Arabic version: أستراليا تدرّب خدمات الطوارئ على انقطاعات الأقمار الصناعية

According to The Guardian, Australia’s emergency services and military personnel are being trained in paper-map reading, navigation without GPS and analogue communications in case the country loses access to critical space infrastructure. A panel at the 19th Australian space forum in Adelaide considered the consequences of having no satellites, GPS, remote sensing or secure communications.

Optus satellite and space systems head Nick Leake said Australians may not realise how much everyday activity depends on satellites. He warned that ATM networks could go down, emergency services could lose situational awareness, aircraft navigation could degrade and remote communities could be cut off. Aviation, freight, energy-grid communications and financial systems also rely on satellite services, he said.

Flinders University adjunct professor Jackie Craig AM, an incident management team leader with the South Australian state emergency service, said emergency workers are increasingly dependent on vulnerable systems. Members are being taught to use street directories and maps rather than phones. If satellite systems failed, she said, emergency services would return to pencil and paper, radios and hard copies of procedure manuals.

Michael Murphy, deputy chief executive of the Royal Flying Doctor Service SA/NT, said the service could operate normally for about 24 hours through contingencies and redundancies before prioritising life-saving missions using manual procedures and alternative communications. The Australian Defence Force is also providing sextant and terrestrial-navigation training. Air commodore Chris Robson said the major risk was not necessarily an enemy attack, but solar activity that could disrupt significant space capabilities. The panel discussed redundancy across multiple orbits, more Earth stations and sovereign satellite capabilities.