The space agencies of Canada and Europe agree to exchange classified information
Canada: “We let our government do it all!”
In what appears to be the increasing policy of the Canadian Liberal government to align its space program with Europe, the Canadian Space Agency this week signed an agreement with the European Space Agency that will make it possible for them to freely exchange classified information.
The European Space Agency (ESA) and Canada have signed a General Security of Information Agreement (GSOIA), which will establish a legally binding framework for the exchange of classified information. The agreement was signed on 14 April at the 41st Space Symposium in Colorado Springs, USA, by ESA Director General Josef Aschbacher and President of the Canadian Space Agency Lisa Campbell, on behalf of the Government of Canada.
The GSOIA will ensure that both parties uphold the highest standards of security while enabling the secure exchange of sensitive information entrusted to authorised institutions and industrial partners. It provides a robust foundation for cooperation in areas where the protection of classified information is essential. In particular, the agreement will facilitate closer collaboration in strategic domains such as space-based surveillance, disaster response and security-related technologies. It will also support the development of dual-use capabilities, including advanced sensing systems, secure communications and emerging space technologies.
Canada is the only country not in Europe that is a partner in ESA. This deal, plus Canada’s recent commitment to provide a half billion dollars of funding to ESA projects, illustrates the Liberal government’s policy to look to Europe more for its space effort, rather than the United States.
This appears also to be part of the Liberal government’s shift away from capitalism and towards a government-based space effort, a decision that is certain to produce few results while wasting a lot of money.
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 or from any other book seller. If you want an autographed copy the price is $60 for the hardback and $45 for the paperback, plus $8 shipping for each. Go here for purchasing details. 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
Canada: “We let our government do it all!”
In what appears to be the increasing policy of the Canadian Liberal government to align its space program with Europe, the Canadian Space Agency this week signed an agreement with the European Space Agency that will make it possible for them to freely exchange classified information.
The European Space Agency (ESA) and Canada have signed a General Security of Information Agreement (GSOIA), which will establish a legally binding framework for the exchange of classified information. The agreement was signed on 14 April at the 41st Space Symposium in Colorado Springs, USA, by ESA Director General Josef Aschbacher and President of the Canadian Space Agency Lisa Campbell, on behalf of the Government of Canada.
The GSOIA will ensure that both parties uphold the highest standards of security while enabling the secure exchange of sensitive information entrusted to authorised institutions and industrial partners. It provides a robust foundation for cooperation in areas where the protection of classified information is essential. In particular, the agreement will facilitate closer collaboration in strategic domains such as space-based surveillance, disaster response and security-related technologies. It will also support the development of dual-use capabilities, including advanced sensing systems, secure communications and emerging space technologies.
Canada is the only country not in Europe that is a partner in ESA. This deal, plus Canada’s recent commitment to provide a half billion dollars of funding to ESA projects, illustrates the Liberal government’s policy to look to Europe more for its space effort, rather than the United States.
This appears also to be part of the Liberal government’s shift away from capitalism and towards a government-based space effort, a decision that is certain to produce few results while wasting a lot of money.
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 or from any other book seller. If you want an autographed copy the price is $60 for the hardback and $45 for the paperback, plus $8 shipping for each. Go here for purchasing details. 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
I always hated ITAR…the damage is done.
Once again, you have this religious/economic dogma that blinds you
Games theory time.
From a Space-First perspective, the fastest path to the stars for humanity would be for Elon to take his blueprints and defect to China.
His creativity backed by an unrelenting national will would be unstoppable.
They would not care if he lashed workers with cat o nine tails, or built a space elevator out of dropping SuperHeavy cores on villagers
His passion plus their passion would make for a new kind of critical mass that makes atomic power look puny.
That would light a fire under America, with conventional armed force expenditures gutted and Space Force at last getting USAF/USN budgets.
There is no Labor government in Canada, it is a Liberal government, (and is working against hard workers) please make the correction.
The labor government is in Britain
I find it hard to conceive that you are working so diligently after knee replacement surgery, Bob! WOW!
