When Redouane Fakir was a 10-year-old boy in Morocco, he would lie on the beach with his headphones, listening to shortwave radio broadcasts about astrophysics by Canadian scientist Hubert Reeves.
He could hardly understand what Reeves was saying, but something about the topic transfixed him. At one point, Reeves said he was doing these broadcasts in the hopes that they might inspire some child in Africa to take an interest in space. The comment hit young Fakir, descended from Sufi masters, like a jolt from outer space. He was that child. He had heard the message. It set him off on a lifetime of learning the physics of the universe.
At a talk at UBC’s Green College earlier this month, he recounted how that first link attracted him to Canada, where he arrived as a young physicist at a teaching job at the University of Montreal. He was assigned an office that still had the nameplate of its former occupant on the door: Hubert Reeves.
That sense of magic and cosmic wonder adds a deliciously unusual element to Fakir’s four-year initiative to launch a Canadian satellite and eventually establish a satellite-launching station on Vancouver Island (www.spacelaunch.ca). At first, to someone like me who has always thought of space as the domain of NASA, huge telecommunications companies, governments and the military, it sounded like some crazy dream.
Fakir, who is a musician and wild salmon enthusiast as well as a high-level astrophysicist, doesn’t mind that. At the October dinner, artist Art Perry set up the evening with an offbeat slide show on being “cool.”
But Space Launch Canada, unconnected to government, is also grounded in some enticing practical opportunities. Canada is one of the few technologically advanced countries that doesn’t have its own space-launch capability.
MDA satellites have to line up at places like Kazakhstan to get into space. Canada once had a sounding rocket launching station in Fort Churchill, Manitoba, but it was shut down in 1985. Fakir estimates it would cost around $200 million for a modern modest launch site “the size of a parking lot,” not a vast Cape Canaveral-like complex.
He has his eye on a site near Estevan Point on Vancouver Island’s west coast, with backup lab sites and technical work at university locations on the island – a new non-polluting high-tech industry for B.C.
“Canada has paid other countries more than $1 billion to launch our satellites in places like Mumbai,” says Fakir. “It would be really cool if we could keep that money in our pockets.”
But that’s phase 3. The first phase is to attract a club of “100 Champions et Championnes” to put down $9,980 each to own a piece of the “Moon Marrakesh Philanthropy Satellite.”
“The goal is to build something that connects people,” said Fakir.
He has a scale model, created by MDA space mission designer Maarten Meerman (working as a consultant), that could be used for direct connections from here to places with little or no other communication link.
Port Coquitlam investor Dean Duperron, the former owner of Sprott-Shaw and Pitman Community Colleges, is the first cash investor. He’s interested in the satellite’s potential to educate people currently out of reach of conventional communications.
Fakir posits the potential for live revenue-generating photos of environmental hotspots or disaster zones or disputed areas of Canadian sovereignty in the Arctic – imagine being at the controls of Google Earth live – without having to wait in the lineup at someone else’s satellite in another country for a huge fee.
As in space, the possibilities are vast and still largely unknown. And very cool. •
