Space

Cape York Spaceport

Cape York Spaceport project had been set to transform the north of Queensland into a major international space hub in the early 1990s. It was Cape York’s proximity to the equator that made it an attractive proposition for launching rockets. If successful the Cape York Spaceport could have been the first commercial space facility in the world. Sir Joh was taken with the idea and commissioned the Institution of Engineers in Australia to undertake a preliminary study. This was the first of a proliferation of proposals, scoping studies and feasibility studies.

Australia’s planned Cape York International Spaceport, located at 12 degrees latitude south of the equator on the east coast of Queensland’s Cape York Peninsula, would be the world’s first private enterprise space launch facility dedicated to serving the commercial market. The estimated $600 million project was to be funded without financial assistance from the Australian government.

Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen was Queensland’s longest serving Premier, ruling the State in his own inimitable way from 1968 to 1987. It was towards the end of this tenure, in 1986, that Stan Schaetzel from the Hawker De Havilland company floated the idea of a rocket launch facility in Cape York to the Queensland Government.

In 1988 two Australian consortia, the Cape York Space Agency and the Australian Spaceport Group, each conducted feasibility studies of the Cape York International Spaceport proposal at the request of the Queensland government. The Australian Spaceport Group consisted of Australian Domestic Communication Satellite, Broken Hill Proprietary, Bond Corporation, Comalco, and Martin Marietta Corporation. The ini- tial Cape York Space Agency consortium included businessmen in the state of Queensland, the Shimizu Corporation of Japan, and some of the world’s major aerospace companies. The Cape York Space Agency enlisted the help of United Technologies Corporation, General Dynamics Corporation, Messerschmitt-Boelkow-Blohm, McDonnell Douglas Corporation, and a consortium of Japanese companies for its study on the commercial potential of the Cape York facility.

In June 1989 the Australian Spaceport Group announced the abandoment of its proposal for the project based on commercial considerations. At the same time, the Cape York Space Agency announced it had a commercially viable proposal for the project and that it proposed to proceed with further studies.

In October 1989 the Cape York Space Agency, now fully owned by Essington, an Australian property developer, submitted a proposal to the Australian and Queensland governments outlining its plan for a spaceport on the Cape York Peninsula and requesting the two governments to formally announce support of the project subject to compliance with statutory obligations. The plan included the purchase of the Soviet Zenit launch vehicle for launch by the Australian spaceport operator. The government considered the proposal in December 1989 and advised the Cape York Space Agency that it had no objection in principal to the use of Soviet rockets. The government’s final endorsement of the project was conditional upon the satisfactory resolution of a range of issues.

The Cape York Space Agency was chosen to act as the co-ordinator for the development of the project by the Queensland Government. This group was formed as a consortium of companies including Mayne Nickless, Boral, the Commonwealth Bank, Price Waterhouse, TNT, Brambles and the Shimuzu Corporation.

GLAVKOSMOS officials gave Cape York Space Agency a firm commitment in 1989 to participate in its spaceport plans to find some profitable use for its Zenit boosters. The Chinese have also expressed interest in using a Cape York Peninsula launch facility. United Space Boosters, a subsidiary of United Technologies Corporation, was selected by the Cape York Space Agency to pro- vide its expertise in aerospace procurement and launch pad management. United Space Boosters’ application for an export license for services prompted a high-level U.S. government review of defense and trade policy as a result of Soviet participation in the Cape York International Spaceport project. The Department of State’s Office of Munitions Con- trol concluded in 1989 that technology transfer concerns were adequately addressed by the government of Australia and the Cape York Space Agency. In 1990 the President gave the Secretary of State the authority to grant United Space Booster’s application as long as it met the guidelines in a proposed commercial space launch policy.

The Cape York Space Agency wished to build a spaceport on the east coast of Cape York at Temple Bay. The Cape York Space Agency proposed to use Russian Zenit rockets in an operation launching mostly United States satellites and negotiating this international minefield between the U.S.A. and the Soviet Union was only one of the difficulties. An article on the Courier Mail of 20 March 1991 pointed towards some of the problems that would ultimately sink the idea.

