Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Spaceport Nova Scotia

Episode Date: November 6, 2024

Spaceport Nova Scotia, Canada’s first commercial launch site, represents a significant step forward for the Canadian space industry. This week, we learn what this spaceport can do for the country's exploratory aspirations and international cooperation with Steve Matier and Sasha Jacob, the CEO and Chairman of Maritime Launch Services. Then Bruce Betts joins me for What's Up and a new random space fact. Discover more at: https://www.planetary.org/planetary-radio/2024-spaceport-nova-scotiaSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Meet Canada's first commercial spaceport, this week on Planetary Radio. I'm Sarah Al Ahmed of the Planetary Society, with more of the human adventure across our solar system and beyond. Spaceport Nova Scotia is Canada's first commercial spaceport. This week we learn more about Canada's growing commercial space industry and what the spaceport can do for the country's exploration aspirations. We're joined by Steve Metier and Sasha Jacob, the CEO and Chairman of Maritime Launch Services. Then Bruce Betts joins me for What's Up and a new random space fact.

If you love planetary radio and want to stay informed about the latest space discoveries, make sure you hit that subscribe button on your favorite podcasting platform. By subscribing, you'll never miss an episode filled with new and awe-inspiring ways to know the cosmos and our place within it. As Canada's first commercial launch site, Spaceport Nova Scotia represents a significant step forward for Canada's space industry. It's located near Kanso, a small community in the northeastern tip of mainland Nova Scotia. The project is being developed by Maritime Launch Services, Inc., which is a publicly traded company. Commercial

partnerships have been a part of humanity's journey to space from the very beginning, but we've all noticed the change in the past decade. Commercial rockets and launch services have transformed the way that we go to space and the conversations that we're having around ethics of space travel and environmental protection. In this changing landscape, Maritime Launch Services hopes to help Canada become a competitive player in the global space market by providing a dedicated and environmentally friendly facility for launching satellites and other missions, which is a capability Canada previously lacked. Our guests today are Steve Metier,

the CEO and founder of Maritime Launch Services, and their chairman, Sasha Jacob. Steve is a mechanical engineer and international spaceport licensing specialist. During his time as a NASA contractor, he received the Silver Snoopy, a prestigious award that's only given to those who make significant contributions to the safety of human spaceflight. His colleague Sasha Jacob is the chair of the Board of Maritime Launch Services, but

also the chair of Nature United and the previous vice chair of World Wildlife Fund Canada. He's also the CEO of Jacob Capital Management. Together, Steve, Sasha, and their teammates hope to advance Canadian space exploration in a way that protects the environment, offers new opportunities for international partnership, and creates science and engineering jobs for the people of Canada. Thanks for joining me, Steve and Sasha. Thank you. Thank you.

So Canada has its first commercial spaceport. This is a huge moment. What has it been like helping to enable this next step in Canadian space exploration? Oh, for me, it's been a real passion and delight. You know, my career started quite a few decades ago and really been a part of seeing how this new space economy is taking hold since that last space shuttle landing in, what, July 2011? And that's really when that space economy started to take off and headed for five, six

hundred billion a year, headed for a trillion. And it's been really exciting to be able to be a part of bringing Canada into that new space economy? I think it's an incredibly exciting time in the industry. Our background is mostly in infrastructure finance, including power and energy finance. And we really saw the same trend happening in this sector where there's a complete commercialization of an entire industry, an entire sector, from government-owned to privately funded and owned and managed. It's an incredible flection point and it's great to be at the beginning of this revolution with an exciting company like Maritime Launch. And you both have a personal

connection to space. Steve, you're the founder, the CEO, and the president of Maritime Launch Services, but this isn't your first foray into space exploration, because you used to be a NASA contractor. How did that experience shape your desire to create maritime launch services? Well, it sure added a lot of tools in the toolbox, that's for sure. So when I actually started a propulsion test facility in New Mexico in 1989, working on the space shuttle program and doing what every big kid would love to do, test rocket engines, smoke and fire and noise and really exciting. But behind that though is all the tools that go into how to build a facility, operate a facility,

train the people, do all the things that you need to do for successful space flight. I work on programs that have achieved different awards. I got a Silver Snoopy, which is a very singular astronaut award that's given out very rarely for some of the work that I did. And so, yeah, it's been a really exciting time. And even before that, you know, growing up as a kid in New Mexico. I remember living in NASA, White Sands Missile Range and traveling over to Las Cruces in the 60s and seeing this facility all lit up out in the desert and wondering what it was.

