Australis Oscar 5: The Improbable Story of Australia’s First Private Satellite

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In the 1960s, a group of University of Melbourne Science and Engineering students and one Law student banded together to build a satellite in their spare time. You are invited to the launch of a book that records the journey of those students as they built Australis OSCAR 5 and had it launched into orbit by NASA in January 1970. Australis operated successfully for nearly two months before its batteries ran out. It was the first satellite built in Australia and achieved a number of important technical milestones, including over a dozen world firsts. Then, nearly fifty years later, another group of students, also from the Universiy of Melbourne decided that they too would build a small satellite. Operating in a very different technical, social and regulatory environment and with remarkably similar goals, the team built their cubesat. As if to celebrate the anniversary year of Australis’ launch in 1970, ACRUX-1 was launched from New Zealand in 2019.