Australia’s first space commander

In January, Air Vice-Marshal Catherine Roberts was promoted from her top job in the RAAF to overseeing a whole new division of the ADF. It marked an extraordinary rise for the young woman from Mount Gambier, who was also one of the RAAF’s first female engineers. Here, she talks about building a culture, her inspirations, and why the country needs to take defence in space seriously

I’m so excited to be Australia’s first space commander! It’s the best title out of any job in defence. I’ve had a passion for space since I was small and saw Neil Armstrong land on the moon. As he uttered those first words, I remember watching around the television in the little country town that we were in, and it was such an incredible moment. I think that moment was when I became inspired by space.

“Australia recognised that defence needed a tranformative change to support the delivery of new space capabilities”

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Back then, Australia didn’t have a space program, so I ultimately had to choose something else. While I had this fascination with space, I ended up choosing between medicine and engineering so I could do something that I thought would make a difference in the world. Ultimately, I joined the Royal Australian Air Force as an engineer, and they paid me to do my degree back then. It meant I could become independent at a young age. I took that role, and I’ve had a fantastic career in the RAAF as an aerospace engineer. And now I’m the space commander.

The decision to launch Space Command was certainly not spontaneous. I’ve been working on it with a team for a considerable time. Space was recognised as an operational domain back in 2019, and the Chief of Air Force was appointed as the space domain lead. At that time, Australia recognised that defence needed to go through a transformational change to support the delivery of new space capabilities in what’s now a congested, contested, and competitive space environment. Previously, even up to five years ago, the space environment was considered much like peacetime — there was no threat.

It was then a lot of work to convince the organisation that Space Command was important and to work on designing how it would function. Then I had to go through a selection process for the top role. Obviously, I’d had a team working on setting the whole unit up, so I was probably well-placed. Even so, it was emotional when I was finally appointed space commander. At the beginning of this year, I sat at the desk with the Chief of Air Force to sign the certificate that appointed me. I was almost tearing up in that moment — being responsible for Space Command and leading it was just a thrill.

Space Command was established on 8 January 2022. We work to coordinate and centralise all the space activities that are going on across defence — to support the joint force and national security. We’ve got members of the Navy, Army, Air Force, Australian Public Service, and industry together under the Space Command headquarters, which is hosted within the Air Force. So, our role is to lead the effort to assure our access to space for Australia, defend Australia and our national interest, and promote global security and via the space domain.

That’s a lot of words, but in essence, we’re structured in three branches that cover the breadth of that role. So, we have a strategic plan branch, which is like your Chief Operating Officer. We would have the capability development branch if I used an industry term. And then we’ve got an operational coordination branch, where we work out how to raise, train, sustain, and certify our people to do the operations they need to do to support the Joint Force.

Probably from an industry perspective, the capability branch is perhaps of the most interest because they’re the ones who are engaging with the industry to work out what capabilities we need now and into the future. Right now, we’re working on our workforce development and what space career paths look like — that’s tricky because we don’t have any strict paths yet. We’re working with our allies, international partners, and industry to determine the future space architecture and capability requirements. I describe that as a constellation in space and a constellation on the ground in Australia. And then, we work out how to improve our operations to support the Joint Force and some of the critical infrastructures that Australia has relies on space.

My role is to lead those efforts across defence, working for the Chief of Air Force, and setting us up — particularly with sovereign state power, but also the military and commercial power that we need to assure our access to space now and into the future.

We all understand the importance of defending our oceans, land, and the skies above us. Still, we also need to be able to protect and defend our space capabilities for Australians and their way of life. From a military perspective, we understand that we rely on space for precision-guided weapons and long-range strike missiles, navigation, and geospatial intelligence. The connection to space is crucial to the effectiveness and accuracy of those systems. The modern military can’t effectively conduct operations without understanding their need and access to the space domain and the protection and defence of our assets in space.

Our daily lives are also reliant on space. From providing real-time information to mobile phones to ATMs, e-commerce, and traffic management, entire systems and cities rely on space connections. Meanwhile, space is becoming more congested and competitive. At the moment there are, I think, more than 7,500 satellites orbiting the Earth and thousands more being launched every year — naturally making space management quite complex and demanding the ability to protect our assets against the threats that are in space. This includes space debris, weather, collisions, and some destructive acts other nations have undertaken.

Space Command is important. We can enhance our sovereign capabilities, be self-reliant in understanding what’s happening in space, and collect that information for the defence of the nation and our way of life. We need to grow and evolve our operational capability to respond and assure Australia’s access to space, because we all rely on it.

