Tag Archives: RADARSAT Constellation Mission

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is the third Canadian leader since the flagship billion dollar RADARSAT Constellation Mission (RCM) was approved in 2004. This past week on a visit to Montreal, he stopped by MDA’s facility to see the satellites and take a tour of where some of Canada’s innovation in space products takes place.

Everyone was smiling at MDA’s Sainte-Anne-de-Bellevue facility, not only because the government had just announced an investment of $26.7 million through the Space Technology Development Program (STDP), but also because the participants we’re about to see the three RADARSAT Constellation Mission (RCM) satellites before they get shipped for launch this fall. All told, there were 49 projects funded through the STDP from two announcements of opportunities.

The RADARSAT Constellation Mission (RCM) data policy is a work in progress and is not yet set. That’s one of the messages that Jill Smyth of the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) discussed at the CASI ASTRO 18 conference.

This fall Canada will launch three identical large Synthetic Aperture Radar satellites, the RADARSAT Constellation Mission. At the moment they are being integrated at MDA’s Sainte-Anne-de-Bellevue facility on the island of Montreal.

This fall Canada’s RADARSAT Constellation Mission, a trio of synthetic aperture radar satellites, will launch 15 years after its conception. In that time there have been government imposed delays and a budget that has grown to over $1 billion. Eric Choi wrote the following article for Space Quarterly Magazine which was published in the March 2013 Canadian edition. It is still relevant today.

What are some of the notable happenings in Canadian space in 2018? Here’s a hint, the first notable event happens in 8 days with a rocket launch in India.

Maxar Technologies President and CEO Howard Lance was on CNBC this afternoon talking about the new company formed from the acquisition of DigitalGlobe by MDA. During the interview he said they would be using a refurbished SpaceX Falcon 9 launch vehicle for the Canadian government RADARSAT Constellation Mission.

“We’re on a cliff.” That’s how Don Osborne, President of MDA’s Information Systems in Canada, described the current status in Canada without a new space strategy in place. But before you get too alarmed, Osborne did say he’s optimistic that the government is listening, which suggests that a new meaningful space strategy is forthcoming.

Arguably 2014 was a watershed year in the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) military space program. Up until this year the military space program was focused on delivering capability that could be used by the Navy, Army and Air Force as joint force enablers but rarely were those capabilities tightly integrated into operations, nor were they exploited to their maximum advantage. To do so requires a …