Uralla Space Centre: Connecting Australia to the Space Domain
High above the New England Tablelands in regional New South Wales, a purpose-built facility is helping keep critical links between satellites and the people who operate them on Earth.
For more than 25 years, Lockheed Martin Australia’s Uralla Space Centre has provided reliable ground station services for commercial, civil and Defence space missions. Today, the facility operates 24 hours a day, seven days a week, supporting customers and missions that depend on resilient communications, tracking and satellite control.
Strategically located between Sydney and Brisbane, and just 15 kilometres from Armidale Regional Airport, Uralla combines the accessibility needed to support customers and a highly experienced workforce with the advantages of a regional location.
For Lockheed Martin Australia Regional Director of Space, David Ball, that combination is a key part of what makes Uralla unique.
“Uralla has been purpose-built as a fit-for-purpose ground station, and our location gives us some immense benefits, including very low levels of radio frequency interference.”
A strategic location for space
In satellite communications, location matters.
Uralla sits approximately 1,100 metres above sea level, benefiting from clean air, a high number of clear days and nights and, importantly, exceptionally low levels of radio frequency interference compared with metropolitan locations.
The Centre’s position also provides an extensive line of sight to the sky. Its location enables reliable communications with satellites as low as five degrees above the horizon in almost any direction, supporting coverage stretching from halfway across the Pacific Ocean to halfway across the Indian Ocean.
This east-to-west coverage provides flexibility for customers operating satellites across a broad range of orbits and missions.
The regional location also offers valuable spectrum advantages at a time when demand for access to spectrum continues to grow across the global space industry.
The site hosts Lockheed Martin Australia’s sovereign built and operated Space Domain Awareness sensors, FireOPAL.
At its core, Uralla provides the three fundamental services required to connect ground operations with spacecraft: tracking, telemetry and commanding.
Tracking provides the infrastructure needed to locate and follow a satellite. Telemetry brings data from the spacecraft back to Earth. Commanding enables operators to send instructions to the satellite.
Together, these functions form the critical connection between satellites in space and the people and infrastructure responsible for operating them on the ground.
“We are a connection between nation-building infrastructure and the ground people who control that infrastructure,” Ball said.
The Centre is equipped with two fully steerable 14.2-metre Cassegrain antennas, with land and infrastructure availability to support future capability. Together, the antennas can support coverage across the geostationary arc and a wide range of satellite communications and tracking missions.
The facility is also designed around resilience.
Robust power infrastructure includes an on-site solar farm, multiple generators and uninterruptible power supply systems. Dual, diverse fibre services provide resilient connectivity, while the secure 10-acre compound has controlled access and the ability to expand across an additional 37 acres as mission requirements evolve.
That combination of infrastructure, redundancy and operational experience is critical when supporting missions where communications cannot simply be switched off.
Experience matters when the unexpected happens
Ground station operations require more than sophisticated equipment. They require people with the knowledge and experience to operate that equipment reliably, particularly when conditions do not go according to plan.
Lockheed Martin is part of a worldwide network of ground stations supporting satellites from their earliest moments after launch. During these initial phases, operators can encounter unexpected conditions that require experience, judgement and the ability to respond quickly.
“It is vitally important that communications is reliable, that the people operating the system know what they are doing and, more importantly, to recover from things that can’t be accounted for,” Ball said.
This experience is supported by Lockheed Martin Australia’s established space workforce and the broader expertise of Lockheed Martin globally.
With a space heritage stretching back to the dawn of the space age, Lockheed Martin Australia can draw on the company's global knowledge, technologies and experience while delivering capability locally.
For customers, that means access to a team that understands both the technical demands of space operations and the importance of dependable, mission-ready ground infrastructure.
Open for the next generation of space missions
The space sector is changing rapidly, with growing demand for communications, Earth observation, navigation, scientific missions, Defence applications and commercial satellite services.
Uralla is positioned to support that growth.
Its existing infrastructure, resilient systems, experienced workforce and strategic location provide a foundation for future missions, while additional land and infrastructure capacity provide room to expand.
The Centre is already operating around the clock for SouthPAN, with personnel supporting operations 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, working alongside a sister site in New Zealand.
For the Australian space industry, that represents an established capability that is ready to support missions today—not simply a facility being developed for the future.
“Ultimately, it comes down to having the capability, the experience and the people to support our customers when they need us,” Ball said.
More than 25 years after it began operations, the Uralla Space Centre continues to provide a critical link between space and Earth.
As Australia's space sector grows, that connection will become increasingly important.