Australian military looks to build crucial space capabilities that will support Aukus nuclear subs

20th century military leaders argued ‘if we lose the war in the air, we lose the war and we lose it quickly’. Defence experts say today the same might be said of space. Photograph: CSIRO

Defence is looking for a mesh of military space satellites that can talk to each other as well as to the ground, and is “scalable, rapidly deployable and reconstitutable”.

The system, in other words, would need to be able to be made bigger, to be quickly put into action and to be repaired in case of attack or accident.