Battery-ing for Gilmour
Most technology-addicted Electricians (that’s what batteries call humans) may have been disappointed with the sideswiping 23-metre 30-tonne Eris rocket that struggled to raise the Vegemite jar payload into the stratosphere above Bowen, Queensland in late July 2025. But it wasn’t disappointing for the future of the Australian Space Industry, nor the start of National Science Week 2025.
‘It was the most thrilling 14-seconds of the 50-year drought of the Australian Space Program,’ says Half-life the AA battery.
Australia is filled with innovative minds, dedicated to some of the most impressive scientific advances in the world. In glides Gilmour Space Technologies wanting to push the agenda of becoming the 7th of the six countries involved in the continuous deployment of rockets delivering various types of payloads into space. Gilmour’s 14-second test rocket may have only been a jar of vegemite, but one day they endeavour to deliver objects into space with frequency, to deliver bus-sized payloads like the James Webb Space Telescope, is a future opportunity only a sturdy rocket, calm weather and 100’s of tonnes of combination rocket propellant away.
Reintegrating Australia into the space race is something author Lawrey Goodrick also considered for the prospects of Australian school children and science-based education, a mere dream since landing on the moon. Australian government passed up the opportunity to be part of history when a similar project to LIGO – Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory – was passed over for funding to develop a similar facility on Aussie soil, a project subsequently offered to and indulged by other countries. The two LIGO facilities in America discovered the first-ever gravitational wave detected from space from the collision of binary black holes in 2014. If the science behind the Australian Space Program is promoted, that particularly through refreshed engaging methods in science education that typically reveal mathematically daunting physics, more Australian school children may be walking into careers in the local Space Industry instead of disappearing with their talents overseas (although it is enticing!).
Goodrick’s new novel Half-life: The AA Battery Adventure explores this fertile promise of Australia’s Space Program, all through the AA battery, Half, who is enticed by the dream of being more than just a power source of devices around his Queensland household.
The 14-second rocket launch at the end of July 2025 cemented one of the predictions for Goodrick as Gilmour Space Technologies dusted off the cobwebs of the Australian Space Program. The AA battery character Half-life Goodrick created, reminisced of Australia’s support to NASA when landing mankind on the moon, talking of the hope of the Space Program by local Queensland innovators like Gilmour who were determined to defy the doubt of Australia’s ability. Goodrick has been long supportive of Australia’s competence and ability for the nation to be a leader in this facet, having self-reliant soil with all the resources and industry to prosper, his book Half-life breathing that potential to recognise all the potential of Australia and of its individuals, renewing a vigour to raise the bar with Australian innovation.
As for that 14-second rocket launch in Bowen, Queensland, it may not have been like a scene from Cape Canaveral of which many NASA rockets have been launched, but like Half-life the battery setting out on his own adventure with ambitions of space exploration, that puff of smoke and busted thruster that caused the Eris rocket to crash, would be a huge accomplishment for a small insignificant AA battery.
Physics fingers are crossed for Gilmour’s space venture, maybe this time with a double-A battery labelled ‘Half’ as payload, smeared of course with Vegemite.
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