Tag Archives: MDA

Maxar Technologies President and CEO Howard Lance was on CNBC this afternoon talking about the new company formed from the acquisition of DigitalGlobe by MDA. During the interview he said they would be using a refurbished SpaceX Falcon 9 launch vehicle for the Canadian government RADARSAT Constellation Mission.

The Honourable Navdeep Bains, Minister of Innovation, Science and Economic Development, made a stop today at MDA’s Brampton robotic facility to highlight some of the governments contributions to the space program over the last few months.

In January 2018 the International Space Exploration Coordination Group will release third edition of the Global Exploration roadmap.

Astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS) successfully completed the third in a series of spacewalks on October 20th that was needed to replace a  robotic “hand” on the Canadarm2.

The stars have once again aligned for Canada’s leading space firm. Earlier this month, MacDonald, Dettwiler and Associates Ltd., now known simply as MDA, a Canadian global communications and information enterprise providing technology solutions to commercial and government organizations worldwide, completed its $2.4 billion purchase of DigitalGlobe, an American-based global provider of high resolution Earth imagery and geospatial information.

On October 2nd MDA’s acquisition of DigitialGlobe closed. The new company formed from this acquisition will be called Maxar Technologies and will have 6,500 employees with $3B in 2016 revenues. Contrast that to January 2008 when MDA thought it had sold its space business to then Alliant Techsystems (ATK), now Orbital ATK, and we’re planning on leaving the space market. Then, as in now, context …

This Thursday the first of three spacewalks will take place to replace one of the hands, know as Latching End Effectors (LEE) on the station’s Canadarm2.

Continuing with our Summer Reading Series of articles or interviews that still have some relevance today, we present the June 2012 article I wrote, In the Absence of Government Leadership Canada’s Space Sector Faces Uncertain Future from Space Quarterly Magazine. 

“We’re on a cliff.” That’s how Don Osborne, President of MDA’s Information Systems in Canada, described the current status in Canada without a new space strategy in place. But before you get too alarmed, Osborne did say he’s optimistic that the government is listening, which suggests that a new meaningful space strategy is forthcoming.

Continuing with our Summer Reading Series of articles or interviews that still have some relevance today, we present Canada’s Fledging Rover Program Is Facing A Rocky Future which outlined the state of rover development in Canada in the fall of 2011. The story was written by Elizabeth Howell and originally published in Space Quarterly Magazine in December 2011. Six years later many of the same players are still …