The company has been busy over the past decade. For example, it developed the 82-foot-tall (25-meter-tall) Eris and built a private launch site on the coast of northern Queensland, called the Bowen Orbital Spaceport, with the goal of making Australia more of a space player.

The payload fairing at the top of Gilmour Space's first Eris rocket was supposed to deploy a few minutes after lifting off from northeastern Australia. Instead, the nose cone fell off the rocket hours before it was supposed to leave the launch pad Thursday.