NordSpace said Thursday it has started the second phase of construction at its Atlantic Spaceport Complex in St. Lawrence, N.L., beginning with a six-kilometre road to the site from which it plans to launch rockets to orbit no earlier than 2028.
NordSpace is building the road to Space Launch Complex 01 (SLC-01), where it intends to fly its Tundra light-lift rocket and, later, its Tempest medium-lift rocket. The company aims to finish Phase 2 by spring 2027 and then install two orbital launch pads, mission control, propellant storage, integration hangars, ground stations and utilities.
NordSpace is paying for the work in part with $10 million announced in August, half from the company and half from two governments. The Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency (ACOA) contributed $1 million through its Regional Economic Growth through Innovation program.
Newfoundland and Labrador lent NordSpace its $4 million, according to the provincial government’s release at the time. The province will forgive three-quarters of it if the company creates 100 full-time permanent jobs by 2033; the rest is a term loan.
NordSpace received provincial environmental approval for the spaceport last December, during a first phase of work the company says began in 2024. That phase also brought crown land grants and Pad 2A at Space Launch Complex 02 (SLC-02), the smaller of the spaceport’s two launch areas, built for suborbital flights and small orbital payloads. NordSpace broke ground at SLC-02 in 2025, and chief executive Rahul Goel told SpaceQ in June that new hangars, pad extensions and security features were being added there.
NordSpace tried to launch Taiga from SLC-02 in August 2025, but a liquid-oxygen supply problem the company could not fix on site stopped the attempt. A second attempt planned for December was pushed to March 2026. Thursday’s release says Taiga is awaiting final regulatory approvals before its next attempt.
NordSpace plans to fly Taiga from SLC-02 even after the orbital pads at SLC-01 open. After Taiga’s first launch, the program would become VERTEX, short for Vehicle for Experimental Rocket Testing and EXploration, selling suborbital flights to government, universities and industry. Customers would use them to try out payloads and components in flight before paying for a trip to orbit.
VERTEX is an interesting program. Canada once launched research rockets regularly: more than 3,500 flew from the Churchill Rocket Research Range in Manitoba before it fell largely idle in the mid-1980s, and its last launch came in 1998. Magellan Aerospace still builds suborbital rockets, the Black Brant, at its Winnipeg plant.
Five Black Brants have flown so far this year, all for U.S. customers from U.S. sites, and more are scheduled before year end for U.S. and Swedish customers. None of those customers is Canadian, which raises the question of whether VERTEX will find a market in Canada.
The company says it is working with Transport Canada on launch approvals under Canada’s new space launch legislation. That bill, C-28, the Canadian Space Launch Act, is still at second reading in the House of Commons, where MPs last debated it April 28. Transport Canada has authorized launches case by case under an interim regime since 2023.
The Department of National Defence (DND) split almost $25 million evenly among NordSpace, Canada Rocket Company and Reaction Dynamics in March, in the first round of Launch the North, a challenge aimed at a sovereign Canadian launch by 2028. NordSpace says the spaceport is on schedule for that date.
Beyond its own rockets, NordSpace has pitched St. Lawrence to other launch companies since it first announced the spaceport in July 2024, when it set aside a second pad for partner rockets, chiefly from U.S. companies. Those U.S. launches depend on a Canada-U.S. Technology Safeguards Agreement that remains unsigned. Thursday’s release says NordSpace is now in talks with several launch companies without naming them.
NordSpace’s first satellite, Terra Nova, launched Oct. 1 on a SpaceX rideshare mission and is operating in orbit.