The news comes days after SpaceX founder Elon Musk threatened to decommission its Dragon Capsule following a row with President Donald Trump.
No topic was off-limits when the children met Eric Philips, Katherine Bennell-Pegg, and Dr Paul Scully-Power at the nation’s premier space industry event, now in its fourth year. The moment is thought to be the first time in history that so many Australian astronauts have gathered together.
The sixth annual Australian Space Awards was held Wednesday, 28 May at Ilumina in Sydney in the presence of Australia's space community.
The flight, which lifted off on Wednesday morning Australian time, successfully reached space unlike the explosions of both the seventh and eighth test flights shortly after liftoff earlier this year, following hardware adjustments by SpaceX prior to the flight.
Speaking at the Australian Space Summit & Exhibition, the former prime minister urged Australia to develop a stronger space capability that would be interoperable with systems from the US, UK and Japan.
The flight lifted off from Starbase in Texas at 5:30pm CT on Thursday, 6 March, before the upper stage exploded, raining debris down in a dramatic light show that caused significant disruption to commercial aircraft in the area.