When the Minister for Education, Simon Birmingham, announced last year that this country would establish a space agency to co-ordinate space related industries, he set off a very Australian reaction: an interstate competition about real estate. South Australia and Western Australia have been quick out of the blocks with offers to host the agency.

The Northern Territory has expressed serious interest. Then come the heavyweights. NSW is putting together a bid with Australia’s first astronaut, Dr Paul Scully-Power, as a central figure. Victoria is expected to put forward a bid soon. For now, the fledgling body is based in Canberra and inertia being a powerful force in politics as well as physics, it will no doubt stay there for a while.

The case for the agency itself is strong. As we have noted previously, Australia already has a space industry – or rather, industries – but these lack a well-informed advocate inside government, an international face for Australian space research and an entrepreneurial agent able to broker space-based solutions for problems or tasks in the wider economy.

In this age of market-driven thinking, such a function might be thought unnecessary. Certainly there has been significant resistance in Canberra to the idea of such an organisation. But space industries and technology are unique in ways which market forces and information find hard to grasp. Satellite imaging, for example, has applications which make it phenomenally useful, but do not immediately suggest themselves to people in the wider economy.

A space agency should be the advocate which understands the industries’ potential and makes the connections which realise that potential, as well as co-ordinating, or at least suggesting possibilities for, Australia’s space industry.