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This week on the SpaceQ podcast we did something a little different. Instead of interviewing a guest we decided to playback a speech we recorded from the recent Canadian Space Summit by Canadian Space Agency president Sylvain Laporte.

The Google Lunar X Prize has a final hard date of March 31, 2018. If none of the finalists have completed their mission to the moon by that date then no one will win.  Even so, it’s clear now that the spirit of the competition has been met.

The Canadian Space Agency (CSA) has awarded $1.85M contract to the University of Waterloo for the Quantum Encryption and Science Satellite (QEYSSat) mission.

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.

The Honourable Navdeep Bains, Minister of Innovation, Science and Economic Development, made a stop today at MDA’s Brampton robotic facility to highlight some of the governments contributions to the space program over the last few months.

Future space explorers are now one step closer to surviving in the harsh vacuum of outer space. The Bigelow Expandable Activity Module (BEAM), a privately-built prototype expandable module built by American-based Bigelow Aerospace and currently attached to the International Space Station (ISS), has been renewed by NASA to at least 2020.

My guest this week on the SpaceQ podcast is Michelle Mendes, the Executive Director and President of the Canadian Space Commerce Association.

If I told you that over the course of the last seven years upwards of a thousand Canadian students had participated in developing CubeSat missions you might think this was a the result of a Canadian Space Agency (CSA) initiative. You would be wrong though. There was a time the CSA was interested in this, early this decade and before, but poor leadership in government, and to …

Depending on who you talked to at the Canadian Space Society annual Space Summit you might come away thinking optimistically about the future of Canada’s space sector or that we’re on precipice about to fall off the cliff.

Today’s podcast was recorded at the Canadian Space Society’s annual Space Summit in Ottawa on November 21st . I spoke with Dr. Kazuya Yoshida of Tohoku University in Japan.