Brad tucker when you have an image of the earth and you realize every single thing youve known, studied, heard, read, met, learned about, is contained in that single image, it changes your world view. Malcolm davis its the nature of human species. Were a exploratory creature since the stone age when we, you know, walked out of the cave and wondered whats over the next valley. Weve always been explorers, and we still always will be explorers. Were never going to be content to just sit on earth. Neil armstrong thats one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind. Michael now, were on the brink of another giant leap for mankind. Steven freeland essentially, our future as a humanity is inextricably tied to the way that we can continue to utilize space. Sarah pearce i think what well see now, in the new path to return to the moon, is again that new technology, new services, new engineering, that we really cant predict when we set out to try and build it, but really will make our lives unrecognizable. Michael a new breed of entrepreneurs is looking to the stars. Adam gilmour were looking to have a multibillion dollar valuation in the company. My vision of space is, i think, you know, sooner or later therell be, you know, millions of People Living off the planet. Therell be, you know, cities on the moon, cities on mars, and itll just become a major part of the ecosystem. Everything is going to be space. Michael in the 21st century, Science Fiction is becoming science fact faster than ever before. Were now on the cusp of a new Industrial Revolution that will change the way we live, the way we communicate, how we travel, and how we work. Tonight on four corners, we examine the extraordinary opportunities and challenges of the new space age. Russell boyce its not just a boom, its a frenzy. Suddenly every Government Department is a Space Department in one way or another. All Industry Sectors somehow are dabbling in space and not just the technology sectors. The legal sectors, Product Management sectors. Each university is suddenly a space university. It truly has become a frenzy. Michael for decades, space was a battleground of superpower ambition. In 1957, the soviet union successfully launched sputnik 1, the first humanmade object to orbit the earth. The space race became one of the defining themes of the cold war. Brad when we looked at the apollo era, nasa fell behind russia. Russia was winning in lots of cases, so nasa said, lets just skip ten steps and go here. Lets go to the moon. Lets skip all the stuff in between. Michael space has always had a powerful grip on the human imagination. The Apollo Missions and the moon landings inspired a whole new generation. Buzz aldrin beautiful view. Neil isnt that something magnificent sight out here. Buzz magnificent desolation. Michael in 1969, pam melroy was one of the millions of kids who watched the moon landing. Pamela and at that moment i decided i wanted to be an astronaut. Pamela discoverys commander, pam melroy. Michael her ambition took her all the way to the top of the nasa space program. Pamela i flew in space three times including my last flight where i commanded a Shuttle Mission to the International Space station. Pamela houston discovery, ive a big loop for both control teams. Pamela the overall feeling is how gorgeous the earth is and its dynamic. Its rolling by underneath you. You get a sunrise or a sunset every 45 minutes and you just cant believe you go completely around everythingeverything that we know, every piece of music, every person you could meet, you go completely around it in 90 minutes. Michael for more than 50 years, the rush to the stars has been limited to nations with vast resources. Until now. Male the cost is really plummeting because private companies are making it efficient. The things that used to be a billion and a half dollars are now 100 million, you know, prices are literally plummeting by a tenth of the price, a hundredth of the price, it used to be. And simply because its cheaper, we can do it. Brad and i like to point to india, for instance. Their mission cost, i think, just under 100 million, which is still really expensive. Male do you copy . Female yes, yes, yes, i copy. Im detached. Brad the movie, gravity, with Sandra Bullock and george clooney, cost 120 million. It is now cheaper to go into space than make a movie about going into space. Jonathan mcdowell the old saying, right, was the way to make a small fortune in space was to start off with a big one. But actually now, about a third of all space activity is commercial, right . Youve got about a third military, a third civilian, like nasa, and a third commercial. So its really big business. Michael arguably, few people have supercharged human space ambition and changed what is now possible more than elon musk. The billionaire founder of paypal and tesla has moved aggressively into space. He believes humans will be more than just space tourists. He has plans to settle people on mars, and he says we will inevitably become a multiplanet species. Elon musk fundamentally, the future is vastly more exciting and interesting if were a spacefaring civilization and a multiplanet species than if were not. Ityou wanna be inspired by things. You wanna wake up in the morning and think, the futures gonna be great. And thats what being a spacefaring civilizations all about. Its about believing in the future and thinking that the future will be better than the past. And i cant think of anything more exciting than going out there and being among the stars. Jonathan elons not the first billionaire to try and get into the Space Business from, you know, dotcom money in the 90s or a lot of people who did that. He was just the only one, so far, who had the stamina to see rocket after rocket blow up and still not give up. And so you know, it was a rough first few years, but he stuck with it until he had something that worked, and i think thats the distinguishing feature, is that he has