Central Australia at 28°S latitude — the same as Cape Canaveral — with 2,000km of empty downrange desert no other site on earth can match. The SBC delivers the rest: methane by pipeline, LOX from corridor power, world-first booster recovery on rail. Australia in the space economy at last.
Central Australia: 28°S matching Cape Canaveral. Access to every commercially valuable orbit. Clearest skies and most launch days per year of any potential spaceport on earth. And 2,000 kilometres of empty, unpopulated downrange desert — meaning failed launches and booster drops harm nobody. No other launch site on earth has this combination.
The best launch geometry on earth has gone unused because central Australia had nothing else. No reliable power. No water. No transport. No gas supply. No workforce pipeline. No accommodation. The geometry was always there; everything else was missing. The SBC delivers everything else.
Australia depends entirely on foreign launch providers — SpaceX, Rocket Lab, Arianespace — for every government satellite. Ukraine demonstrated the vulnerability: when Starlink coverage was modulated by a single CEO, an entire war effort depended on a private decision in another country. Australia cannot afford that exposure on its own communications, surveillance, and navigation satellites.
SBC#1 meets SBC#2 near Alice Springs. At the junction: power at 6c/kWh · sovereign pipeline methane · Alice Hub water · terabit fibre · standard-gauge freight rail · maglev passenger transport in under 30 minutes. The Crossroads had the best launch geometry on earth. The SBC delivers everything else.
No launch site on earth has a national gas grid delivering methane by pipeline from sovereign fields. Beetaloo Basin (500+ TCF, on SBC#2), Timor Sea, and Cooper Basin flow into the SBC gas corridor. Arrives continuously from Australian sources. No shipping. No import risk. At $12/kg, the Crossroads undercuts every competitor on launch propellant cost.
LOX (liquid oxygen) extracted from air at 6c/kWh: approximately $0.03/kg. A Starship-class LOX load under $100,000. No other site has cheap sovereign methane by pipeline and essentially free LOX from corridor power. Lowest-cost launch propellant location on earth. Both propellants. Sovereign. Unlimited. Zero import risk.
Every material connects to the Crossroads via SBC corridors: green aluminium, steel, titanium, nickel superalloys, copper, lithium (world's largest reserves), rare earths, silicon, carbon fibre. Satellite manufacturing target: 20% of global market by 2040 = $3–10B/yr. Built in Australia. Owned by Australians.
Every rocket built here trains aerospace engineers, machinists, propulsion and avionics specialists. All dual-use for defence: guidance, propulsion, composite structures, miniaturised electronics. Knowledge stays in engineers, universities, and defence programs. We stop exporting engineering potential with the ore.
Arnhem Space Centre: sovereign military launch Day 1. Continental Crossroads: heavy commercial. Spaceport feeds satellite network — feeds drone network — defends Australia. As cadence grows, the Crossroads becomes the Indo-Pacific propellant hub. Japan, South Korea, India source propellant here.
Booster recovery on dedicated rail track running downrange — a world first. Land downrange on a moving rail platform, return to launch pad on rails. Lower-stress recovery than barge or ground landing. Faster turnaround. Lower refurbishment cost. The 2,000km downrange desert that makes the site safe also makes rail-based recovery uniquely possible.
The space industry is a supply chain. SBC hosts the Crossroads spaceport and a chain of corridor towns specialised by industry segment: propellant, composites, avionics, satellites, mission operations, ground stations. Workforce lives on the corridor. Career path from VET to PhD without leaving the SBC.
Global space economy: $450B now, projected $1 trillion by 2040. Sovereign launch capability is the entry ticket. The Crossroads gives Australia the cheapest launch propellant location on earth, the safest downrange geography, and a sovereign supply chain. By 2040: at least 10% of the global launch market and 20% of satellite manufacturing — Australian, built domestically, exported to allies.
No memos pinned to this policy yet. When an MMP memo on this topic is published, it will appear here with a short summary. The full memo index is at moralmajority.com.au/memos.html.