Canada’s second proposed spaceport opens first rocket factory
Proposed Canadian spaceports
The Canadian rocket startup Nordspace, which also hopes to operate the Atlantic Spaceport in Newfoundland, last week announced the opening of a new headquarters where it hopes to begin building its smallsat Tundra rockets.
The 60,000 square foot advanced manufacturing campus is dedicated to the production of the company’s light and medium-lift orbital launch vehicles alongside its space systems division, and represents a 10x expansion over NordSpace’s previous headquarters.
In reading between the lines of the press release, it appears this facility is mostly the company’s administrative and operations headquarters, though it is large enough to assembly two Tundra smallsat rockets at the same time, designed to put about three times more payload into orbit than Rocket Lab’s very successful Electron rocket.
Unlike Spaceport Nova Scotia, which was first proposed more than a decade ago and after years of struggle was leased in March by the Canadian government for $200 million, Nordspace has only been around since 2024 and has received a relatively small grant from the government, some portion of a $8.3 million program to support three Canadian rocket startups.
With both spaceports, there has been a lot of blarney spouted. Thus, separating the sizzle from the steak is difficult. No launch dates for Tundra have been provided, though the company says it has purchased the land for an even larger manufacturing facility, though once again it provides no timetables.
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It seems a rather ambitious undertaking by a firm that, as far as I know, hasn’t done much, let alone establish a reputation.
I’ve been around long enough to have seen many similar pronouncements, along with promises of future successes, only for the outfits in question fizzling out.
From the standpoint of suitable sites for spaceports, Canada should be a space superpower. Perhaps one day it will be. Maybe NordSpace will be Canada’s Rocket Lab.
But the company website is, well, vague. Two launch vehicles are mentioned, Tundra and Tempest. Tundra’s lift capability to LEO is to be 1.1 tonnes and Tempest’s is to be 5 tonnes. But there are no other stats on the launchers. Number of stages, length and diameter of each, engine count and type for each, dry and wet mass for each – crickets.
There are also two military vehicles mentioned, Arrow and Sabre. The first is described as a remotely-piloted unmanned aerial vehicle and the second as a hypersonic rocket. And that’s about it.
Ditto the engines. There are three types named Hadfield, Garneau and Bondar and a “military variant” named M2S-HyRock. No word as to which of the first three engines the fourth is a variant of. Given the latter’s name, it is presumably intended to power the Sabre hypersonic rocket. All engines are kerolox designs and able to ingest RP-1, Jet-A and something called Sustainable Aviation Fuel. But one looks in vain for any mention of even such basics as the engine cycle, thrust, weight and physical size of any of these engines.
It is hard to place much confidence in a start-up company that is so reticent.