The Canadian Space Agency (CSA) will again provide mentors for the NASA Space Apps Challenge, the 15th edition, on Nov. 14 and 15, when 19 Canadian sites, up from 16 last year, join the two-day global hackathon.
The CSA’s event page lists sites from St. John’s to Vancouver, including smaller centres such as Gravenhurst, Ont., and Kamloops, B.C. Teams can join in person or online, and the agency says everyone is welcome, regardless of age or technical expertise.
Teams work with open data, meaning information from the Canadian Space Agency, NASA and other partner space agencies that anyone can use, on science, design and communication challenges. This year’s theme is “The Next Frontier,” and NASA’s announcement says the challenges will advance human exploration of the Moon, Mars and beyond. NASA is due to release the full challenge statements on Oct. 28.
Canadian teams have done well over the years. Two of the 10 global winners in 2024 were Canadian. WMPGang, a Waterloo team, took Best Use of Science for SkyShield, a web app that identifies near-Earth object threats and satellite collision risks. Asteroid Destroyer, a University of Regina student team who competed in Saskatoon, won Global Connection for a machine-learning project that maps exoplanets for the Habitable Worlds Observatory, a planned space telescope.
The four-person WMPGang team built its app in about 30 hours. “None of us had any experience with web development,” team member Ian Chow said. “But we managed to build a genuinely useful app, in under two days, starting from scratch with almost no prior knowledge of web development.”
No Canadian team made the 2025 list of global winners, which NASA announced Dec. 18.
The program’s best-known Canadian result is now a commercial success. The founders of SkyWatch won the global competition in 2014 after taking part in Space Apps Waterloo, and the event inspired them to start the business. The Waterloo, Ont., company, which connects satellite operators with the developers who use their data, went on to lead the organizing of the Waterloo event in 2016. In June 2021 it raised $21 million in a venture round led by Drive Capital. SkyWatch says its platform now serves more than 150,000 users.