They did all the original Apollo lunar lander testing there at that facility. And I know that matches a lot of the history that Sasha has with his family as well in the space sector. So it definitely goes back a long time for me. And congratulations on the Silver Snoopy. It's usually awarded for people who have a deep mind for the safety of astronauts and

everyone on board with the crew. And that's something that I'm sure shapes the way that you've thought about this spaceport and the need to make sure that everyone around is safe during these launches. Exactly. Safety first. I mean, when we found this location, you know, in near Cancelanum and Muscogee, you know, the very first things we did were ground safety and flight safety. You're looking at the safety to the general public, how far away they are, do we have adequate safety buffer? Then looking at the flight safety, do we have enough ocean underneath us and no people around or anything else like that? That was the very first

thing we did and it's really baked into everything that Maritime Launch is doing is really safety first. And Sasha, your connection with space goes back to a personal family story. How does that connect back to the Apollo missions? Yeah, it's interesting. I don't talk about it that often, but it comes up once in a while. My original introduction to the space sector was through my great-uncle, who's Josef Blomrisch, who was sort of right-hand to Leonard von Braun. So he's from the German side of my family heritage, was one of the chief engineers of Saturn V, into young years all the way through high school and beyond and would tell us all these great stories about what he was doing at NASA during these fascinating years. So it was a really great opportunity to hear from him directly how

these things were happening. And then that led even to me becoming one of the first ever Canadians to go to space camp in Huntsville back when I was quite a bit younger, I was grade eight I believe. So I had quite a strong interest quite early on. Unfortunately I didn't do engineering, I believe. So I had quite a strong interest quite early on. Unfortunately, I didn't do engineering. I ended up going the finance and business route. But again, so exciting for me to be able to cross over some of that heritage with some of my practical background on the business side.

And another wonderful example of the ways that you can inadvertently end up in space-related fields, right? We've been talking about that a little more often on the show because I know so many people want to get into space exploration, but aren't necessarily really great at physics or mathematics. There are a lot of alternative routes to get into this field. Well, I think that's exactly right.

And really, with this commercialization of the whole industry, you know, leaving sort of the clutches of government-side control and widening out to this huge total addressable market. I mean, estimated now at about $1.8 trillion per year. And then some numbers came in from the Chinese government over the last few days saying that they believe it's going to be 10x that. I mean, just an unbelievable opportunity and scale of growth that's occurring here, which is going to require every facet of backgrounds to commercialize these different facets of the industry, launch of course being one, but so many others.

So I completely agree, a great opportunity for anybody that has an interest that might have a different background from commercial engineering or space that has an interest in getting involved. You know, I would add to that, I was just reading an article this morning entitled, your company needs a space strategy now. And it was not just every aerospace company, it was every company because of this sector has grown so much because it has so many applications, you know, near earth imaging, global broadband, you know, methane detection to remote control vehicles to all in and on and on and on.

And, you know, it touches everything we do today. I mean, what we're doing right now is really enabled by space. I mean, using your cell phone is enabled by space. Every company out there needs a space strategy and how they're going to participate. And just the investment in the sector, you know, I think it was, you know, $1 billion a year on the order of 20 years ago. It's now, you know, many tens of billions of dollars a year investment in the sector just in the U.S. alone. And that's not slowing down. I mean, people really do need to look at how they can be a part of this going forward.

They're bottom line, there is no going back. I've heard from people everywhere from in brewing beer to pharmaceuticals, like everybody is thinking about how they need to create a space strategy. And now it's definitely the time to do it. But I'm curious as to both of your thoughts on how we balance this idea of bolstering commercial space for everyone's betterment with the need for publicly funded space exploration to make sure that we still keep the exploration part of it

as a central part of going to space. It's really kind of fundamental for me. The fact of the matter is in the US without that investment from NASA, Air Force and DOD, where would SpaceX be today as an example? I mean, the billions of dollars of contracts that have enabled them to go forward. The idea that the ISS is going to come down in the not too distant future and be abandoned. But what is NASA doing? They're putting

hundreds of millions of dollars into several different companies that are developing their own international space stations that are gonna go into orbit. Now, there really isn't a whole business model for that at this point, but NASA sees the wisdom of seeding that and helping that go forward. You know, we're working with the Canadian government here

with that same sort of concept. There are no U2S government by any means in that ability or depth in you know, the reach, but there is certainly that interest to help foster the development going forward. And we as a species really need to make sure we are looking out for ourselves both inward and outward in our place in the universe. Yeah, I think I'd go back to the comparison to the energy industry as well. You know, it was previously most of the R&D was done by government-owned institutions.

