The Canadian Space Agency (CSA) has selected four more projects under its 2025 FAST program, backing advanced manufacturing for space structures, astronaut training, navigation in low Earth orbit and CubeSats with about $1.45 million combined.
That takes the program’s total to 19 projects and $6.8 million in grants. SpaceQ reported on the first 15 grants in April.
FAST — Flights and Fieldwork for the Advancement of Science and Technology — is how the Canadian Space Agency pays Canadian universities and colleges to give students hands-on space research experience, funding suborbital flights, parabolic flights, balloon campaigns and other fieldwork alongside faculty. Grants run up to three years and are split into tiers by project cost and whether a team needs access to CSA-owned platforms.
Here’ are the four projects funded in this announcement:
Structures manufacturing
Memorial University in St. John’s got $290,649 for a project on defect detection and feedback for space structure manufacturing, led by Dr. Sima Alidokht. It’s a Category B grant, the FAST tier capped at $300,000.
Astronaut training
École de technologie supérieure in Montreal received $290,205 to study training and cognition monitoring for space exploration missions, work led by Dr. David St-Onge.
Orbit navigation
York University’s Dr. Sunil Bisnath will lead a $436,497 project developing a positioning and navigation system for satellites in low Earth orbit. It’s a Category A grant, the program’s larger tier, capped at $450,000.
A Canadian CubeSat
The University of Victoria picked up $436,500 for “Voices from Above: A CubeSat for Culture, Education, and Innovation,” led by Dr. Afzal Suleman.
In a post on LinkedIn the CSA stated that the program has been running since 2010. In that time, it has funded 179 projects at 32 Canadian universities. Those projects have been awarded more than $47 million and involved over 1,600 students and early-career researchers, about two-thirds of them undergraduates.