Southern Launch

Southern Launch, founded in 2019 and headquartered in Adelaide, South Australia, is an Australian launch services company developing launch infrastructure on the Eyre Peninsula in South Australia — one of the most geographically advantaged locations in the Southern Hemisphere for accessing multiple orbital inclinations due to its southern latitude, sparse population, and wide safety corridor over the Southern Ocean.

Southern Launch's flagship facility is Whalers Way Orbital Launch Complex, located at the southern tip of the Eyre Peninsula approximately 700 km west of Adelaide. Whalers Way's extreme southern latitude (~35°S) provides access to polar and sun-synchronous orbits with full over-ocean downrange trajectory — critical for Eastern Australian launch that avoids populated land masses. The site can also support equatorial-inclination launches for geostationary transfer trajectory insertion and retrograde orbital planes unavailable from Northern Hemisphere facilities.

Southern Launch conducted Australia's first commercial rocket launch in 2022 when Southern Launch and Gilmour Space Technologies completed a suborbital test flight from the Koonibba Test Range, a smaller launch facility on the Yalata Aboriginal Lands. This marked the first rocket launched from Australian soil in over 50 years since the WRESAT program at Woomera in 1967.

The company is positioning Whalers Way as a launch site for both Australian commercial rockets (Gilmour Space, Black Sky Aerospace) and international customers seeking Southern Hemisphere access. Australia's growing commercial space regulatory framework, developed by the Australian Space Agency established in 2018, has enabled the commercial launch activities that Southern Launch is targeting. The company competes with New Zealand-based RocketLab's Mahia launch site and Argentina's CELPA for Southern Hemisphere commercial launch business.