If we even just look at nuclear within Canada, you know, you had government-funded CanDo technology, which was one of the leaders in the world, and now has led to the revolution on micro-scale nuclear reactors that's attracting so much private sector investment. And so crossing over that initial government sponsored funding and R&D, which is extremely important in many different sectors. And then bringing in that commercial discipline on costs and efficiencies and speed

that we see from companies like SpaceX and so many others in this industry. And that's really that great partnership, which I think is essential. Some call it probably partnerships in other industries. And as we're going through that, this commercialization phase, it's extremely important to have those partnerships

with government. You know, in my experience in government, to add onto that a bit is, the NASA program was pretty layered thick with quality control and layers etc that really ended up pushing it to be rather quite expensive. The refurbishment of a space shuttle before the next flight was pretty expensive. Now there's a balancing act between too much of that and some of these other folks that are in the sector that are going a little more cowboy, shall we say. So I think there is that balance in between that government really offers a good vision forward on how to do things safely and correctly.

And then there's all that commercial sector that has also got some of that efficiency and effectiveness and, you know, cutting some of the red tape that I think really makes a difference. Yeah, watching the way that SpaceX's rise in this sector has kind of paralleled this moment where NASA is trying to do stuff like the SLS and these programs that are going a bit more slower is really interesting to watch because NASA doesn't have the leeway to just go blowing up a bunch of rockets before we get there, but look what that's allowed us to do. We have reusable rockets that can actually land themselves. So seeing both of these things working together has been a really beautiful moment

and I think it's probably going to accelerate space travel for everyone as long as we do it safely. I think as soon as we have the crewed missions, it's going to get a little bit more complicated as we saw with going Starliner. Yeah, yeah you're exactly right and I think that you know even then it's not a zero risk game you know by any means and I know that going back to my NASA days you know learning that Silver Snoopy was based on a problem on the space shuttle, had

to be investigated while the mission was ongoing. There was a small inboard fire on one of the reaction control thrusters, and they needed to understand how it occurred, what happened. And so, I mean, you know, safety really does matter at the end of the day, but it isn't 100%. You know, it will probably never reach the point where we have aircraft flying over us and landing on runways over major metropolitan areas.

We'll never get that level of safety to be able to have rockets flying everywhere, to certainly not in my lifetime or my kids lifetime but you know that balancing act between the two is really important. I do love this idea of a future where you can just blast off from the local spaceport to the other side of the world in 45 minutes and just skip that plane ride that might be worth a little risk. Yeah that's right. And part of mitigating this kind of risk factor at least for surrounding areas around spaceports,

is the choosing of the location for the building of the spaceport. So why is this location in Nova Scotia such a prime place for actually building spaceport Nova Scotia? Well, first off, you have to consider the market, where the satellite clients want to put their stuff into orbit. And that's fundamentally changed. We've gone away from geotype massive, multi-thousand kilogram satellites in geosynchronous type orbits into a low-earth orbit where sun-synchronous polar inclinations like that matter much more where there's much smaller

satellites in the low Earth orbit in constellations or groupings, if you will, that make it look at the location much differently than Kennedy Space Center, for example. KSC was, you know, fairly close to it, at least further south, closer to the equator, taking advantage of that lift that comes with launching Easter Lake. Well now you need that location that could service where the satellite clients want to go. That's really what we have to offer at Spaceport Nova Scotia is you know we're hanging out over the top of the North Atlantic so the closest continent south to us is South America. The closest continent

and going easterly, you've got Africa. So we have this massive expanse of ocean, and that is exactly in the direction that people want to launch to. Now we're part of a 2,400 acre parcel that the province of Nova Scotia owns, it's called Crownland, and we have 335 acres

that we've leased for 40 years, that sits right adjacent to the ocean that gives us nothing but access to where all these satellite clients wanna go. And that's hard to find. Obviously, finding coastal places that don't have major population centers anywhere in North America is hard.

Finding them on the right side of the pond, if you will, is hard, to my colleagues in Europe that are trying to launch from places that they can go SSO or polar but not much else. So it's a range of inclinations we offer. It's the fact that we've got this really solid safety buffer of land and ocean that really makes it attractive. And then we're in North America.

We've got a deep sea port a kilometer from the front gate, a super port 30 kilometers down the road. We've got international rail, international highway, massive university infrastructure. We've got the shipbuilding in Halifax. You've got this huge workforce availability. So now you start looking at all the pieces that go into making a spaceport successful. We're not in a jungle in South America. We're not in the outback. We're not inside the Arctic Circle or anything like that. We're really accessible.

