It’s been a few months since the announcement of the three Phase 1 winners of Canada’s Launch the North IDEaS Challenge. NordSpace, Canada Rocket Company, and Reaction Dynamics evenly split a $25-million award to “develop and demonstrate breakthrough technologies to advance Canada’s sovereign space launch capabilities.”
Each is pursuing a somewhat different type of launcher technology: Reaction Dynamics is developing hybrid solid/liquid propellant rockets, NordSpace is working on launchers that use more traditional liquid kerosene/oxygen propellants and Canada Rocket Company, which recently emerged from stealth mode, is working on launchers with methalox engines that use liquid oxygen and liquid methane as propellants.
In NordSpace’s case, however, their strategy diverges significantly. The company isn’t just building launchers, but is also working on its own spaceport: the Atlantic Spaceport Complex in Newfoundland and Labrador. At the recent Canadian Space Launch Conference, NordSpace founder and CEO Rahul Goel also went into some detail on their new production facility in Markham, Ontario, as well as their forays into space systems, lunar rovers, and education.
Following on the heels of recent coverage regarding the Markham facility, SpaceQ reached out to Goel to get more information on the other aspects of NordSpace’s efforts, including the development of the spaceport and their launchers, and some of the changes they’ve made in their approach. Goel provided some detailed responses, discussing everything from the spaceport to the launchers, including the lessons they learned from the Taiga test launch in August 2025.
Atlantic Spaceport Complex
The Launch the North award was for “breakthrough technologies to advance sovereign space launch.” While one could be forgiven for thinking that a launch pad wouldn’t fit into that, Goel believes that they’re all pieces of the same puzzle. He said that “for us, it’s vital to build a reliable and predictable launch operation,” and that having a reliable launch pad is a critically important extension of that.
Goel said that the ground infrastructure can be considered “a sub-system of the launch vehicle itself,” citing Rocket Lab’s launch complex in Mahia, New Zealand as an inspiration.
And how is the development of that infrastructure going? Goel said that it is going “exceptionally well.” The Complex has two main launch areas, SLC-01 and SLC-02, and development is proceeding on each. SLC-02, focused on suborbital and smaller launches, started construction last year. Goel said it has “gone through an incredible amount of studies and design iteration,” and NordSpace has been working closely with people who designed and built Rocket Lab’s Mahia complex.
“Development [on SLC-02] continues as we speak,” Goel said, with “the installation of new hangars, pad extensions and security features.”
As to SLC-01, Goel said that NordSpace has issued tenders for construction there as development on SLC-02 continues. That’s where they’re building their pads for orbital launch and medium-lift extensions, “as well as the test facilities for vertical integration stack tests of our vehicles,” Goel said. They’re being cautious about SLC-02; Goel explained that they want to make sure that they have “redundant infrastructure [and] ground support equipment early,” to ensure that any launcher problems don’t affect their ability to hit the tight Launch the North deadlines.
He also said that that was the major reason for their development of the Canadian Space Research Range, their private 50-acre propulsion test range in eastern Ontario: to keep up with the “aggressive timeline” of Launch the North, and to ensure that they can “turn every decision toward making that timeline possible.”
In terms of the specific firms involved in the development of the spaceport sites, Goel didn’t go into details, saying only that “we’re working with local contractors on the Burin Peninsula and in Newfoundland and Labrador more broadly.”
He did mention some of their larger partners, however, including C-CORE, which is based in Newfoundland, adding that an announcement regarding “an exciting project related to ground stations with them” will be revealed in the coming months.
Government and community relations don’t seem to have been a barrier. The reaction from the provincial government of Newfoundland and Labrador was largely positive, and Goel said that it still has been. He said that NordSpace was gratified by what he described as “being welcomed as guests into these communities.” He said that “it’s important for us to respect that” especially as they scale up into a more frequent cadence of launches of larger rockets.
Taiga, Tundra, and now Tempest
As Goel mentioned in his conference presentation, the company plans on three launchers: the suborbital Taiga, the small-lift Tundra, and a medium-lift reusable rocket that had been called the Titan, but is now called the Tempest. Interestingly, however, there’s also now a fourth rocket in the family: the Tundra+, which is a medium-lift rocket, albeit smaller than the Tempest.
SpaceQ asked about the launchers and the changes.
For the Taiga, things are still going roughly as planned. Though it’s being used for testing right now, Goel said that there will be “many launches after that,” in order to “keep retiring risk for our orbital program by testing hardware in flight,” as well as to train young engineers that are part of their talent development program in how to go about manufacturing, testing, and launching NordSpace’s rockets.
Goel said that “the vast majority of our team is working on Tundra.” The Tundra is still a small-lift launcher “capable of 1,100 kilograms to low Earth orbit,” said Goel, and like the Taiga it will be produced at their new facility in Markham. The new Tundra+ variant, however, will be a medium-lift rocket that can carry “just over 2,000 kilograms to LEO,” Goel said. “We specifically architected Tundra so that moving to the Tundra+ variant…requires very little modifications,” he added. It will need “some tank extensions and some engine optimizations,” but it is still “the cleanest path we’ve found to go from light lift to medium lift.”
The Tundra+ is partially a “stepping stone,” Goel explained, but came from NordSpace’s belief that Launch the North may actually not be ambitious enough. “DND set 200 kilograms as the success criterion,” he explained, but their research led them to believe that that number was actually too low. Many of the most valuable payloads are larger, and Goel mentioned buses like MDA’s AURORA and Telesat’s Lightspeed bus as being incompatible with that comparatively small payload size.
