AIGO has been planned for more than 10 years, and since 1999 has been under active development. It was identified in the Decadal Review of Astronomy in 1995. The project has been led by the Australian Consortium for Gravitational Astronomy, with core universities, UWA, ANU, and UofA. The AIGO research facility has been developed on a specially designated site 80km north of Perth, operated by UWA. Total investment in the facility and associated university facilities exceeds $29M, including major corporate donations towards AIGO's award winning public education centre, the Gravity Discovery Centre. Through the Australian activity, CSIRO Centre for Optical Technology won the contract for major optical fabrication for the US LIGO project.

To bring the facility to the stage where it becomes the key southern hemisphere arm of a global array of gravitational observatories requires a further investment of ~ $20M.
Like all major facilities, AIGO offers the opportunity both to spawn new industries and to support major industrial development. A study of the vacuum industry opportunities and benefits to Western Australia is underway. funded by the WA Government. A major industry development of advanced vibration isolators for airborne mineral exploration is underway, and many lasers and optical devices have significant commercial potential.

AIGO is currently a National Facility in all but name. It is also an official international facility of the US LIGO project. Five Australian universities have been actively participating in research at AIGO.
AIGO is part of an international research project at the frontiers of science and technology. Its research program is strongly linked to the US LIGO project and is supervised by an international advisory committee . AIGO, is the southern hemisphere detector that is essential for the world array to extract full directional information from incoming signals while simultaneously allowing greatly improved sensitivity to be achieved through the 5 additional independent baselines that will be created by a single detector in Australia. The Australian team has made numerous innovative contributions to the world program in all of the major research areas of gravitational wave astronomy.

Observatories are long lived facilities. AIGO is likely to require moderate recurrent funding over a long period of time, and like all observatories is never likely to be commercially viable.

The WA Government has announced a Centre of Excellence in Gravitational Astronomy which will provide academic support for AIGO.
The development of AIGO is strongly supported by the international community. AIGO already participates in collaborative research with all the other major international projects. Major components of AIGO have to date been donated or loaned by other projects and similar in kind contributions can be expected for the next stage of development. At this stage it is unlikely that the capital costs for AIGO will be provided by other countries.

Much of the development of AIGO to date was funded through Systemic Infrastructure as the first half of a 5 year program for partnership in Advanced LIGO.

International Planning Meeting

.An International Planning Meeting held at the AIGO facility in April 2004 . This identified the main research priorities (now underway) and also emphasised the need for AIGO in the world wide array. It was considered that the minimum acceptable length for the southern detector should be 1km but preferably more. The pipe diameter should enable AIGO to be extendable to 5km (the limit of the site without additional land aquisition). For the present purposes we have considered 2km to be a practical compromise between cost and sensitivity.