There are direct flights from New York City or Hawksbury very nearby, as well as International Airport here in Halifax. So it's that synergy of all those pieces, but the fundamental piece is where the satellite clients want to put their stuff into orbit and that's what we solve. Now I would add to that just one other thing you're looking at other places like in North America that can achieve some of that. Vandenberg can do some synchronous prototype orbit launching south. Kennedy Space Center can cover some of what we

have as well, but we covered some of both of them all in one place. But more importantly, if you look at the launch tempo in Florida and the launch tempo in Vandenberg, etc., they can't keep up with the pace of growth. So the other real key piece I think that we offer for our launch clients that are really intrigued in building and making plans to come up here is that high throughput. We've got a wide open access to the ocean, airspace,

and we're now launching once a week. The ability for these launch companies to be able to be successful is really going to hinge on the fact that they can launch frequently. All the work that Maritime Launch has done on Spaceport and Moversport over the last eight years has been extremely, you know, extremely significant in the form of permitting, environmental assessment. I mean all of the approvals are in place and that is extremely unique. There, you know, even if there was a location that were the word major

NIMBYus factors and another location in North America, to get to this stage is very, very difficult. And investors have taken the risk and stood behind the company to get through to the stage it's at now, which is the opportunity to go fully commercial immediately. We've seen some situations at other launch facilities. I'm thinking primarily of SpaceX's launch facility in Boca Chica, Texas, where an accident during a launch will cause a major catastrophe with local environmental reserves and things like that. What steps are you guys taking to try to make sure that the spaceport doesn't impact the

local environment? The original layout was all intended to make sure that there was adequate safety buffer. And even the setback for the pad sites from the ocean's edge, unlike Wallops and some of these other places that are like mere meters from the ocean, we are half a kilometer in any direction from the ocean with where we placed our launch pad and more than three kilometers to the any population centers

in the opposite direction of where we're launching. So that was the fundamental thing we did first. I mentioned that was the first thing I did, the ground safety, the flight safety, but that all comes in from my NASA heritage. But then going through the environmental assessment and sharing that with the community and with the province and really showing them that we can operate and do

this safely, you know, building on my NASA heritage that I bring with me and how we're going to operate the facility certainly helps. And then once we did get that EA approval, we did dozens and dozens of bird studies and moose studies and Mi'kmaq ecological knowledge studies and you name it, we did it to make sure that we had adequate buffer, we had people on islands off the coast checking on birds and their nesting, et cetera. So we've done the full gamut of work to be able to get us up and running and there's no endangered species in the area. There's no major overflight during the seasonal migrations, etc. And that's a tough spot where they are in Boca Chica. There's endangered species nearby, there's towns nearby.

We're cleared for five tons of D'Leo from our site to a medium class launcher capacity, starting with some small launchers that are coming online to get the launch temple up and running while the medium class vehicles that are in development fully mature and then we can bring in one of those. But we classified and characterized it for a medium class, specifically because of that safety and environmental analysis. I was also really heartened, too, to learn that you're trying to do your best to mitigate the carbon footprint of the spaceport.

And I know that this is something that is very, very important to, especially the younger people that are getting into space exploration. They want us to be able to go to space with these commercial rockets, but at the same time we want to think about the environmental impact of that. So what are you guys doing in order to actually offset this carbon footprint from the launches? Well, it is certainly helpful that we're right next to a wind farm and being able to draw some of our energy out of that grid that is servicing the local community up there. We are looking at some of the construction techniques that are less of a long-term impact,

including like sprung structures and those kinds of things. We are looking at the battery backup as well. One needs two sources of power to do launch control as a backup and looking at battery as an opportunity for that. My whole culture comes out of ISO 14001 environmental safety as well from my NASA days and how we can institute those policies and procedures to be environmentally aware of everything we're doing, the material we're buying, you know, whether it's simple green instead of some of the more caustic or toxic kinds of cleaning

materials, anything and everything we do. There's even a company that has a carbon capture in concrete pouring up here in Nova Scotia. That's a company that we're working with to potentially build our flame trench out of a carbon capture kind of environment. This is an important, extremely important area for myself personally, and I'd say for the board. My background is mostly renewable energy finance. I was the first investor maker in Canada to focus on that sector.

I didn't have been involved in it for about 20, 24 years. And I've been involved in over $8 billion of equity financing in the sector. A lot of our projects in Canada, the US, and globally. And so from a policy standpoint, I've been involved heavily as well with different roles and different NGOs, including as vice chair of World Wildlife Fund Canada.

