From a Concrete Pad in Rural Nova Scotia to the Stars
Yes, the spaceport is suspicious, but no, you do not need to be close to the equator to launch.
It would be a gross exaggeration to say that Canada doesn’t have a space program. The launch of the Alouette 1 satellite in 1962 made Canada the fourth country to place an object into orbit around the Earth. Astronaut Marc Garneau nearly became the leader of Canada’s Liberal Party in 2012 (yes, we could have had an astronaut prime minister ... Canadians voted for a nepo baby instead); astronaut Chris Hadfield is a minor celebrity in Canada; Jeremy Hansen became the first Canadian to visit the Moon a few weeks ago. Various iterations of the Canadarm have been fixtures of Space Shuttle missions and the International Space Station for decades. However, Canada does not yet have its own, native launch capability. The Canadian Space Agency acts as an appendage of NASA, with Canadian astronauts and satellites hitching rides on American rockets.
The announcement that the Canadian government is taking steps to develop a Canadian launch capacity has roused me from my uneasy slumber of the last several weeks, and I have awakened in a cranky mood. Several aspects of this story have annoyed me, both those relating to the government’s execution, and those emerging from the reaction from influencers whose justified skepticism of Ottawa’s intentions is intersecting with their poor understanding of space in a fashion that is leading them to beclown themselves.
The story that got everyone’s attention was a two hundred million dollar lease Ottawa signed with Maritime Launch Services for a spaceport in Nova Scotia, Canada’s largest Atlantic province, covering ten years of operations at twenty million dollars per year. The spaceport is, at the moment, essentially just a concrete pad at the end a gravel road, with no other apparent infrastructure.
There are several genuine reasons for serious concern with this, which have been detailed by a Nova Scotian NIMBY who’s been annoyed by MLS for several years now. MLS is a Ukrainian-American company whose original business model was to design, manufacture, and launch the Ukrainian-built Cyclone 4M, which it has never successfully done. To be fair, this effort was interrupted by the Ukrainian war, which for obvious reasons redirected Ukrainian rocketry to military production. However, it’s also worth emphasizing that MLS is an offshoot of the Ukrainian Space Agency, which is every bit as corrupt as you’d expect. The Ukrainian Space Agency has been mired in several expensive scandals over the years; one of them resulted in the theft of $10 million from Export Development Canada.
A former Liberal Party premier, Stephen McNeil, sits on MLS’s advisory board, which could be quite natural and could also be an indication of bog-standard conflict of interest.
The company’s finances are rather suspicious. It has posted operating losses of several million dollars a year, with the exception of 2025 when it lost $47 million1; revenue in 2025 was less than $15,000, and in 2024 it was zero. The incredible 2025 cash burn was apparently due to MLS acquiring Spaceport Canada. The company’s normal losses seem to be mostly due to executive compensation for its small roster of employees: the CEO and CFO between them rake in about a million dollars. This is despite the company not apparently actually have done anything yet. Other expenses include paying the Ukrainians for technical documentation for a launch vehicle MLS had already abandoned, and debt service on funding advanced by investors.
In 2024, MLS abandoned the scheme to launch Ukrainian rockets and pivoted to an ‘airport model’, the idea being that they would make money by charging launch service providers for the use of their spaceport. In 2025 there were precisely two launches from MLS’s concrete pad. Both of them were suborbital. One of them was a student-designed rocket from Toronto’s York University.
Even more absurdly, MLS’s concrete pad is on Crown land, which the company rents from Nova Scotia for $13,500 a year. This then looks like Ottawa renting its own land for $20 million a year.
In yet another suspicious-looking move, one of MLS’s chief financiers, Sasha Jacob, sold millions of shares immediately after the deal was announced and the stock price 10x’d; he then exercised stock options to replenish his position at below-market rates, thereby maintaining interest in the company while pocketing a couple million dollars.
