Launch Canada will receive $1.2 million from the Department of National Defence to expand the training side of its student rocketry program, an official from the department’s innovation arm told several hundred students in Timmins, Ont., on Saturday.
David Cull of the Innovation for Defence Excellence and Security program, known as IDEaS, made the announcement on stage with Launch Canada president Adam Trumpour at the opening of the fifth Launch Canada Challenge. Neither the department nor Launch Canada has issued a release. The two men’s remarks, carried on the event livestream, and posts published afterwards on LinkedIn are the only known public record of the award.
The money comes through Launch the North, the IDEaS challenge the department created in November 2025 to give Canada its own way of putting satellites into orbit. SpaceQ reported then that the challenge was built in three streams: $105 million over three years for small, or light-lift, rockets, a medium-lift stream to follow, and a workforce stream running across both. Cull’s description of Saturday’s award places it in the third.
“This support is focused on growing highly qualified people in rocketry and space launch,” he said. “In plain terms, it’s about helping students and young professionals get real hands-on experience with rockets, propulsion, testing, design and launch operations.”
The workforce stream has been part of Launch the North since it was written. What had not happened until Saturday was a public award under it. NordSpace, Reaction Dynamics and the Canada Rocket Company, the three Phase 1 winners named in March, split $25 million between them to build rockets. Launch Canada builds no rockets. It runs the student competition that trains the people who will.
What the money buys
Trumpour told the conference later the same day that the funding would expand what Launch Canada calls its special projects: collaborative engineering work run outside the competition, such as the electric fuel pump and turbopump program its volunteers have been developing. Follow-on work is planned, and Trumpour said a staged combustion engine — a more efficient and considerably harder design that recycles the gas used to drive the pumps back into the main chamber — is the option his team favours.
The organization will also, for the first time, put money and engineering help behind promising projects run by outside teams. Its first pilot is a rotating detonation engine, a design that burns propellant behind a supersonic shock wave rather than a conventional flame, and which Launch Canada says no Canadian group is currently building.
Trumpour said the award would let Launch Canada “establish a site that is not just the location of a competition, but a national hub for learning, testing and collaboration,” adding that “we hope that Northern Ontario will continue to be at the heart of these efforts.”
Gaétan Malette, the member of Parliament for Kapuskasing—Timmins—Mushkegowuk, told the same audience he was proud of the money and called it “extremely important in the future success” of the competition.
Neither said how long the money runs, or what Launch Canada has to deliver for it. The challenge’s applicant guide fills in some of it. The third stream, Rocketry Talent and Workforce Development, allows for incorporated non-profits as eligible recipients, so Launch Canada fits the criteria as written. The challenge hands out prizes as grants.
What it gives that stream is a description and nothing else. No competition, no deadline, no money of its own. The $105 million and the phase schedule all belong to the rockets. How Launch Canada was picked is still unanswered. The launch week runs on Mattagami First Nation land until Aug. 21.
More SpaceQ coverage: Launch Canada · Launch the North · Race for Canadian sovereign launch – $105M ‘Launch the North’ challenge draws strong interest.