Australia has returned to space with the successful launch from Cape Canaveral on Wednesday morning of three locally designed and built research satellites bound for the International Space Station.

The three mini-research satellites will join a swarm of 36 other "cubesats" from 17 countries as part of the European-led QB50 project to study the thermosphere.

Next month, those satellites will be shot out of the space station like planetary probes to collect information on space weather and the upper edges of the atmosphere.

"These are the first Australian satellites to go into space for 15 years," said Andrew Dempster, director of the Australian Centre for Space Engineering Research at the University of NSW.

The thermosphere is a little-understood layer of the atmosphere between 200 and 400 kilometres above the Earth's surface.

It forms the planet's front-line defence against cosmic rays, solar flare radiation and other unpredictable space weather that can cause GPS units to malfunction, cause power grid fluctuations or potentially trigger mass blackouts.

The cubesats weigh just 1.3 kilograms each, are about 60 centimetres in length and are built as stacked cubes, giving them their name. The satellites will orbit Earth through the thermosphere for between six and 12 months, sending back vital data before they burn up in the denser ionosphere at speeds of 25,000 km/h.

The three satellites include Inspire-2, a project led by University of Sydney professor in space physics, Iver Cairns. Professor Cairns was at Cape Canaveral for the launch.

"I've held Inspire-2 in my hands and built parts of it," Professor Cairns said. Inspire-2 will be launched into the atmosphere in May alongside 19 other mini satellites, including the SuSAT, which was designed at the University of Adelaide.

The other Australian-built cubesat is the UNSW-EC0. It will be launched from the space station in June to study the atomic composition of the thermosphere.

"This zone of the atmosphere is poorly understood and really hard to measure," said Elias Aboutanios, project leader of the UNSW project. "It's where much of the ultraviolet and X-ray radiation from the sun collides with Earth, influencing our weather, generating auroras and creating hazards that can affect power grids and communications.

"So it's really important we learn a lot more about it. The QB50 cubesats will probably tell us more than we've ever known about the thermosphere," he added.

Many in the scientific community hope this launch will boost proposals for Australia to have a space agency and help Australia gain a competitive advantage in developing the lower cost cubesats.

"It proves that, even with modest resources, Australians can be players in space industry and research," said Joon Wayn Cheong, a research associate at UNSW's school of electrical engineering and technical lead of the UNSW-EC0 cubesat.

"UNSW-EC0 and Inspire-2 prove we can devise and build space-ready hardware which can tolerate the punishing strain of blast-off and the harsh conditions of space."

Australia and Iceland are the only OECD countries without their own space agencies. Professor Dempster hopes this will change soon. 

"This is an important milestone," he told the launch meeting for the combined Australian projects at the University of Sydney last year.

"There is no excuse not to have a space program when you're responsible for an eighth of the Earth's surface."