Talk:Austral Launch Vehicle

This article was nominated for deletion on 30 April 2025. The result of the discussion was no consensus.

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Merge proposal

I propose merging this article with Australian Space Agency. Already attempted it based on the deletion discussion, but was rolled back. I think the contents of this article can be edited into one or two paragraphs without losing any factual information, and so does not necessitate its own page. It could also be merged with University of Queensland, if the ASA isn't sufficiently involved, possibly using the same ASA merged text. Hal Nordmann (talk) 14:14, 2 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I spent a lot of time on this article during the AfD. Observations:

• I don't get the impression the Australian Space Agency was driving this. I may be wrong.
• There were 2 different startups associated with the program at different times. One of them was Heliaq. They sort of faded from the news and internet.
• There was the Austral Launch Vehicle lower stage and then there was the SPARTAN upper stage to go with. Was the overall program named SPARTAN or Austral Launch Vehicle - sources disagreed.
• The University of Queensland's hypersonics program has also done related military work. The AUKUS security partnership between Australia, the UK and the US has garnered a lot of attention for the Australian nuclear submarine program. There's also a less talked-about hypersonic component to the partnership. The US is far behind China and Russia in hypersonic weapon development and looking to Australia for help catching up. The University and the Queensland government are involved in the joint SCIFiRE hypersonic missile program.^[1]
  • I suspect UQ may have shelved their civilian space program to pursue more lucrative urgent work on hypersonic weapons.

I believe we need one overall article on UQ's civilian space efforts and vehicles. Alternatively, the civilian program could be part of a slightly larger article about that specific department within UQ. Either article could be assembled relatively easy from this article, its refs and refs introduced at the AfD. --A. B. ^{(talk • contribs • global count)} 16:37, 2 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I feel like even though ASA is not the main driver, it is still a Australian space project. But putting it under UQ somehow is an option too. I already put a modified version of this article into the ASA one, so you could draw on that. Hal Nordmann (talk) 22:37, 3 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]