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The space geeks of Earth are headed Down Under next week for the 76th International Astronautical Congress, the largest shindig in the galaxy for stargazers with dreams of conquering the final frontier.
Headlining proceedings is Katherine Bennell-Pegg, who last year became the first qualified astronaut under the Australian flag. Her husband is Campbell Pegg, who recently left Optus to take up a bigwig director role at the South Australian government’s Space Industry Centre. Immaculate timing.
Katherine Bennell-Pegg became the first astronaut trained under the Australian flag last year.Credit: European Space Agency
But what readers wouldn’t know is that well before the pair became the space industry’s premier power couple, they aimed their starward ambitions at reality TV.
In 2009, the pair dreamt up a TV contest to launch two civilians into space. Beats receiving a rose, we guess.
The proposed show, Starwalker, would pluck two Earthlings from obscurity and train them as astronauts before flinging them through the stratosphere on a Russian Soyuz spacecraft.
But like so many rocketships aimed at the stars, it all went up in flames. The show was scuppered on its launchpad after the pair had left the project, amid later claims of financial mismanagement lobbed towards a producer. Then, history’s biggest brain, Stephen Hawking, distanced himself from the show after claims he would be a judge.
There is no suggestion Bennell-Pegg or Pegg were involved in this ensuing chaos, only that they helped conceive the idea.
“Starwalker was an idea we had as a group of uni students studying space-related degrees, to create an open competition for any Australian to go to space,” the pair told CBD.
“We removed ourselves from the project within weeks of the idea, as we quickly realised our skill was in engineering and not television production.”
The project raised eyebrows in the space industry, and last year Greens senator David Shoebridge asked then-science minister Ed Husic whether the Australian Space Agency, which funded Bennell-Pegg’s $466,000 astronaut training with taxpayer dosh, knew they were once involved with the show. (That would be a no.)
Husic’s replacement, Tim Ayres, will be in town for the big space gathering in Sydney, presumably to spruik the government’s $42 million investment in the Australian moon rover “Roo-ver”. Ayres just announced the Roo-ver is ready to launch at the end of this decade in cahoots with NASA. Let’s just hope that mission gets off the ground.
All crisis, no comms for Optus overlord
Optus’ corporate overlord Singtel is under intense scrutiny following the revelation that four people died amid a network failure in several states that dropped 600 Triple Zero calls. But the company, which acquired Optus in 2001, has some phone issues of its own.
The Singaporean company posted a $S4 billion ($4.7 billion) profit in the past financial year and bills itself as Asia’s leading communications group that ostensibly exists to “help people and businesses communicate effortlessly”. Just not, apparently, if those people are journos and their business requires them to “communicate effortlessly” with Singtel itself.
Reporters trying to contact the telecommunications behemoth about the Australian disaster have found themselves stymied by the fact that there’s no phone number for media listed on its website. Questions must be dispatched via email.
Singtel is the parent company of Optus.Credit: Bloomberg
This masthead dispatched several urgent inquiries to Singtel when the news first broke, and again when Prime Minister Anthony Albanese suggested Optus chief executive Stephen Rue should consider his position and Communications Minister Anika Wells warned that Optus should expect “significant consequences”.
Requests sent to the media email and Singtel’s corporate communications inbox have gone unanswered. So, too, has a phone call and text message to a senior director in its “strategic communications” team, whose number was uncovered through Google sleuthing. That’s all crisis and no comms.
CBD hit up the media email to ask Singtel if the absence of a phone number – and overall lack of communication – was weird for, you know, a phone company. It didn’t buzz back.
Not on song
It is not often that Russian aggression in Ukraine intersects with a Eurovision-style song contest, Northern Territory electronic dance music artist Vassy and Foreign Minister Penny Wong. OK, it is never.
But overseas reports, coming in hot, claim Vassy, an international recording artist who started life in Darwin as Vasiliki Karagiorgos before moving to the US in the 2010s, had abruptly dropped out of representing the US in Russia’s Intervision Song Contest.
This was after coming under “political pressure from the government of Australia”, news agency Reuters said in a report, attributing the comment to contest organisers.
DFAT communications officials were, how can we put this, bemused when we phoned and interrupted a function Wong was attending in New York seeking answers. Well, we can’t all be Peter Hartcher.
A statement was promised and duly delivered, but it didn’t deliver on the central accusations.
“The Australian government has no engagement with, and Australia did not participate in, the ‘Intervision Song Contest’,” DFAT said.
“Australia condemns Russia for its ongoing illegal and immoral war on Ukraine, which it continues to dangerously escalate.
“We will continue to work with partners to press Putin for a just and lasting peace in Ukraine and security and stability in Europe.”
Via Instagram, Vassy thanked her 195,000 followers. “Soon, I’ll be ready to share my thoughts with you.”
Ominous.
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