An Australian Space Agency At Last?

Dante_J writes "In the Australian Federal budget presented last night, as well as big national infrastructure spending, an amount of $48.6 million over four years was allocated for an 'Australian Space Science Program.' Normally a space program is managed by a space agency. Does this now mean that Australia will follow the recommendations of the Senate Space Science report and give up its rather inadequate title of the only top-20 GDP nation not to have one? With nations like Vietnam, Bangladesh and Bulgaria forming or maintaining space agencies, this government infrastructure is obviously not limited to G-20 nations. Discussions to combine Australian and New Zealand airspace have been undertaken; should that translate to aerospace too, and both nations form an ANZAC space agency together?"

Comments

Re:g'day mate

[mjwx]

Well drag me to hell...what does an island nation, sitting well below the equator, need with a space program anyhow.

I know the parent is a troll but...

Using " to indicate degrees as I haven't figured out how to get ./ to render a proper degrees symbol.

Australia's most northern point is 10"41 S (cape york, QLD), the US's most southern point is 18"56 N in Hawaii or 24"33 N on the US mainland (Key West, Fl)

Australia's most northern capital city Darwin, NT is 12"29 S whislt the US's most southern capital city is Florida, FL is 25:46 N

Australia's biggest problem is that it's fairly low lying country but really so is Florida, where Cape Canaveral is located. As I pulled all of this out of Google Earth fairly quickly I don't have avg elevations for NT, QLD and FL.