Southern Launch

You have a portfolio career these days.

You're on the board of Austal, on the board of DroneShield, on the board of Southern Launch, advisory board of Saronic.

There are a bunch of kind of directorship roles in companies that viewed as defense strategic, this kind of thing.

So we're going to get into a lot of that stuff.

Okay, I'm going to finish up on a couple of very different areas.

One's an undersea question, one's a space question.

I didn't mention, I think you're on the board of Southern Launch? That's correct.

Okay, so let's talk about space as an area of potential sovereign capability.

So people may not have noticed this, but in March last year, Australia set a world record with the first return from space to a commercial spaceport.

So that was Southern Launch, one of our key members, and Varda, another one of our members, a US company that have developed miniature pharmaceutical processing plants that they literally send into low Earth orbit to process crystallizing pharmaceuticals free from the heavy hand of Earth's gravity.

We don't realize it, but actually most industrial processes, particularly those that require perfect crystallization, pharmaceuticals, fiber optic cables, silicon chips, stem cells, a huge range of the most important foundational industrial products of the future, These are actually fundamentally better processed in a microgravity environment.

People think it sounds like science fiction, but Varda and Southern Launch have now delivered five capsules back to South Australia, which have put Australia at the forefront of this incredible new industrial ecosystem.

and have returned successfully, perfectly processed pharmaceutical compounds demonstrating an exponential increase in efficiency and performance from microgravity processing.

This is one of the biggest opportunities for Australia.

This is one of the biggest opportunities for Australia.

Our geography, large land area, low population density, clear skies, our large southern hemisphere position, our stretch of latitude, because if you can have equatorial launch possibilities, you can get into geostationary orbit.