Phill O; Fixed. Thanks!
European hockey stick design should benefit.
Jeff Wright,
I shouldn’t be surprised, I suppose, to find that your grasp of geopolitics is roughly on a par with your grasp of rocket engineering, entrepreneurship, political economy and high finance. And, oh yes, we can add game theory to that list too.
Even if Elon was to decamp to the PRC with the complete files of all of his companies, the rest of those companies, especially staff and assets, would very much remain here. Elon is, admittedly, the secret sauce for each, but each is also a world-leading organization in its field and that is because Elon built them – and staffed them – to be such. That doesn’t go away just because the boss absconds to Beijing.
Once in the PRC, he would have to rebuild from scratch except for Tesla. Elon would be an old man by the time he got back to anywhere near where he is now from a PRC base.
Why would any rational actor chose to do that? Hostile politics in the unlikely event the Democratic Party re-obtains any significant power in DC? The Democratic Party is eminently more combatable from within the US than the Communist Party of China would be from within the PRC.
And do not kid yourself that Elon would be given a free hand there. Nobody but Pooh Bear has a free hand there and it’s becoming questionable just how much longer even he will continue to do so. A totalitarian dictator has very little job security and is subject to all manner of sudden acute health risks. Not many manage to die of natural causes.
While Bizarro World Elon struggled for at least another quarter-century to get back to where he was in the US, pre-notional defection, the PRC would continue its accelerating decline. By mid-century, half of the PRC’s current population will be dead. That is just the reality of the PRC’s terminal demographics. That is on rails, there are no brakes and the bridges up ahead are all out. The PRC will have ceased being a going concern long before its notional centenary. It is finding it a harder and harder chore to keep up appearances even with the population it has now.
The PRC is not the wave of any kind of future, especially in space.
Glad as well that you’re back in space..
Canada chose poorly for Canadian citizens. But the finding will be “well received” in the black hole of government bureaucracies.
“This appears also to be part of the Liberal government’s shift away from capitalism …”
It’s happening all across the Anglosphere. The United States is the lone holdout. Canada under the Liberal governments of the past 11 years is bad enough; but Australia has been speed running it too, now. Literally 55% of Australia’s GDP growth since 2022 has been state spending.
See, for example:
https://ipa.org.au/read/research-note-government-spending-the-biggest-contributor-to-economic-growth
Dick Eagleson writes “The PRC is not the wave of any kind of future, especially in space.”
Actually, the PRC is the wave of the future in *every* blue state and city in the United States, and the majority of the voters there can’t get enough of the collectivist Kool-Aid and the Third World living standards that soon enough obtain.
Putting Jeff Wright’s thesis to the test, what would it take to send these blue district voters to their spiritual homeland? It sounds like a
win-win for all concerned, and it would help out with China’s depopulation problem.
https://oladino.com/product/detroit-footbal-drink-the-kool-aid-jim-jones-png-file-free/
Re: Chinese demographics:
Dick tends to follow Peter Zeihan’s thesis on this, and it’s not a hypothesis to be quickly dismissed. (NB: I went to college with Peter, in the same department, but we only overlapped for two years, and we were not close friends.)
I would like to see the emphatic end of the People’s Republic of China (the most bloodstained regime in human history) as much as Dick. I do worry that the Zeihan hypothesis indulges my hostile stance too easily. Perhaps my most salient concern is that we’ve never been to a place like this before — we have never seen a demographic collapse like this before, certainly not where natural disaster or war are not involved, let alone such a thing in a modern industrialized society. We don’t have any examples to go on in forming our predictions. We also don’t have as good a handle on the demographic data as we’d like in making such a hypothesis — almost no statistic we get out of the PRC can be taken at face value, alas, and there is a good deal of scholarly debate right now about just how bad the numbers really are! It’s also the case, too, that the PRC has shown itself to be a surprisingly resilient regime, far more than any Soviet bloc communist government, and they have managed to do it without being a hermit kingdom North Korea-style.
