|
Australia was actually a founding member of ESA back in the early '60's and Australia (with a bit of help from the UK...) launched a satellite from Woomera, putting Australia in 3rd place.
However the Menzies Government decided that all this space stuff was a load of rubbish and that it would never go anywhere, so Menzies pulled the plug, so now we pay billions of dollars to the Americans, Chinese and Europe to do what we were doing in the first (or third) place.
Scattered across many remote parts of WA and SA are bits of 1sta nd 2nd stage rockets launched from Woomera - I have a piece on one somewhere at home...
|