Fleet Space Technologies Shoot for the Moon and Mars

Fleet Space Technologies and the Seven Sister Consortium have revealed an ambitious new mission plan that will see them head to the Moon and Mars for further exploration. Fleet Space Technologies stands in collaboration with leading space and non-space organisations from across Australia and the world more broadly. The principal aim of these organisations is to further exploration of the Earth, Moon, and Mars.

The Seven Sisters’ ultimate goal is to enable humanity’s exploration and settlement of new worlds. The initiative will discover abundant resources off-world for the purpose of humanity’s exploration and habitation of space. The collaboration plans to do this through world-leading surface exploration and construction technologies developed within Australia’s rapidly expanding space sector.

“We are proud to be part of one of the world’s great centres of excellence for the development of leading space exploration technologies,” said Flavia Tata Nardini, the CEO and co-founder of Fleet Space Technologies.

“Involvement in endeavours like the Seven Sisters Project and its bold mission to support NASA’s ground-breaking moon and Mars missions are vital to growing a sector of increasing strategic importance for our nation.” 

“Grants like the Trailblazer enable innovation and national collaboration and we are delighted to submit our bid to be part of a truly historic mission with benefits around the globe and at home in Australia,” she said.

The Seven Sisters initiative represents a truly global effort and collaboration. It is expected that NASA will launch a rover mission for Fleet Space Technologies to the Moon in 2026, provided it meets a range of conditions during this phase of collaboration.

As part of this consortium, Fleet Space will establish partnerships with a number of world-leading organisations. This collective will bring together highly specialised space industry competence from iSpace (a Lunar exploration company focussed on sustainable space futures) and Q-CTRL (a quantum computing company). The collective will also draw on academic expertise from a range of world-class Australian universities, including the University of Adelaide, Monash University, the University of Sydney’s Australian Centre for Field Robotics, the Australian Institute for Machine Learning, and the Andy Thomas Centre for Space Resources.

The Australian Space Agency aims to commit \$12 billion AUD to the economy by 2030. This commitment has been underpinned by significant support at both a federal and state level. Fleet is drawing upon this support through the bidding process for the Trailblazer Programme. This program will provide federal funding for the Moon to Mars initiative. 

The purpose of the Trailblazer Program is to raise funding to leverage and diversify Australia’s world-leading skills such as remote operations and to develop new foundation services capabilities, encourage investment, and opportunities throughout the Australian space sector.

Fleet will lead the consortium response and has engaged PwC Australia to provide its financial and consulting capabilities.

The competitive grant opportunity with the Trailblazer Programme provides up to \$4 million AUD in funding for the development of foundation services rover solutions through early mission phases to Preliminary Design Review (PDR). This will provide a major benefit to Australian industry by enhancing supply chain capability through the development of new sovereign technologies, enabling companies like Fleet to develop demonstrators that showcase Australian innovation on the global stage while supporting Australia's involvement with NASA to return to the Moon with the Artemis program and launch the first missions to Mars.

Fleet Space Technologies is one of Australia's fastest-growing technology exports. This has led to the development of Fleet’s first International HQ in Houston, Texas, in close proximity to NASA.