Canada and Norway said Sunday their space agencies have finalized a cooperation agreement, as Prime Minister Mark Carney hosted Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre in Ottawa and two more companies signed onto a space-and-defence relationship the two countries have been developing since March.
The Canadian Space Agency (CSA) and the Norwegian Space Agency (NOSA) will now work together on space-based technology that supports Arctic needs — Earth observation, navigation, communications and maritime domain awareness. The agreement also commits the two agencies to share information with each other’s governments, researchers and companies.
The joint statement announcing it describes the deal as building on the two agencies’ “shared membership” in the European Space Agency (ESA). Norway has belonged to ESA as a full member since 1987. Canada is a Cooperating State through an agreement with ESA since 1979, renewed most recently through 2030, that lets Canadian organizations bid on some ESA programs that Canada funds.
Sunday’s announcement builds on a joint statement Carney and Støre issued March 14 in Oslo, when the CSA-NOSA agreement was still being drafted and Canada’s defence minister, David McGuinty, signed a separate letter of intent with his Norwegian counterpart, Tore O. Sandvik, on satellite interoperability and other space-domain defence cooperation. “Canada and Norway share a strong and enduring partnership as NATO Allies and Arctic nations,” McGuinty said in a statement at the time. “By signing this Letter of Intent, we are strengthening our cooperation in the space domain.” Sunday’s statement says work under the letter of intent continues through a bilateral roadmap, and ties its next step — a fuller defence cooperation agreement — to the end of Canada’s submarine negotiations with Norway and Germany, which have not concluded.
Two new industry deals
On the margins of Sunday’s visit, Norway’s Kongsberg signed an MOU with MDA Space, to explore joint work on intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) with a focus on watching Arctic waters. MDA Space announced its own manoeuvrable space-control platform, MDA MIDNIGHT, for defence customers in April.
Kongsberg also signed a separate MOU with Telesat to explore using the Ottawa company’s Lightspeed broadband satellites for connectivity tied to ISR and other applications. The two companies’ relationship in the Arctic runs deeper than Sunday’s deal: Space Norway, Norway’s state-owned satellite operator, agreed to buy Lightspeed capacity last year, and Telesat is separately finishing a much larger contract with Canada’s Defence Investment Agency to extend military satellite coverage across the Canadian Arctic.
Kongsberg was already doing business in the Canadian space sector before Sunday. Its Kongsberg Geospatial subsidiary signed a deal last October with Atlantic Canada’s NordSpace to supply mission-control software for NordSpace’s planned launch site, and its Kongsberg NanoAvionics division struck a satellite-bus partnership with Toronto’s Kepler Communications this past February. Sunday’s MDA Space and Telesat agreements extend that footprint into defence and Arctic connectivity specifically.
Norway’s ground-station edge
Norway’s advantage in Arctic space work is partly geography. Kongsberg Satellite Services (KSAT), the ground-station operator jointly owned by Kongsberg and Space Norway, runs the world’s largest satellite ground station for polar orbits, at Svalbard, 78 degrees north — far enough north to see nearly every pass a polar-orbiting satellite makes. KSAT also operates a ground station on Canadian soil, in Inuvik, Northwest Territories, that has fed data from Norwegian and other polar-orbiting satellites for years.
Andøya Space, Norway’s own spaceport, hosted the first orbital launch from western Europe earlier this month, by Germany’s Isar Aerospace. Isar is simultaneously building a launch pad at Spaceport Nova Scotia, on the opposite side of the Atlantic. Andøya’s far-northern latitude suits polar orbits well but makes lower-inclination orbits, the kind many customers want, while Nova Scotia’s lower latitude opens a corridor east over open water into those orbits.
That Inuvik station has already tested the relationship once. In 2018 and 2019, KSAT and Earth-observation company Planet threatened to pull their ground-station equipment out of Inuvik after a federal licence review ran more than three years past its own 180-day deadline; both licences were approved 632 days after that deadline, after Planet and KSAT enlisted Norway’s ambassador to Canada and its prime minister to press their case.
More recently, the relationship has produced better results rather than friction. Toronto-area Canadensys will be using KSAT’s global antenna network to communicate with the lunar rover it’s building for the Canadian Space Agency, and the Space Flight Laboratory, based at the University of Toronto and its commercial spinoff SFL Missions, has built seven satellites for Norwegian customers since the 2010s.
A Norway summit
Støre said at Sunday’s press conference that he had invited Canada to a space summit in Norway this coming February. “Space is also developing as an important part for industrial activity also for our defence capabilities,” he said, “and since we are both located in the north we know that northern location gives opportunities for space which are unique.”