That being the case, American policymakers must make the cautious assumption that the PRC is going to stick around for the time being in determining U.S. foreign policy — and space policy, too. And to take Milt’s main point on board, they also must assume that the great appetite for ever more statism and ever more Chinese-style surveillance and social credit censorship is not going away any time soon in our cousin western allied nations. That might give us a competitive economic advantage, but it also comes with great dangers to us, too.
In the meantime I’ll still bet on Elon Musk, and I’ll bet on the startups run by his former underlings, over anything the PRC’s pseudo-commercial sector can do in space for the foreseeable future because ours is still a much less corrupt system and because it better rewards and empowers human creativity and initiative. And Elon knows this as well as anyone. He’s got factories in both countries, you know. He admires their hard work and hustle, but he also knows he could never, never, never have accomplished what he has in America had he been a Chinese national.
My hunch is lifespan extension and AI/Robotics will blunt the demographic fall-off.
Richard M,
Re: the Canadians leaning into the Europeans
Based on Robert Z’s latest post, it seems the Eurocrats are still busily trying to render their own space patch extinct. Excellent timing, as usual, for the Canadians to be further cozying up to them now.
Re: the PRC
Zeihan has his shortcomings as a prophet – US politics being perhaps the most obvious such. He also seems to completely leave out of his calculations anent many aspects of industrial activity the doings of Elon and the Tesla and SpaceX diasporas. Anent the reindustrialization of the US, he sees the dithering and torpor of legacy industrial players and takes this as normative and predictive.
Anent the PRC, though, he is spot-on. It’s true one cannot trust PRC government stats, but Zeihan does not do so. He does keep a sharp eye out for anything that is briefly revealed before being censored or walked back. Based on these brief flashes of something that at least more closely approximates truth, the demographic situation of the PRC is plainly terminal. Provincial authorities lied about their populations in order to game more appropriations from Beijing during the entire One Child Policy era and they haven’t stopped. The PRC’s actual population is no more than 1.2 billion and may be as little as 1 billion. The phantoms in the ranks of the PRC’s supposed current population of roughly 1.4 billion are all in the age cohorts 45 or younger. The PRC likely has no more actual people in the youngest of these cohorts than does the US.
All of that said, it is certainly the case that the US – particularly in military planning – must assume an indefinite threat from the PRC. Thus, Golden Dome is critical as is a rebuild of the US force structure – including a clean-sheet-of-paper reform of procurement – based on the lessons of the Russo-Ukraine and Iran Wars.
M Puckett,
I think life extension and autonomous androids will begin to address the current depopulation trend in developed nations, but not in comparatively poor ones such as the PRC. Even in the West, I expect such effects to be negligible until the back half of the current century. That will be far too late for the PRC.
China is nowhere near as whack as the Greens that run the DNC.
They are can-do New Dealers in a sense. They are leftists but not liberals. The DNC HATES industry.
China has the opposite viewpoint.
At any university you can name–it is the Asian kids paying attention in class. Their leaders engineers
This article demonstrates what I mean:
https://www.discovermagazine.com/discover-interview-the-worlds-most-celebrated-virus-hunter-ian-lipkin-17193
They listened to what he told them to do–and they did it.
The mystery is why Japan is so ineffective.
They both hit the books….are brilliant, etc.
But China is embarrassing them.
I wish it was the opposite with Japan hard on Elon’s heels and China not being able to launch straight.
There is something else going on… perhaps besides the fact that they have greater resources being on the mainland.
This is hardly surprising. Virulent and rabid hatred of America has been a Liberal Party doctrine going back at least as far as the first term of Pierre Elliot Trudeau (yes, THAT Trudeau family…..).
For example, until Brian Mulroney was elected as Prime Minister in 1984, it was illegal to own a private satellite TV dish. PET claimed that the ban was necessary to prevent Canada from being “overwhelmed” by American culture. Never mind that people across the country wanted them. In late ’84 or early ’85, the prohibition was lifted.
