Nina Patz was head of business development at the Brisbane-based company when it agreed to supply the US Department of Defense with one of its spaceplanes for testing, in a breakthrough moment for the local hypersonic industry.
She will now assume the same role at the spaceport firm as it prepares for more blast-offs next year.
ELA’s chief executive, Michael Jones, said, “Nina’s role will be to work closely with our growing customer base to close out contracts we’ve been negotiating for some time and then help us deliver launch and spaceport services tailored to our customers’ mission requirements and provide them with the benefits of launching from a state-of-the-art, full-service spaceport.
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“We have worked with Nina in her previous role and always admired her style, industry knowledge and professionalism, we are very lucky to have her join us.”
ELA said Patz would help develop customised contracts for clients, including launch, engine testing, payload and mission management, mission planning, and launch support services.
The news significantly comes after ELA agreed a deal with a Singaporean rocket company for a series of suborbital launches later this year.
The blast-offs will take place on the traditional ELA launch pads at its Arnhem Space Centre in the Northern Territory.
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The arrangement with the similarly named Equatorial Space Systems (ESS) is initially an MOU but could lead to a fuller deal for the company to become a longer-term tenant blasting off orbital rockets.
ELA said four other Asian rocket companies had also indicated their interest in becoming clients and had visited the Northern Territory to inspect the spaceport.
That deal comes alongside a separate agreement with a Korean launch company to become ELA’s first long-term tenant.
Innospace will blast off “several” rocket variants, each carrying payloads of between 50 and 500 kilograms, into low-Earth orbit from early next year.
ELA plans to accommodate up to seven resident launchers initially, but the site has the potential to grow further.
To accommodate the expansion, the company recently unveiled both next-generation horizontal integration facilities and launch pads.
The “state of the art” launch pads can handle weights of up to 450,000 kilograms and feature an 80,000-litre water deluge system to reduce the adverse effects of rocket plumes.
Jones told Space Connect in December the company learned lessons from failed blast-offs to help design them.
“Most people didn’t see, but there was a very early version of Starship with the top section coming back,” he said. “It landed off-centre and had a bit of a residual fire from just the heat that the engine produced.
“Automatic water cannons, for instance, were firing, but missed it because it landed off-centre.
“So I looked at that and went: ‘We really need to have a good system so that we plan for the worst case of having an accident on the pad.
“So we said let’s have pre-wetting, let’s have large, really efficient water deluge for the period of launch.
“And if we have any residual fire, I want to purge all the oxygen out of it. Nitrogen is the best source of that. And there’s a reason why we use nitrogen, as well as the longer term. In the next 18–24 months, we’re likely to construct a liquid oxygen plant on-site.”
Adam Thorn
Adam is a journalist who has worked for more than 40 prestigious media brands in the UK and Australia. Since 2005, his varied career has included stints as a reporter, copy editor, feature writer and editor for publications as diverse as Fleet Street newspaper The Sunday Times, fashion bible Jones, media and marketing website Mumbrella as well as lifestyle magazines such as GQ, Woman’s Weekly, Men’s Health and Loaded. He joined Momentum Media in early 2020 and currently writes for Australian Aviation and World of Aviation.
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