I just finished a term as chair of the Nature Conservancy's Canadian arm, which is called Nature United. I'm still on the board of directors there, which is the world's largest conservation organization. So quite, quite heavily involved in all this design and really a key, a key area, both because of personal interests, but stakeholder interest. I think we're seeing, you know, increasingly that whether mandated by

government or not, the stakeholders are speaking. So let's take an endowment, university endowment or a pension plan. Those stakeholders and beneficiaries are demanding that those funds are looking at, you know, environmentally friendly investments or better operating in industries that are trying to address, you know, trying to address these, uh, these concerns as effectively as possible. So, you know, we see it as a priority and are going to take every opportunity to, to do things the most environmentally efficient manner.

Yeah, just as right now is the right time to invest in commercial space, this is also the right time for us to be thinking strategically about how to mitigate all these things, because we're just starting. I mean, this is Canada's first commercial spaceport, but I envision a future where there are many spaceports in Canada, many spaceports in the Southern Hemisphere, and we need to be able to think about how we do this in an environmentally friendly way now before it becomes a big issue for later. So I'm fairly sure that the work that you guys have done is probably going to be a good blueprint for other countries who want to build their own spaceports in the future. Which brings me to this idea of international collaboration, because any time we see a spaceport like this, it's not just an opportunity for the United States to be launching more things, although

Vandenberg and Kennedy, they're just clogged with rockets at this point. But there are so many opportunities for other nations around the world to get involved in this. How has this opened up opportunities for you to collaborate with other nations so far? Well, the launch vehicles that we're looking at come from all over Europe and the U.S. and we in Canada as well. Satellite clients are around the globe, obviously, with the things that they're doing within their countries, and some of the entrepreneurial ideas that people are doing. So there's a lot of that kind of global connection from a from a space port perspective. You know, we're part of the Global Spaceport Alliance out of the US, of course, and really pleased to be a part of that initiative. But also,

you know, we've been approached by three other groups so far that want us to essentially replicate what we're doing. A commercial launch, well thought out, not building the Taj Mahal, build it and they will come, but actually doing it right in a phased approach that gets people excited and interested and revenue generated and up and running, but it's not like

the old old launch sites of the past so we've been approached by several they want us to replicate what we're doing in Canada and these other locations and here at the end of the day before 2011 if you will again referencing that data is that sort of a milestone for me you know space was government venue only right it was it was them and only them that were launching stuff into orbit and the treaties going back to the 60s about the safe exploration of space and now we've got commercial rockets commercial satellites commercial orbital transfer vehicles, commercial lunar landers,

but we're all stuck on government ranges still. And so making that transition is obviously where we need to go. How are we gonna do just as you said to really be able to foster the development of multiple space ports around the world if they're all gonna be government strangled or held or restricted as the case may be.

There is red tape associated with government ranges, that's for sure. And like I said, there's a difference between full on red tape and cowboy, but we're striking that piece in the middle here, where I think it is a model for where the sector needs to go. That's really what got me into this, I think more than anything else,

is realizing that the sector, the space economy, the world has to grow in a different direction with commercial spaceports, not just government spaceports, but commercial spaceports that are privately owned that can serve this burgeoning space economy. How long has it taken to develop this spaceport? Because I imagine that the ideation was much longer

than the beginning of the actual construction. Well, that's true. I mean, we did a study basically back in 2015 looking for a place in North America. I looked at more than a dozen different locations, stood on a beach in Chiapas, Mexico, with the members of the Mexican Space Agency. We really focused the globe, around North America rather, trying to find that sweet spot. And it was only after that that I went out and found some seed funding after doing that study and got this initiative underway in 2016. And then I moved here with my family from New Mexico in 2018.

So we've been at it for a few years to get to this point, but the EA was approved in 2019. We got access, a formal lease of the land a couple of years ago. We started construction a week later, got the initial roads in, a pad site forward, did a suborbital launch last year, and really just putting in the final pieces to really ramp up the major construction here coming up in the spring. We'll be right back with the rest of my interview

with Steve Metier and Sasha Jacob after this short break. Hi y'all. LeVar Burton here. Through my roles on Star Trek and Reading Rainbow, I have seen generations of curious minds inspired by the strange new worlds explored in books and on television. I know how important it is to encourage that curiosity in a young explorer's life. That's why I'm excited to share with you a new program from my friends at the Planetary Society. It's called the Planetary Academy and anyone can join. Designed for ages

