Canadian rocket startup hopes to fly first suborbital launch from its proposed Newfoundland spaceport in August
Nordspace’s proposed spaceport. Click for original.
Though details remain slim, the Canadian rocket startup Nordspace now says it is targeting an August launch of its hopes to fly first suborbital launch from its proposed spaceport in August.
NordSpace’s Taiga rocket isn’t going to reach orbit when it launches in August, but it’s a big step toward the company’s ultimate goal. Taiga is a small, liquid-fueled, hypersonic launch vehicle capable of carrying just over 110 pounds (50 kilograms) above the Karman Line. This summer’s shakedown cruise will be a low-altitude demonstration of Taiga’s capabilities.
The map to the right indicates the location of the spaceport, near the town of St. Lawrence on the southern coast of the island of Newfoundland.
Whether this launch occurs is very uncertain. For example, a previous report in January 2025 about this launch site suggested that government approvals were still required. It is not known if those approvals have been obtained.
Nordspace is the second company in Canada to propose offering a combined spaceport/rocket service. The other, Maritime Launch Services, first appeared almost a decade ago, but has never gotten off the ground. Nordspace first announced its plans in July 2024, so achieving a first test launch in 2025 will clearly place it ahead of Maritime.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The print edition can be purchased at Amazon. from any other book seller, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit.
The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
Nordspace’s proposed spaceport. Click for original.
Though details remain slim, the Canadian rocket startup Nordspace now says it is targeting an August launch of its hopes to fly first suborbital launch from its proposed spaceport in August.
NordSpace’s Taiga rocket isn’t going to reach orbit when it launches in August, but it’s a big step toward the company’s ultimate goal. Taiga is a small, liquid-fueled, hypersonic launch vehicle capable of carrying just over 110 pounds (50 kilograms) above the Karman Line. This summer’s shakedown cruise will be a low-altitude demonstration of Taiga’s capabilities.
The map to the right indicates the location of the spaceport, near the town of St. Lawrence on the southern coast of the island of Newfoundland.
Whether this launch occurs is very uncertain. For example, a previous report in January 2025 about this launch site suggested that government approvals were still required. It is not known if those approvals have been obtained.
Nordspace is the second company in Canada to propose offering a combined spaceport/rocket service. The other, Maritime Launch Services, first appeared almost a decade ago, but has never gotten off the ground. Nordspace first announced its plans in July 2024, so achieving a first test launch in 2025 will clearly place it ahead of Maritime.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The print edition can be purchased at Amazon. from any other book seller, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
While availability of a launch site is the most critical, it’s interesting they’re accepting the (small but measurable) negative impact of launching so far north (in comparison to launching near the equator.) It must be nice to have that much extra velocity available on their platform.
John: A high latitude launch site is not necessarily a disadvantage. As I understand it, it is actually a better location for putting satellites into polar orbits. This is why there are a bunch of spaceports proposed around Scandinavia and the UK.
The location of a launch site has two main ways in which it impacts the cost to any given orbit:
1. Inclination. If you fly due east from your launch site, you end up in an orbit that matches the lattitude of the launch site in inclination. If you want a higher inclination, that’s easily done by just pointing the rocket a bit north and spending a little extra dV. If you want a lower inclination, you generally have to perform a “dog leg” where the rocket flies south until it’s at the correct latitude, then turns due east (or a bit north of due east until it’s cancelled the southerly velocity). If the starting latitude is sufficiently far off from the desired inclination (eg, trying for equatorial and launching from 28 degrees at Cape Canaveral), such a dramatic dog leg basically isn’t possible, and you need to correct inclination after achieving orbit. Of course, inclination changes are expensive, so you don’t want to do any more of that than you have to, so if you’re trying to reach the moon, the planets, geostationary orbit, or other low-inclination targets, you want to launch as close the equator as you can get.
2. Earth’s rotation. If you’re launching due east, from the equator, you get something like 1,600km/h of free velocity. But if you’re going for a polar orbit, or a sun-synchronous orbit which are often slightly retrograde, then that 1,600km/h is actually in the wrong direction and you have to pay to get rid of it. Launching from a higher latitude, that starting surface velocity is lower, so there’s less to cancel.
Sun-synchronous orbits have become very popular in the past decade or so.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun-synchronous_orbit
Several launch sites are being constructed or have been constructed at high latitudes (Alaska, Scotland, Norway, Sweden, New Zealand, etc.) to help satisfy this demand.
Sun-synchronous orbits are possible due to perturbations caused by the Earth’s shape. These days some perturbations are used to advantage.
The orbital mechanics class that I took three decades ago had discussed these orbits briefly, suggesting the advantage was that a satellite could remain in constant sunshine, so the battery could be small. However, I took that class way back when there were few commercial space companies and none were yet allowed to take/publish pictures of militarily sensitive areas. These days, sun-synchronous orbits are popular for observation satellites, because the shadows are the same with each pass of the same territory, but the batteries have to account for the time that the satellite is in Earth’s shadow.
Nordspace’s spaceport is located about 30 miles (50 km) east of the last bit of France (the last remnant of formerly vast “New France”) in North America: the French territory of St. Pierre et Miquelon, the small archipelago of about 3 islands just to the west of that Newfoundland peninsula on the above map.
Anyone who seeks to launch from anywhere in the UK is an abject fool! Don‘t people remember the destruction of Virgin Galactic at the hands of the UK government? Clearly, the folks running the UK don‘t want any rockets launching from their soil. They are socialists, not capitalists.
And remember, when pronouncing the name of the province, it’s “new-fend-LAND”! Un-der-STAND? :)