International Women's Day Luncheon

Tickets Available Now! $45 per ticket

Guest Author - Alice Gorman

Alice Gorman is an internationally recognised leader in the field of space archaeology and author of the award-winning book Dr Space Junk vs the Universe: Archaeology and the Future (MIT Press, 2019). Her research focuses on the archaeology and heritage of space exploration, including space junk, planetary landing sites, off-earth mining, and space habitats. She is an Associate Professor at Flinders University and a heritage consultant with over 30 years’ experience working with Indigenous communities in Australia.
Gorman is also a Vice-Chair of the Global Expert Group on Sustainable Lunar Activities, a Senior Fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, and an expert member of the ICOMOS International Scientific Committee for Aerospace Heritage.
In 2024, she was named as one of the Explorer’s Club 50: ‘50 people changing the world that the world needs to know about’.
She is a regular contributor to national and international space policy, particularly focusing on issues of equity, social justice and rights of nature.
She is a former mentor in the UN Office of Outer Space Affairs Space4Women programme.
She was part of a collective that drafted the first Declaration of the Rights of the Moon and also contributed to the Vancouver Recommendations on Space Mining.

Asteroid 551014 Gorman is named after her in recognition of her work in establishing space archaeology.

The secret history of Australian women in the Space Age

Australia has a long history of involvement in space exploration, starting from the establishment of the Woomera rocket launch range in the late 1940s, to receiving the first images of the Apollo astronauts walking on the Moon in the 1960s, to making a rover to send to the Moon in the 2020s. But it’s a largely a male history. Where were the women?
In this talk Alice Gorman, also known as Dr Space Junk, tells the forgotten stories of a bunch of wild, talented and passionate women, who made their own mark on Australia’s journey from the outback to outer space.