Australia is known for great beaches, top-tier coffee, and a laidback approach to life that really doesn’t square with all the rules and regulations that exist Down Under. What it isn’t known for is being a spacefaring nation.
As it stands, a startup called Gilmour Space has been making great efforts to give Australia the orbital launch capability it’s never had. After numerous hurdles and delays, the company finally got their rocket off the launch pad. Unfortunately, it just didn’t get much farther than that.
You Will Not Go To Space Today
Gilmour Space was founded back in 2013, and established its rocketry program two years later. The company has a straightforward mission—it aims to provide Australian-made launch vehicles for putting satellites into orbit. Over the past decade, the company has been working hard on establishing a spaceport and building a series of ever-larger rockets, inching its way towards its stated goal.
The company aims to reach space with the Eris rocket. The 23-meter-long, 30-tonne vehicle came about after years of engineering work, and stands as Australia’s only realistic bid to join the exclusive club of nations capable of orbital launches. The three-stage rocket uses four hybrid rocket motors in the first stage, one in the second stage, and a liquid rocket engine in the third stage. It’s intended to carry payloads up to 300 kg into orbit. The Eris was first assembled and staged on the company’s launch pad in Bowen, Queensland, in early 2024, and even fully fueled up for a dress rehearsal in September last year. However, local aviation authority CASA was not yet satisfied with preparations, and had not provided the required permits for launch. Since then, the wait has continued, with an expected launch date in March 2025 passing by without fanfare. Even with CASA approval, the Australian Space Agency was still not satisfied with Gilmour’s preparations.
Ultimately, the company would wait long eighteen months for complete regulatory approval to launch their Eris rocket from the Bowen orbital spaceport. Ultimately, everything finally fell into place, with the company set to launch on July 30.
The launch began as so many do, with smoke billowing from the pad as the four first-stage rocket motors ignited. Seconds later, Eris began to inch into the sky… only to falter at low altitude. Having barely cleared the top of the launch structure, the rocket began to fall back to Earth, toppling over sideways while creating a relatively small fireball in its failure. One presumes the payload—a jar of Vegimite sandwich spread—was lost.
Speaking after the event to ABC News, Gilmour Space founder Adam Gilmour speculated as to what happened. “From the videos, it looks like we lost one of the main engines a few seconds into the flight,” he stated. “I’m hoping the next rocket goes to orbit, and if it does, then the next rocket after that will be our first commercial one that takes satellites up.”
It may not have been much to look at, but the company was nonetheless positive about finally making forward steps towards its eventual goal. “Today, Eris became the first Australian made orbital launch vehicle to lift off from Australian soil — achieving around 14 seconds of flight,” stated the company. “For a maiden test flight, this is a strong result and a major step forward for Australia’s sovereign space capability.” Gilmour Space noted its multiple successes—all four rocket engines igniting successfully, the rocket clearing the tower, and the positive operation of its flight software and control systems. While the launch failed to get far off the pad—for reasons yet to be fully determined—the company was ultimately upbeat, and looks towards its second test flight of the Eris rocket.
Indeed, this result has long been expected by Gilmour Space founder, Adam Gilmour. In interviews earlier this year, he noted that the complexities of large scale rocketry meant he didn’t expect grand achievements from the first test flight. “It’s very hard to test an orbital rocket without just flying it,” he told the Sydney Morning Herald in March this year. “We don’t have high expectations we’ll get to orbit… I’d personally be happy to get off the pad.”
Gilmour Space still has a long way to go to reach orbit—roughly 100 km or so, given the rocket only just got off the pad. Still, it’s hardly the first space program to face early failures on its way to the heavens. If anything, the test launch actually happening has reignited interest in the project, bringing renewed attention to the Australian effort to finally join the space club.
Yup, it IS rocket science. It ain’t easy either, or even Musk could build boosters.
You don’t have to like Musk. You can hate him outright.
But ignoring the success SpaceX has had is just pure ignorance.
