The Medianet announcement of the 2024 pre-seed round identified a Sydney-based team of engineers, medical doctors and scientists.
Keeping a person alive in a hostile environment is a life support, physiology, materials and monitoring problem before it is an aerospace one.
Australia carries depth in each from industries unrelated to space: offshore oil and gas produced subsea and saturation diving engineering; the resources sector produced remote operations and hazardous environment safety expertise; Antarctic programmes produced polar and long-duration remote operations capability; university systems carry advanced materials and biomedical research.
Technology readiness progression requires demonstration in relevant environments, meaning conditions representative of operations.
Deep ocean access from Australian ports, Antarctic gateway status, arid regions used for Mars analogue research, and large sparsely populated ranges suitable for stratospheric operations support field validation and deployment.
Australian Space Agency support through the Moon to Mars Supply Chain Capability programme in March 2024. New South Wales government backing, including a Space Research Network seed grant funding collaboration with the University of Technology Sydney.
Industry recognition: Engineering Business of the Year at AusSpace24 in July 2024, and an Australian Good Design Award for Kernel360.
The supplier base for suits, life support and human systems telemetry is narrow. Allied supply chain diversification is stated policy across defence and space.
Metakosmos holds DUNS and NCAGE registration and has worked with CSIRO and the Department of Defence since 2020.
Australian capital markets are thinner for hardware deep tech than US markets, and domestic procurement volumes are small, which places export markets in the plan from the outset.