A South Australian country town is now the home of a vital piece of communication infrastructure that will boost Australia's space capability.
A million-dollar ground station has opened in Peterborough, a town in SA's Mid North, to house transmitters that feed data between commercial and government agencies and satellites orbiting in space.
"There's not much point in putting a satellite up if you can't get information back from it," Nova Systems chief executive Jim McDowell said.
Mr McDowell said weather or GPS data, for example, could be sent and retrieved more than 12 times a day when satellites passed over the site.
"Whoever puts the satellite up, assuming we've got the licences for the spectrum, we'll be able to get that information back to the users," he said.
Mr McDowell said having an Australian-owned, operated, and controlled business involved was important in maintaining sovereign capability.
Nova Systems has already acquired an Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) licence that allows it to serve as a ground station for two American companies and one Italian firm.
Perfect pitch
Mr McDowell said the geography of Peterborough made it the ideal location for the facility.
"It's very, very flat and so that means there's no shading or shadowing of signals coming backwards and forwards and it's electronically very silent, so there's not much in the way of electromagnetic interference," he said.
He also said the town's internet connectivity was good and that its proximity to Adelaide was a plus.
Mr McDowell said Nova Systems was connecting more fibre to the site and was looking to build 75 more satellite dishes, each with 16 antennae.
"At the minute, [the facility] looks like two big golf balls and underneath the surface are the antennae, and one of them looks like a satellite dish you'd have on top of your house," he said.
"So think of a very complex set of dishes on your roof to receive cable television."
'A big thing'
Mr McDowell said a few dozen jobs were created as the construction of new terminals progressed, which would eventually be replaced by highly skilled positions to maintain the equipment.
"In the next couple of years, if we do what we think we'll do, it's likely to be somewhere between $170 to $200 million worth of hardware on the ground," he said.
District Council of Peterborough Mayor Ruth Whittle said the local government was "extremely grateful" that Nova Systems had chosen to come to Peterborough.
"Just one extra job in Peterborough is a big thing," she said.
Lot 14 in Adelaide is already the headquarters of the Australian Space Agency, a hub for research and innovation to develop Australia's capabilities.
Regional sites like Whalers Way and Koonibba are home to launching facilities.
