Careers in Space

From space back to earth: implications of the formation of the Australian Space Agency on STEM education.

by Chris Dite, teacher in the Diploma Programme

The launch of the Australian Space Agency (ASA) in July should delight all Victorian teachers and students. Everyone, not just students doing Physics Higher Level, will have an opportunity to reap the benefits of the new space race.

That was the loud and clear message from Monash University’s School of Physics and Astronomy, which I visited in late October. Dr Jasmina Lazendic-Galloway spoke excitedly of the explosion of new possibilities in her lecture From space back to earth: implications of the formation of the Australian Space Agency on STEM education.

While the spacefaring sector has been doing sensational work, it has been somewhat scattered until now. In ASA, the Wild West of space start-ups has found the sheriff it needs. Dr Megan Clark, former director of the CSIRO, is steering the governing body now overseeing Australian efforts in the cosmos. And this new order is set to make all of earth – and every spacefarer – a lot richer.

The most exciting part of Dr Lazendic-Galloway’s presentation was her emphasis on the broadening definition of a spacefarer in 2018. Artists, graphic designers, gamers and archaeologists are all making prominent names for themselves in vital parts of the industry. Australian companies like Opaque Space (https://www.opx.space/) and Saber Astronautics (https://saberastro.com/) are winning contracts with NASA and challenging conventional understandings of what it means to work in space.

STEM literacy, alongside Art, Design and critical thinking (TOK), will be crucial skills in this new era. Multilingualism will also help prepare students for the necessarily global expansion into the solar system. Last month ASA entered into a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with its first international partner, the French Centre national d’études spatiales (CNES). In a few years our DP students could be working on the first French-Australian mission into the unknown!