All of this looks a whole lot like one more public-private partnership grift in which press releases and public relations materials project a hologram of visionary development, while the funds disappear into a complex web of regulatory compliance, stock buybacks, environmental impact studies, and executive salaries, without anything ever actually being built. This is a scam in which Canada’s Laurentian elites have learned to excel. It turns out that it is much easier, and far more profitable, to get paid for something you’re pretending to do instead of actually doing it; when the inevitable questions get asked, you simply throw up your hands and complain of unexpected engineering difficulties, tortuous regulatory pathways, or other factors beyond your control. None of the people involved – not government ministers, not government bureaucrats, not their private-sector partners – care one bit whether any given project succeeds, because they get paid by the taxpayer and the debt taken out in the taxpayer’s name regardless of outcomes. It is my working assumption that there is nothing more to this supposed space program than this. We are governed by theatre kids dancing to the tune of the Music Man, and none of them know anything about doing anything real.
However, while there are many very good reasons to be skeptical, there are also very stupid reasons to be skeptical, which has left me every bit as annoyed by those critiquing this project as I am by the ones executing it.
The first stupid criticism is that the spaceport is just a concrete pad. I’m not sure what people think a spaceport is. Probably they are picturing glittering launch towers standing over the landscape like wireframe skyscrapers, the full Cape Canaveral or SpaceX Starbase experience, in the same way that when they think of an airport the sprawling infrastructure of La Guardia or Heathrow is what first comes to mind. You do not, however, start with LAX, and just as an airport in its simplest form is a short landing strip which may or may not be covered in asphalt and may or may not have a Quonset hut to serve as hangar, so the most basic form of a spaceport is a concrete pad that serves as a flat surface for the rocket to stand on which will not catch fire when flames start pouring out of the engine.
For reference, here’s what SpaceX looked like back in 2008 or so:
That’s more impressive than a concrete pad, I will grant you, but it is much closer to a concrete pad than it is to Starbase, Texas.
Canada is currently starting from, effectively, nothing. There used to be a rocket range in Churchill, Manitoba, which launched thousands of suborbital rockets from the 1950s through the late 90s. From 1994 to 1998 it was operated by Akjuit Aerospace, which tried but failed to turn the range into the world’s first commercial launch facility. It was subsequently abandoned and has not been reopened.
The existence of the Churchill rocket range, at 58 degrees north, touches on the second very stupid criticism that I have seen, which is that Canso, Nova Scotia, at 45 degrees north, is too far north to launch rockets.
Social media has been full of people very confidently proclaiming that it is absolutely necessary to launch rockets from the equator. This is because the Earth is a spinning ball, which due its geometry necessarily rotates more rapidly at the equator than it does at higher altitudes; the especially well-informed may even know that the Earth is actually an oblate spheroid due to the centrifugal force of its rotation causing the equator to bulge out a tiny bit (by a whole 42 kilometres). Getting into space requires velocity, and using the velocity of the Earth’s rotation means you can get to orbit with less fuel; since the tyranny of the rocket equation means that every additional kilogram of fuel requires yet more fuel in order to push the fuel before it is burned to turn it into velocity, it is economically impossible to launch from anywhere but the equator. Or something. I suppose someone should have told that to the Russians before they built the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan (45 degrees north), or especially the Norwegians before the built a spaceport on Andøya Island (69 degrees north).
I’ve seen this ridiculous half-truth about the advantages of equatorial launches so often that it seems to be on the verge of becoming the new ‘the Apollo missions were impossible because the radiation in the Van Allen belts would have killed the astronauts’.
A common problem when wordcel take-sellers with severe politicsbrain opine on technical matters is that they don’t actually understand numbers. They see a qualitative statement like ‘hydrocarbons are a limited resource’, ‘the atmosphere protects the Earth’s surface from cosmic radiation’, or ‘space is really big’, and assume this means something like ‘we’re going to run out of oil tomorrow’, ‘the moment you go into space you will get cancer and die’, or ‘everything in space is too far away to reach’. Thus, ‘it’s easier to launch from the equator’ becomes ‘it is impossible to launch from anywhere but the equator’.
