warfighters will miss out on homegrown innovations that can make a difference on the battlefield,” he said.
Hallett said Australia needs strategic autonomy and resilience for its “future economic and national security” and it is central to AUKUS Pillar II, the cluster of capabilities such as hypersonics, autonomy, AI and other advanced weapons America, Britain and Australia are pursuing to rapidly improve their militaries in the face of China’s rapid military modernization.
“Owning and operating significant military space infrastructure in the Indo-Pacific as part of a multi-orbit architecture would have achieved this, and provided meaningful contribution into AUKUS Pillar [II],” Hallett said, “the advanced capabilities of which cannot function without space capability.”
The DoD’s statement suggested Australia would pursue an altered space program, one with a “multi-orbit capability,” but did not provide further details.
