The shameful neglect of Australia's legacy of space facilities

The destruction of our heritage from NASA is a great shame on the government of the ACT and (even more so) its predecessor, the Commonwealth Department of Territories. I know of a number of community groups that had been interested in using the buildings. Rumour had it that there was an unofficial (green?) agenda at the time to deliberately allow the facilities to decay in order for the sites to revert to natural bush.

With changing times, the space industry is again back in fashion with government and bureaucracy in Australia.

Australia's latest policy on space involved an announcement in 2017 that the Australian Government would be launching a national space agency. In the 2018 Budget $26m in seed funding over four years was allocated to establish the Australian Space Agency, with a further $15m for international space investment starting from 2019. The budget was criticised for being inadequate by private Australian space companies.

One commentator noted that:

…the 1980s Australian Space Board was managed by a small office within the Department of Industry, Technology and Commerce, but it fizzled out after ten years and we were back to square one. There's a strong feeling in the Australian space community that a substantial investment in a stand-alone agency is the only way to avoid another death by bureaucracy.

On 12 December 2018, Prime Minister announced that Adelaide would become home to the Australian Space Agency.

It is hard to avoid the conclusion that Australia is again attempting too little too late, and that the decision to headquarter in Adelaide was simply another pork barrel to South Australia in the lead-up to the last election. There are now many established players in the space industry internationally so that the prospects for the Australian Space Agency are not good. Nobody much cares anyway. It's just another waste of public money, like the inaction that led to the destruction of the ACT's tracking stations.