So let’s run the numbers.
Getting to orbit requires a rocket to reach orbital velocity; that is, the rocket must be going fast enough for its forward motion relative to the Earth’s surface to compensate for its downward motion due to the Earth’s inward gravitational pull. Essentially, the satellite must be fast enough that as it falls towards the Earth, the Earth’s curvature falls away below it, thereby keeping the satellite at a constant altitude. For a stable Low Earth Orbit, the necessary ground velocity is around 8 km/s or so. The change in velocity available from a rocket’s fuel is measured in delta-v; so, LEO requires about 8 km/s of delta-v. In practice this is a bit higher due to the necessity to overcome air resistance, so make that about 9 km/s of delta-v. Getting to geosynchronous orbit (GEO) requires another 4 km/s or so of delta-v. Getting to the Moon requires another 2 or 3 km/s beyond that.
At its equator, the Earth rotates at 465 metres per second. At a latitude of 45 degrees, where the Canso spaceport is located, the Earth rotates at 328 m/s. The difference from the equator is only 137 m/s. The delta0v penalty is real, but rather negligible when compared to the 9 km/s of delta-v the rocket needs to reach LEO. Launching from the equator rather than 45 degrees saves a whopping 1.5% of delta-v; plugging that into the rocket equation yields a payload difference (or, equivalently, a cost to orbit per unit weight difference) of around 4%. That is not a big number. It is a constraint, but it is not a show-stopper.
All of that assumes that you want an orbit aligned with the direction of the Earth’s rotation. This is just one class of orbits. If, instead, you want a polar orbit, launching from the equator is actually the worst option, because you need to reduce the 465 m/s of velocity you inherited from the Earth’s rotation to zero. If you want a sun-synchronous orbit, such that the spacecraft passes over a given part of the Earth with a constant angle to the Sun, you actually want to launch against the Earth’s rotation. For polar orbits you actually want to launch as close to the pole as possible. Which is precisely why the Norwegians built a spaceport on Andøya Island.
There are other considerations than latitude in siting a spaceport. Climate is important, because launches get scrubbed when it’s pouring rain or snowing, so you want a site which you can reasonably expect to enjoy lots of clear, calm, sunny days. Logistics matter, because you need to transport the rockets to the launchpad, along with fuel, payloads, the people servicing and launching the rockets, and the food, water, shelter, and power those people need. Therefore you do not want the launch site to be too far from inhabited areas. However, you also don’t want the site to be too close to people, because launches are loud. Finally, you want to be able to launch along trajectories that will take the rocket out over uninhabited land or, even better, open ocean, so that if the rocket blows up mid-air it won’t rain down debris on innocent bystanders.
Taking all of that into consideration, a small town in rural Nova Scotia makes perfect sense for a spaceport. It is close enough to service, but not so close to major cities as to be disruptive; the weather isn’t perfect, because it is Canada, but is probably about as good as you can expect anywhere in Canada (for the record, MLS estimates 150 suitable launch days per year); launches over the Atlantic probably won’t kill anyone if anything goes wrong; and the middle latitude is reasonably versatile in terms of reaching a wide range of orbital inclinations.
All of this of course assumes that Maritime Launch Services has anything to launch. That brings us to my final cause for annoyance, which is not that the government is spending far more than it should, but that it is not spending nearly enough.
As far as I can tell there are three Canadian companies developing launch vehicles. Nordspace is a Toronto startup attempting to develop reusable two-stage rockets, and which is also building its own spaceport (in St. Lawrence, Newfoundland, at 46 degrees north, for those keeping track). As an aside, I saw people misattributing the Nordspace launch facility to MLS, and making fun of them for scrubbing a recent launch, thereby managing to makes arses of themselves in two ways at once.
