The Australian Space Agency, formed in 2018, has a budget of just over $41 million (€26 million) — spread over four years. That doesn’t worry the agency’s CEO, Dr Megan Clark. She plans to increase the industry’s value to at least $7 billion a year by 2030.
Clark started her career as a geologist in the mining industry. At the time, women were not permitted to work underground. “The game was then that if a mines inspector came, you came up to the surface, and as long as they didn’t see you working underground or as long as you weren’t ‘blatantly’ working underground, they would sort of turn a blind eye,” she told The New York Times. “And I just thought that lacked integrity: ‘This is what I do, and I’m not going to hide from that.’” When an inspector caught Clark working underground, her boss was told either to fire her or put her in a different job. Instead, he spoke up for her; the law was changed in 1986. Clark says she receives a lot of letters from children who are filled with curiosity about space. “Some people get [that curiosity] beaten out of them, but some people don’t, and they end up in the space sector.”