28th August 2021
The day WA’s first home-grown spacecraft Binar-1 CubeSat launched, made by a team of students and engineers at Curtin University's Space Science and Technology Centre, the sandgropers of Perth gathered like it was a grand final, only the ball was a shoebox zooming to space. Down on the foreshore, Auntie Maz brought fairy bread (“for aeronautical reasons”) and Unc Gaz set up a camp chair labelled MISSION CONTROL.
Someone dragged along a telescope the size of a wheelie bin and aimed it at Florida, which is not how telescopes work, but we appreciated the effort.
On the big screen, the rocket rumbled to life in far‑off Florida while the Bell Tower tried very hard not to look jealous.
“Go you little beauty!” yelled a kid waving a WA flag twice their size. A quokka on the railing borrowed someone’s binoculars—strictly for scientific purposes.
As the plume bloomed, the crowd did that collective Aussie inhale usually reserved for dropped meat pies. Then—lift‑off. Cheers. Fist pumps. A tradie dabbed a tear and said it was “just dust from the Fremantle Doctor, mate.” Auntie Maz declared WA officially a space state and promoted the esky to “cryogenic storage.”
Someone asked if the satellite would wave when it flew back over Scarbs. “Too busy doing important maths,” said Unc Gaz, already Googling “how to talk to satellites from a Bunnings antenna.”
By the time the credits rolled, Perth had adopted a tiny box in orbit—proof you can start in a lab behind a carpark and still end up drawing circles round the planet.
* as depicted by AI - may not factually be correct