Last night Channel 7 News, Perth turned its cameras to one of Western Australia’s proudest engineering stories, the Binar Space Program. We watched with a particular sense of pride, because the frames that hold those satellites together were machined right here by our team.

Watch the news report here

Binar is Western Australia’s own space program, run out of Curtin University’s Space Science and Technology Centre. Named after the Noongar word for shooting star, it produced the first satellites ever designed and built in this state. What began as a bold idea in 2017 has since put multiple CubeSats into orbit, from the pioneering Binar-1 through to the Binar-2, 3 and 4 missions that reached the International Space Station, with a next generation already in development.

Every one of those spacecraft needs a structure that can survive the violence of launch and the extremes of space. That is where we came in. We machined the frames for the Binar satellites, delivering the tight tolerances and material precision that spaceflight hardware demands. There is no room for error when a component is heading into orbit, and getting that right for a local space program is exactly the kind of work we love.

Seeing Binar recognised on the news is a reminder of how far Western Australia’s space and advanced manufacturing sectors have come. It is one thing to machine a part. It is another to know that part is now circling the planet, carrying experiments built by WA researchers and students.

Congratulations to the entire Binar team at Curtin on the well deserved coverage. We are proud to have played our small part in getting your satellites off the ground, and we look forward to seeing where the program goes next.