both the vision but also, if you like, the guts to push forward and not give up whenat the first hurdle. Male liftoff of falcon. Michael elon musks big breakthrough came with the development of relatively cheap reusable rockets. Male look at that. Elon thats unreal. Female three, two, one. Michael two years ago, musks company, spacex, successfully launched what it calls its falcon heavy rocket. The falcon heavy is a powerful reusable rocket that can carry the worlds biggest payloads into space. Elon it was superstressful, but it worked. Male stand by for main engine cutoffs. Anna moore elon musk challenged the status quo on how we access space and said, no, it doesnt have to be done the way we have been doing it for years. We can make it cheaper. We can make it more available to anyone. And honestly, i think a lot of people really doubted that was every gonna happen. And he proved them wrong, and so its been its been a huge catalyst. Michael the splashdown of the Spacex Dragon manned flight this month was another gamechanging moment in the history of space exploration. Male splashdown. Male welcome back to planet earth and thanks for flying spacex. Jonathan but has a bigger significance, i think, that its saying that low earth orbits no longer the frontier, that we can focus at nasa on further horizons like the moon and mars, and for low earth orbit, yeah, thats just a trucking company. Spacex can do that. Female ignition, liftoff of the falcon 9 brad spacex and falcon heavy and falcon 9 have not just changed human exploration but Space Missions as well. It is literally hundreds of millions of dollars cheaper to launch it. Nasa builds space telescopes, something ive worked on, and you dont launch on nasa rockets, you launch on spacex cause it is cheaper, and that means what used to be the cost of two missions is now four missions. And so once you can do four missions, the science and research accelerates so now then you can go do eight. But theres this multiplying factor thats happening. Michael elon musks most ambitious rocket of all is this. Its called the starship, a cheap steel tube that can carry a huge payload. This month, it made a test flight to 150 meters before successfully coming back to earth. Jonathan starship is the nextgeneration rocket, and it looks just like, you know, a 1950s Science Fiction rocketship. If it works, it could be a further revolution in the cost of getting to orbit. Rapid reuse, very huge payloads going into space, being able to carry very large numbers of people into space. He needs this if he wants to settle mars in the long run, andbut, you know, its been a bit of a rocky road so far. Hes blown up quite a few test articles. Richard branson having maybe something really sexy. Female three, two, one, release, release, release. Male fire. Male fire michael spacex isnt the only company developing cheaper space transport. Male welcome to the club, astronauts. Michael Richard Branson has plans to develop commercial spacecraft for space tourism. Jeff bezos weve been working on this lander for three years. Michael and amazon founder, jeff bezos, is also developing rockets to carry humans into space and spacecraft to deliver cargo to the moon. Jeff we have here as an example, a very large rover and by the way, even though thats a large rover, this vehicle can land four of them simultaneously on the surface of the moon. Brad it isnt just spacex. Theres other Companies Like blue origin coming online as well, private companies and smaller groups in australia, or rocket labs in new zealand, for instance, that is all making that cost cheaper. I like to think of its like airplane travel. We spent the longest time having one costly airline, but now we have a bunch of budget carriers that are making it effective. Adam we live on this little dot and whats out there is just massive, and i wanna explore whats out there and see it. Michael australian entrepreneur, adam gilmour, is building one of those budget carriers. Adam all right, guys, were going soon. Michael five years ago, he cashed in a lucrative career as an International Banker for the potential he saw in space. Adam this rocket engine, it sits up the top of the vehicle and its the final engine that puts the satellites into space so youre gonna see a 20second burn of this engine where were making sure that the fuels burning properly, the materials in the rocket engine are operating correctly, and Everything Else is smooth. Male and then a burn duration of 20 seconds michael at a secret location near the gold coast, four corners filmed gilmours technicians in the final stages of testing a new hybrid rocket that he hopes will see his Company Become australias first multibilliondollar launch company. Adam all right, cool. Good job. Adam theres a lot of things that will happen in the next 5 or 10 years that will set the scene for the next 10 or 20 afterwards. Adam i think were going to expand out because we can. I think because we can get out of this earth and theres so many planets and asteroids and everything just in the solar system, it is inevitable. Its the same reason why, you know, humans have colonized the earth so greatly. I think well do it to space. If you have the access, then well do it. Michael like almost everyone in this business, adam gilmour has grand ambitions. But for the moment, hes working towards cashing in on the fastestgrowing area of one of the worlds fastestgrowing industries. Adam when are you gonna start putting lowgrade Hydrogen Peroxide to it . Adam the biggest thing thats been changing is miniaturization technologies has been shrinking satellites and what thats done is make it incredibly cheap to build a satellite and to launch a satellite, and thats why our rockets are good because our rockets can take up very small satellites. Michael australia has a long connection to Space Missions. Tidbinbilla is just a small part of nasas global space infrastructure. Everything from the pictures of armstrongs first steps