Quebec’s Reaction Dynamics is sticking with a fully disposable design, but aiming to make it so simple and cheap that throwaway rockets become economical for small payloads.
Finally there is the Canada Rocket Company, also developing a reusable launch vehicle.
Each of these companies has been awarded a whopping $8.3 million by the Canadian government to develop the country’s sovereign launch capacity. Those are Canadian dollars; in real money that’s about $6 million. The plan is to distribute a total of around $100 million (Canadian, so $70 million real dollars) over the next couple of years, with the winner taking a $40 million (i.e. $28 million) grand prize in 2027 or 2028. These three companies have also raised a certain amount of private sector funding, but as far as I can tell this is still in the low millions to tens of millions each. CRC’s total funding to date is $14.7M, for instance.
For comparison, Musk founded SpaceX with $100 million of PayPal money back in 2005. Companies like Rocket Lab or Astra burned through hundreds of millions of dollars just to reach orbit, not always successfully. Sums in the hundred million to billion dollar range are table stakes in the orbital lift game, and I do not see Ottawa anteing up anything on that scale.
Instead, Ottawa is lavishing $200 million on a sketchy Ukrainian outfit that has so far built a concrete pad, while throwing some small change towards the companies doing the actual engineering to develop the actual rockets that will supposedly launch from it 150 times a year.
Presumably, the $200 million being paid to Maritime Launch Services is intended to provide them with the funding necessary to construct and operate more extensive facilities. However, neither the concrete pad nor whatever gets built next to it are good for anything without rockets, and if Ottawa was serious about getting Canada into the orbital game it would be spending a lot more money on this.
Nothing would make me prouder than Canada entering into the new space race in a serious way, and I very much hope that this initiative succeeds, but it’s difficult not to be cynical about ambitious engineering projects in Canada. The pattern since WWII has been an unrelenting sequence of rugpulls and boondoggles. Every time a Canadian corporation manages to develop a world-leading technology, Ottawa discovers some fresh new combination of short-sightedness, ineptitude, malign neglect, and open treachery to ensure those efforts come to absolutely nothing, destroying the dreams and careers of thousands in the process. Prime minister Diefenbaker set the pattern when he destroyed Canada’s nascent aerospace industry by killing the Avro Arrow; more recently, Canadians watched helplessly as crown jewels of the Canadian economy such as Nortel and Blackberry encountered financial difficulties, only for the crown to leave them to be dismantled bankruptcy, with their intellectual property and human capital getting bought up by American or other foreign investors for pennies on the dollar.
I really hope it doesn’t end up that way. A proper Canadian space program would be a wonderful thing to see. I simply lack any faith in Canada’s current crop of elites. They’ve done nothing to demonstrate that they’re made of the right stuff to pull it off, while having given us every reason to dread yet another Liberal Party money laundry. As such I have a visceral sympathy with the many Canadians who share this bitter cynicism. But for God’s sake, don’t make yourselves look like idiots out of your eagerness to express it.
Apologies for the long silence. I’ve been going through some personal things, while working on some larger projects that aren’t at all ready to be shared yet, but hopefully will be before too much longer. This wasn’t really the kind of thing I wanted to return with, but I felt sufficiently annoyed by this interruption in the news cycle, that it was worth spending the afternoon banging out this quick examination of the topic.
As always, I’d like to express my deep gratitude to those of your who provide me with your support. I know I try your patience sometimes with long waits between essays, and this little morsel is hardly enough to justify your patronage. I’ll probably need to lean upon your forbearance for a bit longer. And hey, if this is your first time reading one of these Postcards From Barsoom, you should consider subscribing so that you can receive the next one.
According to the aforementioned NIMBY; the National Post reports MLS’s operating losses at a few million dollars, which is a substantial difference.
What I want to know, since Americans are the indigenous Moon people, did they make Hansen do a land acknowledgement. At a minimum, we should follow indigenous precedent and rename ourselves The People.
Let's launch Mark Carney and the Liberal Party of Canada into high orbit.