Commercial rocket launching company Equatorial Launch Australia, has secured a lease with traditional owners for about 60 hectares of land, to build a rocket base in the Northern Territory. The site is about 30km south of Nhulunbuy, in North East Arnhem Land.

ELA expects to start construction of the Arnhem Space Centre early next year, with the first launch at the end of 2018, once regulatory processes and environmental assessments to “get a space license” are complete.

Sounding rockets up to 15m long — which are used by pharmaceutical and research companies, universities, space agencies and many other organisations to collect data and conduct experiments — will be launched from the site.

ELA spokesman Shannon Brown said sounding rockets “go up into the edge of space and have a hang time of 15mins in zero gravity” before they return via parachute to a designated area on earth.

“They take scientific instrumentation and payloads to conduct experiments in a zero gravity environment,” Mr Brown told news.com.au.

“One guy on an American campaign, did research and experiments while looking into eye disease and stem cell research.”

The sounding rockets are also used for monitoring and observational purposes.

“The initial observations of the green house effect and the destruction of the ozone layer were made using sounding rockets,” Mr Brown said.

“The other thing these rockets can do is deploy small satellites, often the size of shoebox.”

WHY IS IT BEING BUILT IN THE NT?

The land — which belongs to Galarrwuy Yunupingu’s Gumatj clan on the Gove Penninsula — was previously used by the European Space Agency in the 1970s as a tracking station.

At just 12 degrees south of the equator, the location provides a more cost effective way to reach Earth’s orbit.

According to ELA, its customers will include private companies; weather monitoring organisations; research laboratories; universities; and international space agencies such as NASA.

Mr Brown said NASA has visited the site and expressed interest in using it for a potential launch in 2019.

But the base won’t resemble Cape Canaveral, home to the Kennedy Space Centre in the US, according to Mr Brown. In fact, it won’t appear to be anything special at all.

“The pads for that these rockets launch from are quite small, the size of swimming pool,” Mr Brown said.

The Arnhem Space Centre will cost a total of about $5 million, according to the ELA.

“It’s a mostly private investment, but we’ve had some assistance from the NT government, the total cost of construction by competition will total about $5 million,” Mr Brown said.

The NT government has signed a Project Facilitation Agreement with ELA, Gumatj Corporation and Developing East Arnhem Limited to support collaboration over the first phase of the project. The centre is expected to unlock more than $100 million in economic benefits for the NT. The space industry is worth about $300 billion globally.