MDA Space wants to secure a pipeline for launch, a pipeline that runs through Canada. Every spacecraft the company builds and tests in Montreal now leaves the country to reach orbit, Melissa Quinn told a room of student engineers in Timmins, Ont., on Saturday.
Quinn is senior director of corporate development at MDA Space and, on secondment, vice-president of spaceport operations at Maritime Launch Services. MDA paid $10 million for a stake in Maritime Launch last November and took the board seat that came with it. “Part of that investment was me,” she said.
She ran Spaceport Cornwall for a decade. In January 2023 it hosted the first orbital launch attempt from British soil; the rocket reached space and released none of its satellites. “I woke up the next morning with my face on the front page of every newspaper in the UK,” she said. Virgin Orbit, which owned the aircraft and the rocket, filed for bankruptcy that April.
Setting the dates
The afternoon before her keynote belonged to companies with schedules. Hubert Fortier, who worked on Starship at SpaceX before returning to Canada, said NordSpace employs 50 people, wants about 70 by year-end and is raising money. Its suborbital Taiga is waiting on approval to fly this year. Tundra, meant to reach orbit, is scheduled for no earlier than 2028.
Crews are breaking ground on an orbital pad at NordSpace’s Atlantic Spaceport Complex in Newfoundland. NordSpace also has a 50-acre test range in northeastern Ontario. Before the end of the year, Fortier said, it hopes to run what would probably be Canada’s biggest test of a liquid-fuelled rocket engine, bolted to a stand rather than flying. NordSpace also revealed a lunar rover this year, Terry, which it hopes to launch in 2027. “This is a matter of getting Canada on the surface of the moon,” Fortier said.
Yaroslav Pustovyi, Maritime Launch’s director of safety, described a 335-acre site on a 40-year lease in eastern Nova Scotia, and said the company plans five orbital launch pads. Pustovyi is a NASA-trained astronaut with Ukraine’s space agency who served as a backup payload specialist on STS-87, Space Shuttle Columbia. He called the business an airport model: it sells services to rocket operators the way an airport sells them to airlines, not to the satellite owners riding along.
Quinn filled in the schedule from her Maritime Launch role. The company is back on site, she said, and construction restarts in two weeks. A pad is being built out for Isar Aerospace, a German launch company, and another for the Department of National Defence, which holds a 10-year lease that makes it the spaceport’s anchor tenant. Three more are to follow.
Mark Uitendaal of T-Minus Engineering, a Dutch firm that has flown two suborbital rockets from the Nova Scotia site, said it wants a cadence there of at least one and probably two launches a year. Motors would ship across the Atlantic on a schedule, and could be made available in Canada if there is demand. Both flights so far lifted off cleanly but fell short of their targeted altitude.
The customer’s case
Quinn’s case to the room was commercial. MDA had people in the front row, a customer the rocket builders in the audience could actually sell to. Of the launch startups she has dealt with, she said, “hardly any of them came up and said, ‘What would you pay?'” Get the technology right, then find a partner who understands business models and the price per kilogram to orbit. A company can come back from a rocket that fails. Coming back from a business that fails is much harder.
Mel Holmes, head of infrastructure at the Canada Rocket Company, had made the same case that morning from the other end of the experience curve. Holmes stood up Starlink’s manufacturing side at SpaceX, and took the room through the method she learned there, which puts deleting steps ahead of automating them. Most teams get that order backwards, she said. “Cadence isn’t an engine problem. It’s a process problem.” A sovereign launch industry, she added, “isn’t a prize one company wins.” Fortier followed her onto the stage nine minutes later and described owning the whole chain as building a moat, with space as the castle behind it.
Quinn closed on the politics. Ottawa’s interest is real, she said, and the prime minister is passionate about launch, but the alignment of government, business, investors and the military “doesn’t last forever.” She rejected the purist definition of sovereign launch, a Canadian rocket flown from a Canadian spaceport by Canadians alone, because “it’s still partnerships with our allies.”
Her pitch to the students was that they are the constraint. Everyone is hiring, she said: MDA, Maritime Launch, the rest. MDA alone takes roughly 250 co-op students a year and keeps about seven in 10. “We’re only scratching the surface of what this is going to be and we’re already starting to run out of skills,” she said. “So you are needed.”
Money for people
The only federal money announced over the weekend went to none of the rockets. David Cull of the Department of National Defence’s IDEaS program told the room Saturday morning that Launch Canada would receive $1.2 million through the Launch the North challenge. It is aimed squarely at “growing highly qualified people in rocketry and space launch.” The city of Timmins added $100,000 from its tourist development fund the same morning.
The people that money is meant to produce were in the room. Launch Canada has grown from nine teams in 2022 to more than 30 this year. On Sunday those teams presented their own work, failures included.
The competition runs on Mattagami First Nation land until Aug. 21. Canada builds the satellites, Quinn’s argument went, and buys the ride. The people who could change that were sitting in front of her, taking notes.
More SpaceQ coverage: Launch Canada · Spaceport Nova Scotia · Launch Canada Challenge returns to Timmins for fifth year of student rocketry.
Editor’s correction: An earlier version of the story stated that MDA Space wants to stop sending its satellites abroad to be launched. That was incorrect, and we’ve updated the story.