on the moon to communications with deep space probes and rovers on mars have passed through here. Brad the nasa deep space tracking station in tidbinbilla is, you know, just outside canberra. Its essentially the ears of space, and if we dont have that capability, we cant get the data back from mars, we cant communicate with spacecraft, and the second problem we have in this is were all in this globe that spins. You cant just have one point on earth that talks with everything in space. You need these things spread around the world, and australia, because of that geographical position, were in the middle between the us and europe, and were in the southern hemisphere, provides that other ears that you cant get on one side of the world. And nasa and europe identified australia, you know, 50, 60 years ago as the place to do it. Michael australia also has some unique advantages in the space sector our geographical position, our wide open spaces, and relatively low light pollution. But for all that, we have come to the new space rush a little late. It was only two years ago that we joined much of the rest of the developed world and established a National Space agency. Male declare the Australian Space Agency here in adelaide open. Michael why did it take so long . Karen andrews i think it was a lack of understanding by many, many people of what space is all about and the opportunities that it can present. So i think it took a little bit of time for people to understand the significance of space, the space industry, the space sector, to australia. Theres opportunities for us to grow our businesses, theres opportunities for us to create jobs here, and theres opportunities in space for our everyday lives to become that much easier, that morethat much more simpler. So yes, there are some opportunities for us, and we should grasp them with both hands. Malcolm the Australian Space Agency was really important and a very positive step because what it does, it gives us a policy organization within government whose job it is to help grow the australian commercial space sector. Michael right now, the space world is a very exciting field to be in, full of boffins who have spent years working toward the moment were now living. Brad tucker, an astrophysicist at the anus Mount Stromlo observatory, is one of them. Brad i love doing it. I love talking about it. I think people feel that. And i love talking about it because it is so now tangible. In the 90s, it wasnt tangible. You know, yeah, things happened and there was things happening, and it was cool, all right, but thats it. But it feels so real now. It feels so accessible. Michael when people like brad tucker talk about how space will change our lives in the near future, the big focus is on cheap Global Broadband that will drive even more rapid technological development. Adam the real big market thats developing now is Broadband Internet from space. Theres three or four companies that are launching thousands of satellites into low earth orbit that are gonna beam down broadband all over the earth, and the speeds are, you know, two to three times faster than the nbn. Brad it is the big project that lots of companies are doing, oneweb, starlink, amazon. The fact that, for a fraction of the cost of the nbn, we can get terabyte per second downloads, that transforms the way we work. And were not talking about in cities. You can be in the middle of a rural town in australia and have the same connection speed as a city and better than what we have right now. You know, you can only imagine thats gonna transform. The fact that were gonna get gps accurate to the scale of centimeters, were not even talking about tens of meters. The scale of centimeters means, you know, the data for use for farmers and tracking and navigation is an order of magnitude better. Russell were getting into the age where its not just people that are being connected, its machines. Its business to business, machine to machine, machine to person, and the implications for that are enormous. Who can say exactly what they are . What well see unfold in the next small number of years will probably be quite staggering. Male the actual deployment of the bowtie antenna michael at the university of New South Wales campus in canberra, Russell Boyce and his team are working with defense on research to develop small nextgeneration satellites for potential intelligence gathering. Russell if we can have a lot of these in orbit, theyll be able to bounce signals from one to the next to the next. Russell yeah, its not just a boom, its a frenzy. Australia has, by far, the fastestgrowing space sector in the world, the fastest rate of establishment of startups of any space economy anywhere in the world. Michael in june, they launched the latest of their socalled cube satellites. Russell we can fly these small Space Missions to demonstrate the art of the possible. Thats what were doing in collaboration with the air force. Thats what we seek to do for government, for industry partners. Our vision is to be a significant contributor to this development of networked, intelligent, constellation capabilities. And every mission that we fly is a step towards that. Michael Satellite Technology is evolving fast, and australian scientists are at the forefront of the new developments that will deliver a huge array of applications. Sarah and when you think about the first satellites and the size that they needed to be in order to be able to get these sorts of images of the earth, now this is really a whole new world that were in with these cube sats, very small satellites, very miniaturized and of course, you know, cheaper and quicker to get up. But it will let us look at things like ground cover across australia so for example, deforestation or flooding. It will let us see through smoke and see whats happening in bush fires, and it will let us look at how clouds are formed, for example, and see the creation of cyclones. Michael with more and more countries