The workforce is a big challenge. We have quite a few space specialists in defence, but as previously mentioned, we don’t have that career path. Defence is quite rigid in terms of its structures; we have categories, mustering, and trades, but we don’t have that for space yet. So, we’ve had to pull together a bunch of folks who are our space professionals — a lot of whom have been trained overseas. Some here, though, too. We’re running our courses in Australia and using some of the academic courses here, but we have to work out how we’re going to grow them into the future because we’ve got such rapid growth that it’s hard to get the right people we need in space with the right qualifications. At the moment, I’d say I’ll take anyone from any background and train them.

“We need to grow and evolve our operational capability to respond and assure Australia’s access to space, because we all rely on it”

We’ve already got a mission that’s been specified for us — to prepare Space Command to secure Australia’s interests in peace and war. We will follow the Defence Space Strategy’s five lines of effort. But in terms of my five-year vision, we are going to develop a space workforce. I don’t have doubt that we will work on how we can do that and grow that workforce. And I will have to inspire the younger generation to go into STEM to have a future space workforce.

We are also going to be rapidly accelerating our capability program. The rate that things change, that technology changes, and thus the strategic environment changes, means that we need to build capabilities more quickly. The only way we can do that is with rapid experimentation with the industry from day one, building capabilities, and then continually evolving them. That’s a very different approach we’ll take regarding future capability.

We’ve got to work on becoming the organisation we’ve been told to be. I talked about it in the context of taking Space Command to its Initial Operational Capability — that is, raising those people. It’s running and setting policy and ensuring that we have a strong capability focus. We need to do that with our industry partners, the government allies. Equally, we need to work internally within defence to ensure that we are efficient and effective.

Ultimately, over the next few years, we’d like to achieve that mission and the elements of the space strategy. And it’s relatively rapid growth, so I consider us a start-up if we’re talking in industry terms — that’s the sort of attitude and approach we’ll take. We’re going to be small, and we’re going to be fast if we go after these capabilities because of the nature of the strategic environment.

I consider us to be a start-up… that’s the sort of attitude and approach we’ll take

A lot of time will go into raising our workforce. We’re trying to work out how to do it as quickly as possible using the people we currently have and then training the future workforce. I think there will be some constraints on how much we can do, but I am working as hard as possible to ensure that that does not slow down our milestones. That’s probably the major constraint that we have.

We’re looking at novel ways to try and deal with workforce constraints — from artificial intelligence to digital twins. There are various ways to reduce workforce demand and use what we have to our advantage.

Defence is a big organisation, and this is a massive change for them. We’ve got to work through that change with them, and there’s a plan for that. There’s a lot of discussion involved.

Changing defence to create a new domain will be challenging for several reasons — we have to get into the technology cycle a lot more quickly, and that involves taking more risks and being more innovative. We need to do that so that we can build these capabilities, as I said, at the speed that makes them relevant to the situation that we’re currently in. To give you an idea about how we’re trying to do that, we’ve recently done ‘rapid prototyping’ and ‘rapid experimentation’ work involving Gilmour, Palantir, and Skykraft, and we’ve got some ongoing Defence Innovation Hub partnerships with some great Australian companies. Through that, we’ve got some good tech that we know we’ll be able to incorporate into that capability. But we need to involve industry and academia early on and have that program of rapid experimentation so that we can deliver the capabilities at the speed that we need to because, again, technology changes so quickly that we need to couple speed and capability.

I was one of the first female engineers in the early days, and it was a bit different. I felt a degree of tall poppy syndrome, so despite being good at my job, I was conscious about standing out too much. But the ADF has changed a lot since then, and I’ve learned to turn that difference into strength, and it’s a strength that forms the foundation of the Space Command culture and how I lead the team. What I’m excited about with Space Command is that the culture is a blank slate. I have people from Army, Navy, and Air Force blended together, but we can set it up as inclusive from the start — and we are. We have this start-up culture where everyone is excited about being there.

Space Command empowers us to be bold, and that doesn’t mean being rude. It means taking risks to develop the capabilities we need at the speed we need. The culture is also something that we work on from day one, and we all get to have input. We also value expertise over seniority because space experts are not the most senior. I think, in that context, I’m in a perfect position to do all this right from the start. Right now, in my organisation, we have 36 per cent women, and we have a pretty diverse group of backgrounds culturally. a really exciting place to be.

We’ve made space a collaborative environment. Women often index higher in skills like collaborative problem solving, self-awareness, and interpersonal communication, and will bring great strengths to space and Space Command. I’ve got some wonderful women in my team who are great role models. I’ve got a young leading aircraft team member, Fiona Ellis, who is just incredibly talented and competent. She thinks differently, and that gives us an advantage in the different ways we can get about the Space Command mission.

We’ve got fantastic opportunities in space from whatever background you can come from — and that’s something that I think women and girls need to think about. Space is something where you can make a difference in society. You can be involved in dealing with issues such as climate change and space exploration, from the Moon to Mars and beyond. This will be something that helps the human race into the future. I say to girls that if you want to make a difference, think about joining space and get excited about it. Seek to understand it and learn.