Who’s ignoring the success SpaceX has had? Piotrsko is simply, rightly, pointing out that it’s not like Musk is down there on the assembly line, riveting panels into place and such. I’m not sure if you’re aware of this or not, but SpaceX employs a whole lot more people than just Elmo.
I’m not sure why you feel polluting hackaday with your politics has value.
It really doesn’t.
Politics is the one thing that deviates us from failed states in Africa where every conflict is solved with machete or a pakistani clone of soviet AK. Without it, as a society, we’d be doomed.
can’t reply to the actual comments since there’s apparently a maximum comment depth.
Probably shouldn’t reply to the comments anyway, but…
re: “Politics is the one thing that deviates us from failed states [where everything is solved with violence]” – without getting into the merits of that argument, I’m fairly certain that neither politics (unless directly relevant to the topic) nor violence would contribute anything to these discussion forums. Though, admittedly the latter is more challenging to accomplish on a semi-anonymous internet forum.
re: “Musk haters” – believe it or not, this has always been a surprisingly bipartisan group. It’s also perfectly possible to respect the achievements of his companies and his role in running them and still think the guy is a complete tool.
re: “turnabout is fair play” – turnabout is an improvement over escalating overreaction, but it’s still a shit political strategy for maintaining a stable and functional society.
At least the front stayed on this time.
Well, some of them are built so that the front doesn’t fall off at all.
And when (if?) it works, it will actually leave the environment (of Earth). John and Bryan will be thrilled.
And that’s that point where you actually do want the front to fall off. Usually.
Luckily it’s outside the environment.
..if I may borrow from a line from The Moody Blues.
Blasting, billowing, bursting forth
With the power of ten billion Kangaroo jumps.
Man with his flaming pyre
Has conquered the wayward breezes.
ah but I’m honestly grinning, because, it’s one more time human kind is working at getting out into the cosmos. Somehow that always brightens my spirit a little, when I see it.
It’s always good to start with a V2 long range ballistic missile, using your Urgroßmutter’s Strudel recipe: single-stage single-engine suborbital heavy payload turbo-pumped liquid-fueled vane-steered terrestrially targeted vengeance weapon. It’s complicated known to be very delicious.
Looking at their vehicle history, Gilmour’s approach is sprinting without mastery. It’s expensive, and even if you have billions there’s no guarantee that you haven’t made a fatal incremental mistake in your iterative engineering that will prevent what is downstream from ever working.
Gilmour doesn’t have billions.
Not totally accurate. A Black Arrow rocket launced the prospero sattelite from Woomera, Australia in 1971.
Ok technically the rocket was UK owned, but it was launched from Australia
Even ignoring the Black Arrow, which is indeed “the first orbital launch vehicle to take off from Australia”, it’s a slightly presumptuous to call it “the first orbital launch vehicle to take off from Australia” when it’s not actually proved itself to be an orbital launch vehicle.
Look, I’ve made the first FTL vehicle… it just crashes on launch…
No wonder the government weren’t happy with their preparations. They were right for once. Clearly they didn’t know anything about space.
Whoever wrote that marketing line should be on the next launch, surely it’ll be orbital this time.
UK. The only country to gain capacity to launch satellites and then promptly scrapping it.
Reminds me of Looney Tunes cartoon when Daffy Duck got the rocket in reverse.
To be fair, a good 50% of their new, very novel, engines worked perfectly under their very first outing under real-world conditions.
On the Australian scale, not exactly “ripper”, but it still counts as “a pretty good go” for their first time out of the drive.
And whoever did their control systems deserves to have everyone in the territory buy them a pint of bitters tonight.
The waited to long to launch it. The Foster’s beer fuel got warm and went flat. They didn’t spend the time to load fresh beer and shake it up.
That actually was the reason given. “Well, the rocket was 18 months old… “
Back to the drawing board. Hopefully they have got enough data to fly a bit farther off the pad :) on the next attempt. Even with SpaceX experience, they are having trouble with Starship… Getting to space and working in space is hard. Nice to see people/companies/organizations continue to work on the problem. Maybe someday it will be ‘routine’.
