OTTAWA — Sovereign launch. Canadian rockets. These are buzzwords, backed by government funding, being invoked daily in the Canadian space community these days.
But while many in the country may think this is a new phenomenon, Alex MacDonald reminded the audience Tuesday (May 5) at NordSpace’s Canadian Space Launch Conference in Ottawa that Canada has been here before.
MacDonald served as NASA’s first chief economist, in which he helped start up not only the American agency’s Moon-to-Mars strategy, but also the Artemis program. The latter is now made famous in Canada through Jeremy Hansen of the Canadian Space Agency, who flew around the Moon with Artemis II earlier this year, and his astronaut backup, Jenni Gibbons.
MacDonald also served as program executive for the International Space Station (ISS) National Laboratory. Canada has long-standing astronaut missions and contributions to both the ISS and Artemis through various international agreements and funding arrangements, highlighted by the Canadarm robotic series now managed by MDA Space.
Much has changed since the last NordSpace launch conference a year ago, MacDonald said in a keynote at the Canada Aviation and Space Museum.
- The Government of Canada began its Launch the North program, allocating more than $300 million to Maritime Launch Services and three Canadian launch companies (including NordSpace).
- The government also recently launched Bill C-28 to enact the Canadian Space Launch Act and regulate spaceflight.
- Artemis II is now a flown mission, bringing Canada’s space capabilities to the world stage.
While it may feel as though these milestones came in a rush, MacDonald said it is “valuable to examine the long-run history, the antecedents of that supposedly new phenomenon” to better understand the framework of how this space investment came to be.
The year 2026 happens to be the 100th anniversary of Robert Goddard’s historic first liquid-fuelled rocket launch in the United States, which was in part made possible by the Guggenheim family’s patronage, he noted. MacDonald also paid tribute to the early funding of U.S. astronomy observatories in the 19th century by well-endowed families.
Similar investment examples exist in Canada, MacDonald said, and he highlighted a few stories to help understand the background of sovereign launch. Here are some of the examples:
- William Leitch, Queen’s University principal (aka president) in 1861, described the basic principles of rocket flight in a non-fiction book. As Queen’s once wrote, “William Leitch wrote about the use of rockets in space 30 years before any other scientists.”
- The Black Brant rocket, which MacDonald said is “one of the most successful space rockets ever built”, and similar in success to the long-standing Russian Soyuz rocket program. Magellan Aerospace, which currently operates the program, says more than 1,000 of these rockets have flown since 1962, with a 98% success rate. MacDonald added that this program alone is just “one of the reasons that we should have confidence that Canada can build a sovereign orbital launch capability.”
- Canadian historic rocket investments in the far north. Take the Distant Early Warning (DEW) line for missile launches, a system of about 60 radar stations in Alaska, Greenland and Canada. Cape Parry, in the Northwest Territories, hosted 18 U.S. Tomahawk, Canadian Black Brant and other rocket launches between 1969 and 1982 in what MacDonald said is a foreshadowing of today’s CSA and NASA collaborations.
“I think that these stories should remind us of the connections between Arctic development, continental defence and spaceflight,” MacDonald said. This understanding, he continued, “could form, potentially, the basis of a new multi-pronged strategy that would lead to new partnerships, new sovereign capabilities, and new investments.”
MacDonald added that just because Canada has done such hard projects in sovereign launch before, we should not ignore the technical, programmatic or regulatory challenges in continuing the work today.
“Nonetheless,” he noted, “developing a Canadian orbital sovereign launch capability has now been declared of national importance … and frankly, we all in this room, now, need to just get this done.”