We don’t normally talk about suborbital launches, but we do have a special mention this week.

On September 19th at around 02:00 UTC, a privately-owned Australian company called Southern Launch successfully lifted a small payload on a suborbital mission. This was the first commercial launch of its kind from Australia. The mission, which was called DART, took off from a test range in an outback town in southern Australia (the Koonibba Test Range).

Southern Launch is a commercial company developing small, agile, reusable orbital and suborbital launch vehicles. They partnered with DEWC to launch the latter’s test payload DEWC-SP1, which sent back data to further the company’s satellite development process. The actual rocket was built by T-Minus Engineering.

More information

Southern Launch announcement (LinkedIn)

ABC News article 

West Coast Sentinel article