So while Tundra is designed to be able to get small payloads into sun-synchronous orbit, Tundra+ will give them the flexibility to handle larger, and potentially more lucrative, payloads, while still leveraging the basic Tundra design. Goel did say that they made slight modifications to the Tundra’s length and diameter to accommodate the shift, however. Goel emphasized the cost-efficiency of this approach, stating that it “almost gets Canada a medium-lift vehicle for free compared to the cost of developing a medium-lift launcher from scratch.”
Meanwhile, the larger reusable Tempest rocket will require a more ambitious production facility. Goel said that they’ve already acquired the land for their future “RF-2” facility, and are in the planning stages regarding the details. R&D for the Tempest will be taking place at their new RF-1 facility, however, including for its larger Hadfield 350 engines.
Development is still in early stages on the engines, and Goel did not have much to share yet.
The renaming to “Tempest” was apparently an “internal decision” at NordSpace. Goel liked the “Titan” name, and said that he was hoping that NordSpace could “send a payload on the Titan vehicle to Titan itself.” But, in the end, NordSpace liked the name Tempest a little more as it “captured the energy and spirit of the vehicles that came before it: Canadian-inspired forces or features of nature.”
Goel said that he’s happy with the new name, as it “captures the energy…of what we’re attempting with that vehicle and the spirit of the Atlantic coast of Canada.”
An “ordinary” rocket engine
Goel re-emphasized that the biggest impact that Launch the North has had on their decisions is the tight 2028 launch timeframe, and also that they would seek out tried-and-true solutions wherever possible. Part of this is in how they approach the development of their Hadfield engines.
“Our goal is for our engine to be as ordinary as possible,” Goel said, as “building rockets is hard enough.” That reality, paired with the tight Launch the North timeline, meant that NordSpace was focused on “an engine cycle designed for high performance, but also for manufacturability and the ability to test at a substantially lower budget.”
That focus on manufacturability also led to a strong focus on additive manufacturing. Their new facility will have what Goel described as “the largest-scale metal additive manufacturing in all of Canada,” and “the largest-scale robotic automated-fibre-placement composites manufacturing in all of Canada.” Between the two, it will allow for effective 3D-printing of their engines and launchers respectively.
For other components, especially in space systems, Goel also emphasized strong reliance on off-the-shelf parts where they’re available, as they’re more readily available than with rockets.
The engine uses tried-and-true propellants, kerosene and liquid oxygen; Goel said it also has “an architecture that has worked for decades.” Instead, what they’ve focused on is “everything that makes it a practical engine: the unit economics, the manufacturability, [and] the forgivability built into it on its way to orbit.”
Canada’s goal, Goel said, is “not to build an innovative rocket…it’s [just] to build a rocket.”
Part of that “forgivability” is in one key design decision: to have the Hadfield use dual combustion chambers. Goel said that it offers a variety of advantages: it can be “deeply throttled,” can be manufactured in-house, can be tested more easily, and “can even survive an engine-out on the way to orbit,” adding that “if we lose a chamber out of the many on the first stage, we’re still okay.”
Goel said that this architecture decision shaved “3-4 years off our development timeline,” making it that much likelier that they will hit the tight Launch the North timeline.
Taiga launch attempt lessons
Hitting that development timeline means a lot of launch testing, and NordSpace made their first launch attempt in August 2025. The Taiga didn’t launch, and a subsequent attempt was delayed so that they could join the Launch the North process, but Goel said that they still “learned a lot of lessons” from the earlier attempt.
Goel said that “everything worked really well, but the challenge was that everything worked really well in individual pieces.” They had an issue with their liquid oxygen supply that “cascaded,” Goel said, to the point that they were simply not able to fix it on-site with their limited resources.
Notably, tests at their facility in Ontario worked fine. “But once we arrived in Newfoundland,” Goel said, “we were a long way from our shop and our resources,” so there were issues fixing small issues within that limited launch window. Goel said that “you need to be prepared for that eventuality,” and so “we’re working on a lot more infrastructure now.”
The goal is to be able to “test integrated systems in their operational environment as quickly as possible,” he said, adding that “getting to the pad quickly and learning these lessons…has been extremely valuable for us.” That may prove vital going forward for Launch the North and its demanding schedule.
Space Systems, investment and talent
There wasn’t much new to share about space systems that wasn’t already in Goel’s presentation, though he reiterated their focus on the Terra Nova satellite and space systems like the Zephyr-EP thrusters and Chronos camera.
He also highlighted the TERRY lunar rover, named after Terry Fox, but said that he couldn’t share any new information about which lunar lander would be carrying it to the moon. He said that “we’ve always thought lunar surface operations will be the critical piece” going into the 2030s, and this mission is part of that belief.
Regarding investment and talent, Goel mentioned that a significant amount of his own money had gone into the company, and that the guiding idea is still to avoid over-raising in order to avoid excessive dilution and to ensure the company stays in Canadian hands.
Goel said that they have things to announce regarding “substantial investments” at the provincial level, as well as a funding announcement at the federal level “related to the Atlantic Spaceport Complex” but that “that’s actually going to be pushed a little later into the summer.”
As to the search for talent, he said that he is “very proud of the calibre of our team,” which is drawn from a variety of space companies like SpaceX, Firefly, Rocket Lab and Blue Origin. He noted that “launch is a new activity for Canada,” and so the search for talent could be challenging. But that is changing, he said, thanks to organizations like Launch Canada, which is helping to develop “a large pool of eager Canadian talent that wants to help shape the history of Canada through launch.”
He believes in an approach of pairing that new talent with experienced senior talent, “and developing programs that let them upskill in safe environments.” He also said they were looking to draw in talent from other parts of the Canadian industrial base, where “there is a lot of knowledge and experience transfer we can leverage.”
“We have a vast country with significant experience and resources,” he concluded, “that are uniquely Canadian.” His comments come as the challenging Launch the North campaign moves forward.