In just 14 seconds, Gilmour Space Technologies’s Eris rocket made history. The company’s CEO tells create what went right and what went wrong with the launch.
It was a clear North Queensland day, about 8:35 a.m., on Wednesday 30 July, and the team of engineers at Gilmour Space Technologies was making history.
At that moment, the first orbital launch vehicle to be designed and built in Australia took off from Bowen Orbital Spaceport. As steam spilled over the launchpad and an orange flame spurt forth from the ascending craft’s tail, the team celebrated the culmination of years of effort and ingenuity.
“As soon as it leaves the pad, you know you’ve made history,” said Adam Gilmour, the co-founder and CEO of Gilmour Space. “When it got off the ground, the entire company was jumping in the air and screaming,”
Aiming for a low-Earth orbit, the 23 m, 30 t rocket, named Eris, stayed airborne for 14 seconds before slipping out of its trajectory and falling back to Earth.
The quick conclusion to the mission did nothing to dampen spirits. Speaking to ABC News in April, Gilmour had predicted the team’s first launch attempt would not see the craft reach its destination.
This week, speaking to create, he compared Gilmour Space’s launch to its predecessors’ maiden voyages: Virgin Orbit’s initial attempt to send its LauncherOne rocket into orbit failed soon after first-stage ignition. SpaceX’s Falcon One craft made it to 25 seconds during its first launch, then its engine caught fire and the mission was abandoned.
And, as any engineer knows, every failed experiment yields data that will guide improvements for the next iteration. In Gilmour’s case, Eris had 400 sensors sending measurements back for the full 14 seconds. The team has barely begun to dig into the information.
“We know what didn’t work”
Within hours of the launch, however, Gilmour already had some ideas about what happened.
“We know what didn’t work,” he said. “We don’t know why it didn’t work.”
Eris, he explained, had an electric turbo pump system that ran using batteries that generate direct current, meaning the system required an inverter to convert that power to alternating current.
“That inverter seems to have turned off,” Gilmour said. “And once that inverter turns off, the pump stops, you get no oxidizer flow, and then the engine stops.”
That is not the only thing that could have gone wrong; the team will examine all possibilities to work out what it needs to change for its next attempt, which Gilmour hopes will take place in 2026.
“We’ve got voltage data, temperatures, vibrations, pressures – and that’s enough different pieces of information to forensically look at how each of the subsystems worked,” he said. “We’re going to do a failure investigation, but we’ve got good data. I’m very confident we’ll know what went wrong and know how to fix it for the next vehicle.”
Yet as interested as Gilmour is in understanding the launch’s flaws, he’s also proud of how much went right.
“We have this launch checklist of about 40 different lights, [indicating] tanks, pressures and temperatures, and we can’t commit to a launch unless every single one of those lights is green,” he said. “When we got into the launch campaign and started going through, all of the oranges turned to green. That was a momentous achievement even before we launched.”
Getting off the launchpad itself required the rocket’s four main engines to fire at full thrust.
“We have an algorithm that detects the thrust. If it isn’t firing at full thrust, it won’t let go. It will hold it on the pad and abort after another 10 or 15 seconds. The fact that we got off straight away meant we hit full thrust on those engines.”
After three seconds, one of those engines went out, but even then, the guidance, navigation and control system kept the rocket vertical.
Ready for round two
Lisa Vitaris CompIEAust EngExec of the Space Industry Association of Australia, and Director of the International Astronautical Congress (IAC) 2025, highlighted another important achievement in the Gilmour Space team’s launch.
“I really liked their pad avoidance measure that they had,” she said. “From the video, the rocket seemed to veer slightly to one side so that it didn’t come back onto the rocket pad, which meant that that infrastructure was kept intact.”
According to the Gilmour team, the launch also took place with no injuries and no significant damage to infrastructure.
Although Gilmour Space is the first organisation to launch an Australian-designed and built craft from home soil, Vitaris told create that Europe and the United States have been attracted to the country’s large land areas, low population density and clear skies since the 1960s.
“Australia is really well-known for its launches and returns, and taking advantage of growing interest in our capabilities is one of the big strategies that we are focusing on in the Australian space industry,” she said. “And now we’ve set the standard for not just fantastic engineering in Australia, but equally a fantastic regulatory environment to enable such commercial launches to happen.
“Team that with world-class universities and researchers, and a raft of adjacent industries honing in on space sector growth right now – the possibilities are huge.”
And that landscape will be important for the future of companies such as Gilmour Space.
“The challenge in Australia is every American rocket company that starts up can hire engineers from other rocket companies,” Gilmour said. “We can’t. There’s nobody else that’s doing rockets in Australia that I can tap into to get people and resources. So much of what we’ve done is from zero.”
That’s why it’s so important for more homegrown engineers to consider the space sector, said Vitaris, who also serves as an Engineers Australia board director.
“There is the potential for them to have a career in the space industry and stay in the country now,” she said. “Previously, a lot of people thought that they had to – or probably did have to – leave Australia to have a job within the space industry.”
And achievements like the Eris launch serve to highlight that. The Gilmour Space team said the launch involved 200 people and more than 500 Australian suppliers.
“I think it’s really exciting for the whole of the Australian space industry because it really sends a signal to the rest of the world that we have some incredible capability within the Australian space ecosystem. We have our own sovereign capability,” Vitaris said.
For Gilmour’s part, he hopes the next rocket his team launches will actually reach orbit.
“If you’re working on seriously hard things, you have to test them, and you’re probably going to fail,” he said. “This is absolutely part of the process that every rocket company takes. They do a test launch. It fails, they learn, they go again, they go again, and they go again until they get it right. We’re on that journey.”
Join Adam Gilmour and Lisa Vitaris at the International Astronautical Congress (IAC) 2025, held in Sydney from 29 September to 3 October 2025.
Fly high, fly straight