GATINEAU, Que. — Defence Minister David McGuinty announced Wednesday at Space Canada’s SpaceBound conference that the Department of National Defence (DND) will pay NordSpace $20 million over 10 years to keep a launch pad ready for military use at the company’s Atlantic Spaceport Complex in St. Lawrence, N.L.
Under the facility access agreement, DND gets priority access to a dedicated pad. NordSpace keeps the site maintained and on standby, and says it will keep hardening the facilities. The funds, about $2 million a year, pays for that upkeep alone; each launch would be contracted separately when DND calls for one.
NordSpace plans to go beyond what the agreement requires by keeping a Tundra rocket on standby at the spaceport, along with several of its Aquila spacecraft buses. Aquila is a larger bus than the Athena that carried the company’s first satellite, Terra Nova, and NordSpace has yet to release its specifications. The company says a DND satellite or payload could be mounted on an Aquila bus, launched on Tundra and operated in orbit within 24 to 72 hours of a call.
DND’s Launch the North challenge asks for a Canadian rocket that can reach orbit on 96 hours’ notice by 2028. NordSpace is one of three companies conditionally approved in March for $8.3 million each in the first round. The company says it is working with 3 Canadian Space Division, the Royal Canadian Air Force’s space formation, on the orbits, payload interfaces and timelines the service would need.
“A sovereign spacefaring Canada needs the ability to launch a payload into orbit on its own schedule, from its own soil, on its own rocket when national security demands it,” chief executive Rahul Goel said in the release.
Tundra is being built at NordSpace’s Markham factory, and the company started Phase 2 construction at the spaceport last week with a six-kilometre road to its orbital launch site. The orbital pads, mission control and propellant storage are to follow once that phase is finished, which NordSpace is targeting for spring 2027. NordSpace’s suborbital Taiga rocket is waiting for its first flight, and the company says later Taiga flights will include a responsive-launch rehearsal in a joint exercise, with details to come.
NordSpace says it is working with Transport Canada on launch approvals, which the department grants case by case under interim rules it has used since 2023. Those rules will give way to Bill C-28, the Canadian Space Launch Act, once it becomes law; the bill is still at second reading in the House of Commons.