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I wanted to congratulate you on that first launch as well. Was that July 2023? Is that right? Yes, it was. Yeah. Yeah. And I know that was just a sub-orbital launch and it was a student-led project, but right. I mean, that's like a major moment. Did you guys both get to be there for that launch? Oh, yes. I was heart and soul right in the middle of it. And the interesting thing for me was, yeah, student, yeah, suborbital. But guess what? It involved Transport Canada, NAV Canada, the RCMP, the fire station, local community, had to clear the waterways, had to clear the airspace, and virtually anything and everything you have to do

for any sort of orbital launch, we actually had to do for that mission. So it was a great practice session for everybody involved to really kind of exercise their roles in making a successful launch happen. So again, it was student led and we did foster and out pay for that to happen. And we had a great community opportunity to come together and be a part of it. But we also learned a great deal. I'd say that's probably the number one inquiry request that we get, that certainly I get,

is from shareholders and potential shareholders asking if they can come to the launch. And that's a very important aspect of the company is the community involvement that Stephen mentioned. You probably saw from the Launch Control Center plans, very significant community area, even space museum and viewing areas. So that's going to be a very significant community area, even a space museum and viewing areas. So that's going to be a very important component. And one of the exciting things about being a public company is that everybody can have part of the company

and be involved and be invited to launches. Every Canadian can have part of this historic Canadian event, and of course, any investor outside of Canada as well. But it's a it's an exciting opportunity. We saw you know other companies in the US like ASTS just recently doing a launch event with their shareholders and I think the plans are to do similar things with Maritime Launch and offer the opportunity for shareholders and their families to be part of it. It's going to be so cool to have a whole museum there someday displaying all the cool bits of Canadian space exploration history, but also the way that this particular facility

has helped enable that. Because just a few of those space centers I've been to, every time I go, I'm just like, I feel so fired up about the fact that this is here. And I'm sure it's going to inspire a whole new generation anytime people visit. Indeed. And there's another interesting twist with Canso and Hazelville, a little Dover area where we're building this thing. It happens to be the place where transatlantic cable came ashore. So one of the first communications from the Titanic and the first communications between Europe and North America,

we're a part of that information age back 100, 120 years ago, right, and that ongoing opportunity. And here we are in the new space age of telecommunications. And so many of the kids in the schools there have Starleak already, for example, or, you know, there's an outfit that's looking to put in a ground station for satellite service to cell phone 911. We've got Leafspace setting up to do downlink of data from satellites on our site already. So there's a whole lot of that opportunity from our history to our present that are really kind of crossover in Canso and Hazel Hill being a part of the historical change. The way that this spaceport is about to interact with all of the local businesses, I'm sure there's already like a flourishing economy because of that already,

but when you combine all these things together, give it a few decades. I can't even imagine what it's going to be like in this area because the spaceport has enabled everyone to work together on this. Well indeed if you look at the opportunities of any anchor tenants, right, you look at a shipbuilding as an anchor tenancy or air force base as an anchor tenancy, you look at what happens around the community, providing everything from you know care for the people that are showing up, whether it's hotels or restaurants or as they say, tires and toilet paper.

I mean, everything is needed to service this anchor now to a community. And that kind of grows up around. And now we have satellite clients that want to be closer to the facility. We have machine shops that need to be be there providing cleanup on parts or manufacturing or testing centers for different aspects of technology going into orbit. So all of that stuff starts to really snowball as it does with any anchor tendency and it really will provide significant growth opportunities. You know we did polling in the community several years ago and it was really interesting that it was 88% support

for the development in this independent polling that we had done. And most of that was about job creation, the kids being able to stay home and have something to do. It's a great little fishing community, the lobster fishing is marvelous, but it is a one trick pony in that sense. So the ability to have some additional capacity for other things to happen in that community,

I think, and have these kids have the opportunity to have high paying jobs and stay at home is really important to them. And now those kids are going to be able to just go out and sit on the lawn and watch those rocket launches. I was just speaking with a group of Canadian students maybe if I want to say three months ago and they were part of the Canadian reduced gravity experiment challenge where them and a bunch of other Canadian student groups have been looking for ways to do their experiments in space and usually they do those kind of vomit comet parabolic flights.