I suspect the real reason was because of government policy. In 1969, the company Telesat Canada was established to control and manage satellite signal traffic. All the downlink had to go through a Telesat station and direct-to-home satellite broadcasting circumvented that.
That was one of the many ways PET displayed his attitude towards the U. S.
Now, Mark Carney said during a TV interview that Canada’s ties to America are weaknesses that need to be fixed. Then again, he figures he’s more a European.
As for this proposal being a waste of taxpayer money, it’s a foregone conclusion.
Jeff Wright,
All of those bright PRC kids studying engineering in the US will find that there are no jobs for them once they graduate and return home. Unemployment among recent college grads in the PRC is officially at 20%. In reality, it seems to be north of 50%. There are plenty of jobs going begging, but they’re all on assembly lines. PRC college grads with STEM degrees are no more attitudinally suited to such work than are American grads with degrees in Resentment Studies or Lesbian Dance Theory.
The difference between Japan and the PRC lies mainly in Japan having gotten to be a rich country before its population began to fall precipitously. The PRC never managed this trick and is far too late to play the needed catch-up football now however much it thrashes about. Demographics roll on with the inevitability of Juggernaut’s Carriage. The Han Chinese are in the early stages of being ground under its wheels. Half will fall by mid-century and the rest by century’s end. If the inevitable collapse of the PRC goes badly enough, that schedule might well advance significantly. It will not, under any circumstances, reverse.
The PRC does have more internal resources than Japan. But then Japan has ranked dead last on this metric for nearly two centuries. The Pacific War was all about Japan needing resources located elsewhere that it didn’t have at home.
The PRC is better off in this respect than Japan, but only marginally. It still needs to import energy, food and raw materials in vast quantity. It has only been able to do so – without launching colonial wars to obtain them – due to the post-WW2 global trade framework the US stood up and maintained for 80 years. The same was true of Japan, of course, but the Japanese have always been cognizant of this and understood who its best friend was in this respect.
The PRC has never really acknowledged this at all and still doesn’t. But, then, it’s a large continental land power and not a small island nation so that likely accounts for the difference in fundamental worldview. The PRC has also never suffered an existential defeat of the magnitude the Japanese did in WW2. Revision of worldview tends to follow such catastrophes.
BMJ,
I take it you are, yourself, Canadian. My condolences. Your capsule history of the last several decades of only briefly interrupted Canadian stupidity at the top nicely captures the essentials of Canada’s ongoing self-destruction.
The execrable Mr. Carney is certainly correct in feeling that he is more European than Canadian – he is. The fact of his Canadian birth has been long-since completely overshadowed by his having spent pretty much his entire adult life in Europe, including in the UK when it was still part of the EU.
Sadly, I don’t think Canada is salvageable in anything much resembling its current form. Western Canada, if it is wise – and it seems to be – will detach itself and establish a new nation with rational trade and defense ties to the US. One hopes most or all of the non-provincial Canadian territories go with this new nation. Ontario and Quebec seem destined to become Islamic caliphates. The Maritimes, if they are also wise – about which there seems serious question – will stick with Western Canada. We in the US can build us another wall along the necessary parts of our northern border and simply wait for nature to take its course in what was once the heart of Canada.
Dick Eagleson:
Credit where due:
‘Lesbian Dance Theory’ US Representative (R-CO) Lauren Boebert
From Google AI:
“Viral Insult: The phrase was popularized by US Representative Lauren Boebert, who criticized student loan forgiveness as funding degrees in “lesbian dance theory,” portraying it as a useless, niche field of study.”
“Congresswoman Boebert was the proud owner of Shooter’s Grill, a Second Amendment and Western-themed restaurant in Rifle, Colorado where staff open-carried.”
Mr. Eagleson:
Thank you for your comments. You rightly surmised that I’m a Canadian, in fact one of the many Albertans who doesn’t see a bright future for the province inside Confederation.
I have much more to say on the matter, as well as what I wrote earlier, but I’ll leave that for another occasion.
Mr. Eagleson’s verbage is just delightful…he has Bill Buckley’s wit without coming across creepy and imperious..