The site would be a satellite launch center for the entire Pacific Rim region and could serve initially as a hub for long-haul flights by future hypersonic transport aircraft linking Asia, the Pacific Islands, and Australia to Europe, North and South America, and Africa. Another long-range possibility would be the expansion of the Cape York Interna- tional Spaceport for future shuttle spacecraft or aerospace planes, such as Hermes, HOPE, HAL, Saenger II, or a future operational NASP-derived aerospace plane.

The spaceport would be built at Bromley Holding near Temple Bay on the east coast of the Cape York Peninsula. The Cape York Space Agency planned to construct an airport and harbor facilities, including a barge ramp for landing cargo brought in by sea. Booster components would be shipped by sea to the deep water ports of Cairns or Townsville in northeastern Australia and then taken by barge to Temple Bay. Satellite payloads and personnel would arrive by airplane at a new airport.

Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen had the quaint idea that with his backing and direction, $500,000 in taxpayer seed money and the enthusiasm of private sector friends, Queensland was a shoo-in for the space age. With a divided local business community, ignorant of the demands and disciplines of space technology, legal disputes over the ownership of the actual site of the proposed station and protests from Aboriginal inhabitants, it was never going to be that easy.

Within Australia's tropical savanna zone, the northernmost frontier regions have experienced the swiftest transition towards multifunctional occupance, as a formerly flimsy productivist mode is readily displaced by more complex modes, with greater prominence given to consumption, protection and Indigenous values. Of these frontier regions, Cape York Peninsula became the focus for increasingly entrenched, complex contests about regional futures. In this increasingly contested arena, the pivotal divide was between traditionalist/localist against modernist/reformist/regionalist visions of Indigenous futures, with this divide influencing the agendas and strategies of other major participants, notably conservationists and state and federal governments.

In the early 1990s the push for Aboriginal land rights was gaining momentum and then Premier Wayne Goss was committed to developing a Land Rights Bill in Queensland. Against this background the Wuthathi Aboriginal Council retained a team of barristers to launch a High Court action against the spaceport on land rights and environmental grounds. Their objections are set out in an article in the Koori Mail in August 1991.

Wuthathi and Kukuy’au tribal representatives maintained their stand against the proposed Space Port at Cape York when they met the Senate Standing Committee on Transport, Communications and Infrastructure in Cairns recently. … The representatives from the Wuthathi and Kukuy’au Aboriginal tribes said that a space port in the Temple Bay vicinity would not be in the best interests of the majority of the Aboriginal tribes of the Cape York Peninsula. At a land rights meeting held recently at Lockhart River attended by representatives from all Cape York Aboriginal and some Torres Strait Island communities representatives voted to support the Wuthathi and Kukuy’au tribes stance of no space port in Cape York Peninsula. Aboriginal representatives say the main reasons for this stance are that it infringes on traditional lands, it is not a viable enterprise that will benefit the rightful owner, it is merely an excuse to open up Cape York to massive tourist and unaboriginal development, and that the development of such a project will have a catastrophic result on the environment.

These objections could perhaps have been overcome through negotiation and compromise but the real problem with the project seems to have been financial. Ominously the spaceport project was included in a book "A herd of white elephants? : some big technology projects in Australia" edited by Pam Scott and published in 1992. The spaceport is examined as a possible part of the next generation of white elephants.

Australia cannot afford to allocate public resources to a space program which is not carefully and critically assessed. Without this Australia could find itself repeating the experience of the US military which built a $3.5 billion spaceport on the west coast of America and promptly mothballed it on completion. Amid the din of entrepreneurial advocacy, there has been a lack of critical attention paid to the spaceport, perhaps emanating from the belief that any space-related activity is likely to bolster the cause of Australia’s space industry.

Will the benefits trickle down? And does this belief warrant the dearth of rigorous analyses which should normally be associated with a potential large allocation of public resources? Would a spaceport soak up funds that might otherwise go to more worthwhile space endeavours? … In the wake of a perception of government inaction, some space enthusiasts have lent support to an initiative that has come from private consortiums. That the project has not progressed further in the past four years is largely due to the fact that those consortiums have either judged the project to be commercially unviable, or that they have not been able to obtain significant financial support from Canberra.

The once high profile project seems to have been quietly shelved when it turned out that the money for the spaceport was not forthcoming. It joined a number of ambitious plans for the North that failed to live up to their promise.