But this is another opportunity as this spaceport kind of gets on its feet and there's more launches, you could do a lot of collaborations with programs like that to bolster these kids and their dreams because we're going to need more engineers if we got a spaceport there. Well, indeed, the CSA has that opportunity to do some of those kinds of CubeSat developments, etc. And they have done suborbital launches in Europe before that now they don't have to go so far. They can do those from our backyard. Even the suborbital opportunity, I think, at Spaceport Nova Scotia is also really starting

to take hold. It's not just orbital insertion, it's just what you're saying. It's the 0G three to five minutes and getting your experiment back within a couple of hours is pretty powerful for people in science and the things that are happening in the development, right? And the medical industry. I read an article, somebody actually did some 3D printing in a zero-G kind of environment during a suborbital flight. So in that three to five minutes of zero-G, they ran some really cool experiments.

Pharmaceutical industries, they're really keen to get microgravity time that they can do some stuff with. Manufacturing of chips and microchips and things like that under high- zero G. The whole sub-world program is really starting to open up as an opportunity for us as well. Canada has no access to space right now, and this is what Maritime Launch is providing for academic institutions,

R&D, as he was describing, but also defense. You know, right now, Canada is in a position that we have to ask for a ride share of some time in a calendar booking long time down the road. This is going to really change that fundamentally for Canada and Canada's NATO partners. Supporting that was, of course, the technology safeguard agreement that was assigned between the US and Canada, underlying the great importance of the defense collaboration between the two countries and economic collaboration. And that's a unique partnership that I think the spaceport is going to unlock and strengthening those partnerships with the US and the NATO partners. Where is the spaceport at this moment in its development and what do you hope it's going

to look like in the future? So we have, of course, the 335 acres fully permitted to build the entirety of the spaceport as it is. We have a model we're following to lease some pad sites, if you will, for two or three small launchers, thousand kilogram kind of capacity to take up residence. I think of it as an airport model, if you will, where we're providing the airport for the aircraft and the air carrier and the baggage and the people getting on the plane. Those are satellites and fueling, et cetera.

So it's that analogy that I think that fits really well to describe what we're doing. We have the site infrastructure already available to support suborbital launches. We are modifying that site layout for the multiple launch pad configuration as we speak. We've signed an agreement with a company in Europe to take up residence at our site.

We've signed an agreement with a company in Canada to take up residence at our site. And we'll probably add one more in the coming months. But the idea then is really to get the infrastructure in place to provide them the services they need. They're gonna build their stuff, their equipment, their rocket, their handling equipment, but they need access to a launch control center, to the propellants and gases, to payload processing facilities, and those kinds of pieces of

infrastructure, as well as the access to orbit and the final regulatory hurdles that we need to complete with Transport Canada. So it's really about finalizing all those pieces while we're building out the things that provide services to our clients. Some of our clients want to know where the swimming pool is. So they want us to be able to take care of their people that are coming out to the location that are on a six or eight week tour, getting their satellites or getting their rockets ready to go, and they want us to be able to,

so we're working with hoteliers in setting up a situation to help fill some of their rooms and also provide for our client base as well. The ability to put up with these, help these people get set up and operate. We're working with the community. We have a CLC, Community Liaison Committee, that's been in operation for years,

that we communicate with regularly and help them understand what the opportunities are with new restaurants or whatever else that needs to come into the community to support this influx of people that are gonna start showing up in regular intervals as we do in more and more launches per year, it's going to reach a steady state of several hundred people per

year that are consistently visiting the area there just for the vehicles and just for the satellites alone. And then you have all the pieces that come in place from, I want to go watch a rocket launch from Canada, from the west coast of Canada driving over flying over to being a part of this and where are they going to stay and how are they going to be accommodated and then you look at it regionally Atlantic Canada well they're not going to stay for one day you know they're going to show up a few days early they're going to stay a few days late they go out they take a left or a right and they're in New Brunswick or they're in

PEI or up in Cape Bredden they're doing salmon fishing and golfing and whale watching and on Halifax Harbor front. Now it's this whole economy that is really taking off and ramping up and it all kind of grows out of starting with a small launcher and getting these big launchers and providing these services to everybody and then extending these services to a larger everybody of the people that need to use it. You're going to need places for people to stay because I'm already envisioning the Planetary Society meetup when Canada launches its own full-fledged mission from the CSA from the spaceport in the future. I mean, we're talking

about this enabling all kinds of commercial ventures, but can you imagine how this could potentially change the way that Canada interfaces with its own space agency? This could be a huge turning point for the nation as a whole. Yeah, I wholeheartedly agree. And even just the fact that we've been doing this as much as we have, it's pretty heady stuff.

