Astronaut Chris Hadfield is my new hero, only partly because I can relate to his legs atrophying. His sudden rise to international celebrity status as the social-media-savvy commander of the International Space Station adds to an already stellar career: retired colonel; pilot of more than 70 different types of aircraft; former US Navy test pilot of the year; veteran of three trips into space.
He already has a school and an airport named after him.
But his daunting career doesn’t tell the whole story of a man completely comfortable expressing life’s deeper currents through music. It was the emotion and feeling he brought to his cosmic journey on the International Space Station that really launched him into the hearts of his almost one million Twitter followers.
Now that he’s back, Canadians are newly awakened to the wonders and mysteries of space and our place in the cosmos. Now what?
Will the Canadian Space Agency (CSA), eroded by a flat-lined budget and disappearing staff over the last decade, take off in some new way? Canada was the third country to have a domestically built satellite in space, the first to have its own domestic communications satellite, the first to develop a direct broadcast satellite, and – as British Columbians aware of Richmond-based MDA’s role in building the Canadarm will know – a pioneer in space robotics.
But that’s all history.
Last year, in spite of Canada having a $3.4 billion space industry, with upticks like MDA’s recent launch of Canada’s first dedicated operational military satellite, India passed us in the International Space Competitiveness Index.
According to a recent review of the CSA by former federal cabinet minister David Emerson, “fostering a competitive Canadian space industry will require … the government explicitly recognizing the importance of space technologies and capacity to national security, economic prosperity and sustainable growth.”
Hadfield’s epic journey as a person in space engaged millions at an emotional level, but the space industry is much more about unmanned satellites and robotics. That’s the focus of Space Launch Canada, a homegrown visionary project led out of UBC by Moroccan-born astrophysicist Redouane Fakir. His dream of creating a space industry for his adopted province has gained momentum since I first wrote about it in October 2013. Since then, UBC and UVic students have mastered the science of building small satellites as part of the Canadian Satellite Design Challenge. UVic has received $671,000 from Western Economic Diversification to build the embryo of a research and development infrastructure that will back up Fakir’s investor-financed small satellite (already designed by an MDA engineer).
His latest investor, Web Express Printing owner Byron Sheardown, wanted to be part of Fakir’s dream of B.C. having its own space launch satellite and eventually a Vancouver Island launch pad. (The U.S. already launches off the coasts of California and Alaska; Canada has no launch site.) His particular interest is in communications after a disaster.
Fakir has personally raised $300,000, with no help or response from the Canada Space Agency. Larry Reeves, a space consultant and one of many MDA alumni living in B.C., says B.C. has plenty of capability to build innovative, cost-effective space systems, and that the B.C. coast is an ideal place to launch a satellite. He notes that 50 countries are now working on developing their own space programs, some using new satellites only slightly bigger than a shoebox.
Chris Hadfield launched our imaginations into a new orbit. We owe it to his inspiration to open our minds to a B.C. space industry. •
