Stories

Written by Rebecca Whitfield-Baker

Bella Hatty doesn’t remember a time she wasn’t “looking up”, fascinated by the moon and stars.

At 18, while on a trip to Japan, she got a small tattoo celebrating her “love for orbits” – a delicate swirl with a flower bud to capture the connection between orbits, space and Earth.

Now 26, she is an orbital analyst – part of a global team supporting Australia’s defence and security by monitoring movements in space – and smiles as she recalls star-gazing as a toddler in the Northern Territory.

She says her fitness instructor mum and landscaper dad would regularly take her and her two brothers camping in Kakadu National Park.

“There would be just the most beautiful dark skies where you could see the stars in all their glory ... I think seeing that over and over again sort of sparked my fascination – it was almost like magic,” she says.

“You know, I’d think ‘what am I looking at? I see some twinkling ... that one is shining brighter than the other one, why is that happening?’.”

The delightfully down-to-earth Zoomer (Gen Z) got her first telescope as a teenager, with her love for all things astronomical piqued even further by her high school physics teacher.

She studied astrophysics at uni and crammed in as many “space extracurricular activities” as she could before landing a role as an intern at a tech consulting company and then at the Australian Space Agency.

In December, she became orbital analyst at Adelaide-based KBR and describes her current work in space domain awareness as her “dream job”.

“A good analogy (of my job) is, just as we have air traffic controllers at airports to make sure planes are going the right way and flying safely ... an orbital analyst is like a space traffic manager,” says the proud “space nerd”, who speaks Japanese and Latin and also rock-climbs, treks and camps.

“So, it’s making sure satellites and debris are in safe places and behaving safely ... a big part of my job is making sure people are acting safely in space ... tracking satellites, problem solving and applying different techniques.”

Interestingly, being an astronaut isn’t on her wish list (she prefers to “look up”) but helping on a spaceflight mission involving Adelaide astronaut Katherine Bennell-Pegg is.

She laughs when asked if strangers’ eyes glaze over when they learn what she does.

“No, as humans, humanity in general, we have such a fascination with space ... everyone’s looked up at the stars, everyone has sort of wondered what’s up there and what’s going – I love that I get to do that as a job,” she says. “I really see what we do as sort of the enabler for

safe space activity; if we want to continue to explore space and understand the mystery out there, we need to have rules in place to make sure that we’re all acting safely.

“We’ve got a real – and worsening – problem with the amount of debris in space which we need to be able to control.

“Our dependence on space assets to function is huge ... everything, from GPS on our phones to the technology used by farmers to access precision agriculture relies on satellites; if something goes wrong with those satellites –they collide or break– our quality of life will be degraded. I just don’t think that is properly realised.” 

This article was originally published by NewsCorp as part of the Defending Australian special report.