October Public Meeting | Australia in Space: From Australis OSCAR 5 to an Australian Space Agency

This is the free monthly meeting of the Space Association of Australia - all welcome!

We'll be in the Function Room on the first floor of the Caulfield RSL. The venue is disabled friendly and includes a lift. Meals are available at reasonable prices. Ample car parking is available immediately behind the RSL or in St Georges Road. Trams and trains run within 200 metres of the venue.

The meeting will be streamed live here and then made available on-demand via the Space Association's YouTube channel - SAA.TV.

Kerrie Dougherty is a freelance curator, historian, educator and writer, with more than thirty years’ experience in the space field. Formerly Curator of Space Technology at the Powerhouse Museum, Sydney, Kerrie is an acknowledged expert on Australia’s space history, having co-authored the original edition of Space Australia and published more than a dozen other papers on the topic.

A member of the Faculty of the International Space University, Kerrie lectures in Space Humanities in the ISU’s Space Studies Program and Southern Hemisphere Space Studies program. She is also an elected Member of the International Academy of Astronautics and serves on international committees on the ‘history of astronautics’, ‘space education and outreach’ and ‘space and museums’.

Kerrie has been the recipient of an Australian Space Pioneer Award from the National Space Society of Australia and was the 2015 winner of the Sacknoff Prize for Space History.

Australis OSCAR 5: The Story of how Melbourne University Students Built Australia’s First Satellite with Richard Tonkin

In the 1960s, a group of University of Melbourne science and engineering students banded together to build a satellite in their spare time.

Australis OSCAR 5 tells the story of those students as they built Australia's first satelllite and had it launched into orbit by NASA in January 1970.

The satellite operated successfully for nearly two months before its batteries ran out.