Canadian rocket/spaceport startup Nordspace invests in Canadian missile company
Proposed Canadian spaceports
The Canadian rocket/spaceport startup Nordspace, which is developing its own Tundra rocket along with its own launch site dubbed the Atlantic spaceport, has now invested an undisclosed amount of money in a Canadian missile technology company called North Vector Dynamics.
Beyond capital, the investment reinforces an active technical partnership between the two companies across two areas of shared strategic interest. The first is the defence application of NordSpace’s rocket propulsion technology. NordSpace’s Hadfield-150 engine line, patent-pending and designed and manufactured end-to-end in Canada, was developed to power the company’s Tundra and Tundra+ orbital launch vehicles. The same core propulsion, manufacturing, and testing capabilities that underpin sovereign orbital launch have direct relevance to Canadian precision defence systems, and NordSpace intends to make its infrastructure available to support NVD’s development roadmap where it accelerates sovereign outcomes for both companies.
The second, and central to the deepening partnership, is the advancement of Canadian hypersonic research and development.
In other words, the capabilities of both companies enhance each other.
Though the leftist government in Ottawa appears to favor the other Canadian spaceport in Nova Scotia, giving it a $200 million ten-year subsidy, Nordspace seems overall more solid. While the Nova Scotia project has been languishing for a decade, Nordspace is less than two years old, and in that time it has opened its first rocket factory, had its spaceport’s environmental assessment approved, signed a deal to establish its mission control center as well as a deal with a company to provide tracking and communications during launch.
It remains to be seen whether these actions are the steak, or merely the sizzle. At present it is very unclear what Nordspace’s time table is for the first Tundra launch.
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Here in Canada, I’ve heard lots of similar stories, along with their promises and “visions”. Few of the companies in question ever amounted to anything.
Like many such ventures, it has to demonstrate its financial viability and I haven’t heard much about that, particularly since it’s been in existence for less than 5 years.
These things are always hard to judge at a distance and, sometimes, even close-up. Still, the fact that space companies seem to keep popping up lately in the Dominion after decades of nothing much but a couple of Canadarms suggests that the general tendency of the current Canadian administration to make “sovereign” its favorite word is having some effect in formerly mostly quiescent sectors.
The issue of sovereignty isn’t new. Nearly 60 years ago, Pierre Elliot Trudeau used it as a campaign issue.
I’m sure it isn’t a new issue. But its profile has certainly risen lately – enough so that we can hear it even on our side of the border. Equivalent concerns tend to also wax and wane on the other side of our other border too, and for comparable reasons. Being cheek-by-jowl with the US has been problematic for a long time.
Wasn’t someone talking about bringing back the Avro Arrow?
It seems that every few years or so, someone makes that suggestion. Good luck with that.
When the John Diefenbaker government cancelled the Arrow, the entire program was eradicated. All the prototypes were cut up and sold for scrap. (A cockpit for one of them ended up in a museum in Ottawa.) The plans were destroyed. The scientific and technical staff was dispersed. (Many of those people went south with a number working for NASA. One engineer, Jim Floyd, returned to the U. K. and worked on Concorde.)
It was as if the Arrow had never existed.
Indeed. I saw that Dan Ackroyd movie about all of that back in the day. Anyone who thinks Bowb Your Buddy Day anent the US and Canada started with Trump hasn’t been paying attention.
The docu-drama you mentioned was broadcast about 30 years ago and it stirred up quite a bit of discussion about the Arrow.
Roughly 20 years after Black Friday, the day the project was cancelled, the CBC aired a TV documentary about it called There Never Was An Arrow. It was an examination of what happened and it also includes interviews with some of the people who worked on it, including Fred Smye, who was the president of Avro, and, as I recall, the aforementioned Jim Floyd.
I think it’s on YouTube.
But the Arrow wasn’t the only Canadian military system that came and went. The Royal Canadian Navy had its own aircraft carrier, HMCS Bonaventure. It was originally designed for the Royal Navy for service in WW II but was never finished because of VE Day. Canada acquired it a few years later, completed work on it and it was commissioned, oddly enough, about a month before Black Friday.
It wasn’t around for very long, being taken out of service in 1970, partly because of a restructuring of the armed forces, and because it was deemed to be surplus.
The RCN also had, for a while, the world’s fastest warship, the HMCS Bras d’Or, a hydrofoil. (An appropriate name as it was on Bras d’Or Lake where Alexander Graham Bell conducted experiments with hydrofoils.)
It, too, was cancelled and scrapped in the early 1970s, though there may have been technical reasons for that. I heard that the ship had problems with cracking in the foils.
The prime minister during that time was Pierre Elliot Trudeau.
I live less than 3.5km from the concrete pad the Canadian government leased from MLS. Through ongoing correspondence with the provincial and federal governments, I know MLS has not completed the necessary EA requirements to operate as a commercial orbital launch facility, nor is MLS a fully licensed commercial spaceport. As a resident of Canso, I know there is far more opposition to the Canso Spaceport than there is support. The hospital with an attached long-term care unit is 3km from the concrete pad. This site is too close to our community!
Earlier this year, Rebel News ran a few stories about the MLS site. A local journalist, who looked into it, was interviewed and she mentioned many of the same concerns about the location.
Many of the reports about it by the MSM hail it as if it was something new. As I mentioned a few weeks ago on a related thread, Canada had a launch facility many years earlier near Churchill, Manitoba. I remember my senior high school physics teacher, who had a graduate degree in that discipline, showed us colour slides of some of the preparations for a flight. (I think that mission was part of his research.) Some of those pictures were interior shots showing, as I recall, the payload being checked.
If the MSL site is supposed to be a proper launch site, where are the facilities for getting those rockets and payloads ready?
I have been reporting on Spaceport Nova Scotia and Maritime Launch Services now for almost a decade. At first I thought this company was real. Then I realized that even if it started out that way, circumstances had made it a hollow shell.
The leftist Canadian government has for some reason decided to save this failing enterprise, even though there remain all the questions BMJ and Jim Geddes bring up, and even though latecomer Nordspace appears much more solid. That decision however convinced Isar to make this a launchsite for its Spectrum rocket.
In the end, Spaceport Nova Scotia might survive, but it remains wise to be skeptical.