Qualla: Koonibba Test Range

Koonibba Test Range: Introduction

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Just after dawn on 19 September 2020, a slender rocket no longer than a person rose off the red earth of the Far West Coast and arced north over the saltbush, the first commercial, space-capable launch from Australian soil. It lifted off the lands of the Koonibba Aboriginal community - a launch the people here had negotiated and welcomed onto their own country. For a community whose connection to this place runs back tens of thousands of years, watching a rocket climb from it was a new chapter written on very old ground.

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Koonibba Test Range: A Community on the Map

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Koonibba sits about 40 kilometres northwest of Ceduna, a small settlement of roughly 125 people on the edge of the South Australian outback. Its name and its story belong to the Wirangu, Kokatha and Mirning peoples whose country this is. Koonibba began in 1901 as a Lutheran missi...

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Koonibba Test Range: Six Years of Talking

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Nothing here happened quickly. From 2019, the private space company Southern Launch sat down with the Koonibba Community Aboriginal Corporation, and the conversations had in fact been running for years before the first countdown. Members of the community were hired to build and r...

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Koonibba Test Range: Light This Candle

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The 2020 flights carried small DART rockets - barely 34 kilograms and 3.4 metres long - launching north over the empty Yumbarra Conservation Park and Yellabinna Wilderness. The first attempt failed; the second pair flew true. Their purpose was data: information to develop tiny cu...

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Koonibba Test Range: The Biggest Pad in the South

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Sprawling across roughly 41,000 square kilometres of sparsely populated country, the Koonibba Test Range is described as the largest launch pad in the Southern Hemisphere - an expanse of land so vast that a rocket can rise, separate, and return without ever leaving the safety zon...

Read more: Koonibba Test Range on Qualla