News

Fifteen years in the making. That was a comment repeated several times by Elon Musk during a presser, or press conference, shortly after SpaceX had done what no one had done before, reusing a first stage booster of an orbital rocket that had been previously safely returned from another mission.

On December 6, 2016 Space Systems Loral (SSL), a subsidiary of MacDonald Dettwiler and Associates Ltd. (MDA), was notified by NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center that there had been a data breach of their proprietary data on a NASA server. Orbital ATK was responsible. SSL is now suing them, and publicly, it looks bad for Orbital ATK.

Next Monday, a United Launch Alliance (ULA) Atlas 5 rocket is scheduled to launch from Space Launch Complex 41 (SLC-41) at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida with the Orbital ATK Cygnus spacecraft on a cargo resupply mission to the International Space Station (ISS) for NASA. The cargo will include the first ever satellite from Alberta, Experimental Albertan #1 or Ex-Alta 1, a CubeSat which …

NASA appears to have been spared a major cut to its budget according to the NASA 2018 Fiscal Year (FY) Budget Blueprint. The Trump Administration’s FY2018 budget blueprint would see less than a 1% cut to NASA’s budget and is proposing it be set at $19.1 billion. 

Western University recently held its Physics Undergraduate Conference (PhUnC) which included the keynote talk by Dr. Nigel Smith, Director of SNOLAB. The conference brings together students from Western University with other universities in Southwestern Ontario and some nearby U.S. universities. Undergraduate are provided an opportunity to present their work on a summer research project, honors thesis, or any physics topic of interest, including interdisciplinary physics research. More video from …

Maritime Launch Services (MLS) will announce today that it has selected a site in the Guysborough Municipality near Canso and Hazel Hill, Nova Scotia over 13 other prospective locations for its new commercial launch complex, or spaceport, and expects to break ground on construction within a year.

The Canadian Space Agency (CSA) has released the State of the Canadian Space Sector 2014 report and it shows total revenues of $5.38 billion as compared with $3.49 billion in revenues in 2013.

The Liberal Budget 2017 will be presented to Canadians on March 22. For the space community it’s expected that there will be no major projects announced. This comes as no surprise as a new Space Strategy won’t be released until June, and a new Space Advisory Board has yet to be announced. Any new major funding would come in next years budget.

The year 2017 marks the sixtieth anniversary of the space age and no doubt the major spacefaring countries of the world will mark this occasion, but it is unlikely that Canada will be among them. For some strange reason, despite its direct involvement in the exploration and exploitation of outer space since the very dawn of the space age, Ottawa seems to have forgotten how …

Hey, am I at the right conference? A first-time visitor might be forgiven for feeling a little confused. There was certainly no shortage of bleeding-edge science and engineering – asteroid mining, anyone? – but for much of this three-day event, the air was abuzz with talk of bootstrapping, venture capital funding (or lack thereof), pivoting, culture-building, and various and sundry other facets of the startup …