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STaR SHOTS DST targets high-impact technological problems BY MAX BLENKIN
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s old strategic certainties become increasingly less certain, and our part of the world becomes more contested, Australia faces some problems which can only be confronted with serious science. Take space for example. The ADF and the Australian community rely on space-delivered capability, from communications and surveillance to TV broadcasts and Google maps. Yet that means overwhelming reliance on other people’s satellites which, at crunch time, may be degraded or simply unavailable. Australia is acquiring new submarines and antisubmarine warships, but our vast ocean surrounds still provide a haven for other people’s submarines which, in time of conflict, could halt fuel imports and exports of everything we sell. And there’s more: while the COVID-19 pandemic has delivered a small taste of what may lie ahead, the ADF has never had to operate in a contested chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear (CBRN) threat environment. To enable future ADF operations in these domains, the Defence Science and Technology
(DST) Group has come up with eight of what it calls STaR (Science, Technology and Research) Shots, a term inspired by the technological challenge in putting humans on the moon half a century ago. The new DST Strategy – entitled More, together: Defence Science and Technology Strategy 2030 – was released in May. It intends to concentrate strategic research on a smaller number of specific and challenging problems, up there with the scale and impact of the world-leading Jindalee Operational Radar Network (JORN). Chief Defence Scientist Professor Tanya Monro told ADBR this is a significant shift that DST cannot achieve on its own. “The problems Australia needs science and technology for in defence are much bigger than DST alone can solve. I am not going to be able to grow my workforce anywhere near enough. To do it we need to harness the capabilities of Australian industry and Australian universities. “We need to much more effectively communicate the challenges and much more effectively partner. “Partly it’s also about getting better at transitioning things out of DST – not holding on to things just because they were invented
Priority number one: delivering efficient spacebased communications, surveillance, navigation and positioning capability without reliance on international assets. SMARTSAT