“Maybe someday it will be ‘routine’.”
I’m not sure if you are directing this at the Australian space program, or globally, but in the US, the Space Transport System (Shuttle Program) flew 135 missions over 30 years with only 2 fatal accidents.
I’d call that pretty “routine”. Just saying.
That’s still a 1.4% chance of dying on any given trip.
I suppose those are pretty good odds when you consider the strategy of getting to work by strapping yourself to the top of a giant thermos of rocket fuel, but putting it in the “routine” box might be overselling it a bit.
“strapping yourself to the top of a giant thermos of rocket fuel”
The issues with the space shuttle were the solid rocket motors not the liquid fuel ones.
Perhaps it should be “strapping yourself to the top of a giant thermos of rocket fuel surrounded by firecrackers”
And Falcon 9 flew 134 flights just in 2024 alone, not over 30 years, with 1 failure.
I was thinking ‘global’ :) . Yes things are better, but it ‘seems’ any new design has real teething problems so to speak. It is not routine to just go out, design a rocket and shoot into orbit, or send someone to the moon. It is still a hard nut to crack. SpaceX had problems to begin with to on Falcon Nine. Now look at starship… No not routine yet! :)
All those excuses..
You should test components, get them working, think about what could go wrong, fix those things and test the fixes, and THEN build the rocket and test it.
Each of those steps need to be done, but the ‘think’ part seems a bit of an issue at the moment eh.
But as human brains are declining and devolving, as we all observe, you are bound running into such issues I suppose. And rockets are not the biggest issue there.
Strayan here. I was pretty excited for the launch which took place about 540km (that’s a different number in miles) from here. I too think testing a subcomponent would have been good, say launching just one of the four engines in a simplified booster. And also test it vertically – maybe Gilmour did, but all the test footage I saw showed the engines running on their sides. Would that not affect the liquid propellant?
Many people think it might be related to the horizontal testing, but I think since the stuff uses pumps and is pressurized and since rockets undergo various G forces during flight it would be quite a bad design if you need gravity for it to reliably work, so that somehow seem unlikely to be the issue.
Plus all other rocket makers also test horizontally, and have for decades.
But what do I know, I’m not a rocket engineer.
Incidentally this is, as another person commented, quite a unique design, so it’s not surprising that there are development issues, but as I said, I think those should be dealt with before assembling a full rocket.
And think about how we have powerful computers now and advanced simulation software to guide us a bit. And we learned so much in the many decades since the first successful rockets.
I absolutely love the “(that’s a different number in miles)” … not figuring it out for anybody because if they refuse to use kilometers then they have to do the work for themselves.
BS. Falcon 9 flies sucessfully every 3 days, How much more routine can you get?
thats one way to light the barbie.
Who the hell thought it was a good idea launching a rocket upside down from Australia?
well, they can just drop the rocket into space from there — but why did they ignite it?
So they turned a dropbear upside down. Big deal.
Rocket scientist from Down-under : “With that boomerang shape, I promise you it’ll come back”.
I would really like to see the space launch complex at Woomera be rebuilt. There hasn’t been any orbital launch activity from there since the end of the 1960s.
Yes j s, and the Woomera facility established some records in the 60s. The Brits launched a series of their Blue Streak rockets from there in the 60s: they gave Australia space on the last in the series to launch a satellite, just sub-orbital. The satellite, WRESat (Weapons Research Establishment Satellite), was designed in Adelaide at this defence facility; it was successfully launched and communicated with base during its flight, quite an achievement!
WRE in those days alse had a drone called Jindivik; that project didn’t go very far as Jindivik was launched from a sled and had no landing gear, so each flight ended in a crash.
When did Aussies get good coffee?
When I was there (20 years ago), it was tea or, maybe, lame instant coffee.
“…One presumes the payload—a jar of Vegimite sandwich spread—was lost…”
Perhaps this ‘accident’ was The Fates’ way of expressing displeasure at the payload not being a jar of Vegemite?