This Week in Space for Canada: January 8th, 2010

This week in space for Canada is all about taking stock of the upcoming space, aerospace, venture capital and business focused events occurring over the next couple of months. Think of it a basic list of fun places to go, interesting people to meet and useful organizations to connect with. Some of these events are even in Canada.

Here’s my own private and personal list in order of occurrence.
The National Angel Capital Organization is holding one of their business breakfast sessions on the topic of Raising Cash from Angels and VC’s on January 20th in Mississauga, Ontario. This is a great event for business owners and entrepreneurs whether or not they they work in a newspace, traditional space or aerospace.

The Astronomy & Space Exploration Society (ASX) at the University of Toronto is holding their 7th Annual ‘Expanding Canada’s Frontiers’ Symposium on January 29th in Toronto, Ontario.
The Lunar and Planetary Institute is holding it’s Next Generation Suborbital Researchers Conference in Boulder Colorado on February 18-20th focusing on the powerful opportunities that next-generation suborbital vehicles like Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo, Blue Origin’s New Shepard, XCOR’s Lynx and others offer for research, education and public outreach activities in space.
The American Conference Institute is holding an ITAR Bootcamp in San San Diego, California on February 24-25th mostly for American firms needing comprehensive, practical information on upgrading in-house ITAR compliance programs but also quite useful as background information for Canadian firms looking to grow their US business.
The 2010 Canadian Space Commerce Association Annual General Meeting is being held in Toronto, Ontario on March 16th and is focused on the growing Canadian commercial space sector.
The SpeedNews 8th Annual Aerospace & Defense Industry Suppliers Conference is being held in Los Angeles, California on May 3-5th and is designed for equipment manufacturers, marketing representatives, analysts and raw material suppliers.
The Canadian Venture Capital and Private Equity Association’s 2010 Annual Conference is being held in Ottawa, Ontario on May 26-28th and is focused on the topic of private equity, venture capital and their role in driving innovation.
The next Space Investment Summit is being held in Chicago, Illinois on May 28th and will focus on exclusive dialogue sessions with prominent space focused business investors and an entrepreneurial showcase of pre-qualified space-related business plans.
The Space Frontier Foundation’s conference on NewSpace 2010 is being held at the NASA’s Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California on July 17-20th. The four day conference will explore public and private partnerships, small satellites, and commercial space initiatives.
COSPAR (the Committee on Space Research) is having it’s 38th Annual Scientific Assembly in Bremen, Germany on 18-25 July 2010. This event is generally the biggest interdisciplinary conference on space science worldwide and well worth attending.
The venture focused events are likely going to be the most boring but over the long run they might be the most important connections that business owners looking to grow existing space focused businesses and recent graduates looking to fund a start up need to make.
That’s all for this week in space for Canada.