This week, ELO2 Consortium beat out rival AROSE to win the right to create Australia’s upcoming lunar rover.

The rover is designed to collect regolith, or moon soil, that will eventually be turned into oxygen to support a permanent NASA base.

It’s arguably the biggest and most exciting project Australia’s space sector has ever been involved with, and will work in tandem with NASA’s Artemis mission to return humans to the lunar surface.

Here, host Adam Thorn interviews two of the key figures at ELO2 overseeing the project: Lunar Outpost’s Joseph Kenrick and EPE Oceania’s Ben Sorensen.

Space Centre Australia plans to build a spaceport in far north Queensland that it hopes will become like an international airport for launch vehicles.

However, unlike its local rivals, it believes it can one day host larger rockets manufactured by companies such as SpaceX.

In this episode, SCA’s founder and CEO, James Palmer, joins host Adam Thorn to talk about the latest developments as well as the appointment of its new chairman, Scott Morrison.

The pair also discuss the latest industry topics, including the high-profile cancelling of the JP 9102 tender with Lockheed Martin.

In 1999, an archived speech was discovered that had been written for US President Richard Nixon 30 years before in case a disaster on the Apollo 11 mission left the astronauts with no hope of recovery.

Thankfully, that speech never had to be given – but what if it had? What if some key component on the lunar lander had failed, stranding Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the moon, to slowly run out of oxygen as the world watched in horror?

It’s a question asked by author David Dyer in his new novel, This Kingdom of Dust, which provides a fictionalised look at just such a scenario.

In this Space Connect podcast, he talks to Jake Nelson about NASA’s concerns with the Apollo program, how the world might have reacted, and whether the enthusiasm for space travel so prevalent in the 1960s can be recaptured.