I don’t even like calling mainland China the PRC anymore in that I already consider the PRC as dead as Mao and the DPRK economy.
China today is a return of the Manchus.
I am actually more of a libertarian in an “information wants to be free sense” than some here would guess.
Trademarks Copyrights and patents should be done away with. I bet there would be an economic boom from Trekfans alone selling model kits in stores with no Paraborg sending Pinkersons and C&Ds out.
In terms of the sharing of classified information, Anthropic might be in a spot of trouble…scared to release their new product.
As it happens, they actually played a role in letting A.I. code some of the Mars rover movements. Most impressive.
As should surprise no one, I am a staunch supporter of SLS with it being able to throw its 87 ton core 1,700 km up WITH a useful payload, as opposed to overweight Starship that can shuffle cards about 100 miles up.
But I know better than to ask any of the usual suspects here to help me brainstorm….if I asked what could be done with SLS , the hackneyed “kill it with fire” is all I would hear.
–so I contacted Anthropic and suggested that they in turn contact Boeing, so as to make hay with the Artemis II afterglow before it fades.
A.I. designed SLS missions would be perfect for Anthropic and Boeing…out in public…I’m sure Boeing would love to be on board with Anthropic’s Mythos engine.
No need for a public roll-out when you can ask that engine about SpaceX secrets away from normal business hours–right Boeing?
They’d be perfect together.
I’m really coming around on this whole A.I. thing.
Jeff Wright,
“But I know better than to ask any of the usual suspects here to help me brainstorm….if I asked what could be done with SLS , the hackneyed “kill it with fire” is all I would hear.”
You would not be the first to ask such a question. NASA asked the same question of the whole world, ten years ago. It got no responses. No one had any use for SLS at all. Congress had to fill that gap with a Europa mission that NASA gladly and quickly moved to a Falcon Heavy the first chance it got.
Edward,
I think everyone here can imagine many possible uses for the SLS. I certainly can. I just run headlong into reality when I try it. That said, there are two groups who are very interested in using the SLS: those who expect to profit from SLS sales; and those who expect others to pay for their dreams. Both are incentivized to support it, because neither experiences the negative consequences of their decisions.
Blair Ivey,
I would certainly have credited the so-very-fetching Ms. Boebert – who has always struck me as looking like a terrific combination of Sarah Palin and Lacey Chabert – had I known the coinage of that phrase was hers. I try to acknowledge sources when I know or can find them. Thanks for the assist.
I didn’t previously know about her restaurant. I feel even more of a kinship now as, once upon a time, I was an employee of a firm whose boss and workers also all open-carried.
BMJ,
I’d say your vision is 20/20 anent Alberta’s future within the Confederation. From where I sit, that future seems limited to being Ontario and Quebec’s perpetual financial blood donor and punching bag.
As a Californian, I am a sane person having to endure an insane regional political milieu but at least said milieu is no longer national in scope. In your case, your regional political milieu is more or less sane, but the craziness persists and grows worse at the national level. I will hope for Albertan secession soonest whether any of the rest of the West cares to come along for the ride or not. Best wishes to you and yours in the meantime.
Jeff Wright,
Thank you for the kind words anent my authorial skills. Especially as most of my verbal shiv-alry is directed your way.
The PRC is quite wobbly, but not – sadly – yet dead. Next year in Jerusalem.
I will also disagree about trademarks, copyrights and patents. Abolition of same is not a libertarian position, it’s a socialist one. All three have served the cause of intellectual property creation well despite a certain amount of inevitable abuse.
SLS can afford to mass less than Starship as it doesn’t have to come back from space, intact, then make the round trip again and again. Same reason aircraft carriers are more heavily built than cruise ships. The latter don’t have to go as fast, routinely operate in heavy seas or withstand big fighter jets being thrown into the air from them then thumping down on them constantly.
I don’t think you’re “coming around” on AI so much as you’ve decided it’s magic and that you can invoke it to apply a thin coat of something at least superficially connected to reality to some of your other magical hobbyhorses.