A leading Australian space company has abruptly shut down its “state-of-the-art” Northern Territory launch site and relocated operations to Queensland, following nearly three years of lease negotiations.
Equatorial Launch Australia (ELA) announced this week that it would be immediately shutting down the Arnhem Space Centre in the Northern Territory and relocating the launch site and space port to a new site in Queensland.
The space startup blamed the move on the “inability” to finalise a lease for the planned expansion of the site.
In a statement, Equatorial Launch Australia claimed that the Northern Land Council (NLC) had “failed to meet its own specified deadline” to approve the lease and that it had been left with no choice but to relocate the launch site.
The NLC rejected these claims and said it was being “unfairly blamed” by the Australian space company.
The Arnhem Space Centre is located 700km east of Darwin near the Arnhemland town of Nhulunbuy and was established with the aim of being Australia’s first commercial space centre.
It rose to prominence in 2019 when it was announced that NASA would be launching a series of rockets from the site, marking the first ever commercial rocket launch in Australia.
ELA had been planning a significant expansion of the spaceport, and had plans to launch a rocket per week from the site at its peak.
The Northern Territory government has also invested $5 million into the site, with the company planning to pour $100 million into the expansion.
See ya, NT
But earlier this week the company announced it would “immediately cease operations” at the Northern Territory site and would be relocating it to remote Queensland.
“The decision has been forced by the inability of the company to finalise a lease for the expansion of the Arnhem Space Centre,” the company statement said.
“The lease approval process has been in progress formally for just under three years, since 1 January 2022.
“The decision came after the Northern Land Council failed to meet its own specified deadline for the approval of the head lease for the fourth time over the last 12 months in October 2024.”
The ongoing delays had potentially put ELA in “breach of its contractual obligations with launch clients and jeopardised a previously secured major funding round”, the company claimed.
“Accordingly, management and the board of ELA were left with no option other than to act in the best interest of its customers and shareholders, abandon negotiations, and seek an alternate equatorial site in Queensland,” it said.
Land Council responds
The NLC has rejected Equatorial Launch Australia’s claims and said the statement contains “falsehoods”, saying that the space company had “provided inaccurate timelines and unfairly blamed the NLC for delays as the reason for their decision”.
“The NLC has engaged proactively and positively to facilitate a substantial, swift and most crucially, safe agreement being made between Arnhem Space Centre and traditional owners,” the NLC said in a statement.
NLC chairman Matthew Ryan said he was “disappointed with how ELA has handled this and especially the false timeline they are sharing”.
“Our people will not be pushed into cutting corners for outside business timelines, nor can we jeopardise cultural obligations, our country, or the hard-won land rights of our people,” Ryan said.
“The NLC has worked hard to keep this moving and communicate with them many times through what is a complicated but really important process.”
ELA said it was now working with the Queensland government and has already identified an alternate site at Weipa, with plans to have regulatory clearances for its contracted launches in the third quarter of next year.