You know, rockets and launch facilities and stuff like that. It's it you can see smoke and fire and things going into orbit and stuff. And so there's a lot of sudden attraction in Nova Scotia. Where is that? I think there is. I know there's influx in the community. People wanted to come see what the Spaceport looks like at some of the restaurants and the Airbnbs. So I know it's happening in the province already as well. So that's going to keep going for sure. There is an amendment report done by the Conference Board of Canada, which is a leading economic think tank in Canada about the non-economic

impacts of Space Board Nova Scotia on the media community, the region, the Atlantic region, and all the way through Canada, and for that matter also into parts of the U.S. And it is multi-billions of dollars that are going to be impacted and that are going to be generated for all these ancillary businesses. So really exciting economic opportunity for the whole region. What do you envision the next 40 years is going to be like at the spaceport?

And what do you think it's going to do for the long-term vision of Canadian space exploration? The opportunity as the industry matures, I think, and some of the technology matures, having Canadian launch vehicles and the benefits to the economy here and some of the Canadian satellites that are relaunching from our place and having

multiple launch pads that we can expand and build upon. I think the future is pretty bright for where this is going to go over the next 30 to 40 years for sure. What was reminded of when you asked this question though was the report that was done in the 60s in Canada that was looking at where we should be relative to space exploration and that report that looked at okay had some recommendations to build this communications company, Telesat came out of that, built a space agency in the CSA came out of that. And lost in that report were this little piece about building an orbital launch capability in Canada.

So that report got tabled when, there was a recommendation to do the big launches out of the US, which was also adopted as well. But that little fourth little piece that says, you know, we think Canada should have its own small launcher capability even back in the 60s. This is sort of a dream fulfillment going back that long ago. It's called the Chapman Report and it was released I, in February or March of 1967. John Chapman is who the Canadian Space Agency headquarters is named after in Montreal.

So there's a bit of history there about where we've been. And now let's take a 40-year leap forward and see where we are. And we'll be there. And in the short term, when do you think we're going to see more launches coming out of this facility? Well, the announcement we made with Reaction Dynamics recently has us doing a Karman line launch next year and an orbital launch shortly thereafter.

So, orbital launch is reasonably 2026 for us, but it might happen sooner, but certainly getting some significant orbital launch under our belt of 150 kilometer altitude is on our near term horizon. Thanks so much for joining me, both of you, Steve and Sasha. Thank you very much.

Thank you, I appreciate your time. And now it's time for what's up with Bruce Betts, our chief scientist at the Planetary Society. Hey, Bruce. Hey, Sarah. So we got to talk about commercial spaceports this week. How weird is it that we live in a time where there are commercial spaceports? That's very weird having grown up without such a thing existing. I mean,

just merely the fact that you're calling them space ports is kind of an exotic change for me. Launch sites was sufficient before. Space ports just sounds cooler, definitely more futuristic. Something that I think about a lot is that we're in this time where we've got more and more rockets going up. We've got all these commercial entities, all of these new space missions. And so much of that is pinned on what's going on at our existing launch facilities that are kind of near the equator. So as an example, we had the Europa Clipper mission go up recently, and that whole thing had to be delayed because Florida just happens to be right along the path of a bunch of hurricanes, right? So the more of these launch sites we can have, the better. But there is a very good reason why we try to launch from these locations, which we get into a little bit in this conversation, but not in deep detail. So for people who are wondering, why do we usually

try to launch things from the Earth's equator? Because you can use the velocity you've already got from spinning around with the fastest linear velocity. So everything's moving and all the way around in roughly 24 hours in a day, but you're traveling almost 40,000 kilometers ish if you're going on the equator. Whereas if you're right at the North Pole, you're not actually going anywhere, you're just spinning around in a circle. So basically, you have a pretty darn good speed to begin with, and if you launch to the east, so you're already using that speed, you've already got a good jump on your orbital speed from the equator that you can't get from higher up. Now, it doesn't help you if you do polar orbits, which they're more inclined to do from higher

latitudes. So... Does that mean you're limited on what kind of launch paths you can take from those locations, or do you just need a really big rocket in order to achieve something similar? From which locations? From a location that's further away from the equator. Further away. You get more creative.

So yes, one answer is you can get a bigger rocket. The other is, depending on what you're trying to do, you can find different orbits that it's not as big a deal. So for example, as I say, polar orbits where you're going over the poles instead of over the equator or, and you're not launching out to other planets or the moon where you really want to get that boost, you don't lose as much if you're doing that. The different orbits have different advantages around Earth and then of course we, the Planter Society, and our members and friends and people listening to the show like to focus on things to get, I believe the technical

term is, hucked out into deep space. And those, it's better to be down low. And the European Space Agency with the Ariane launch site in French Guiana, really got it near the equator. But yeah, you can play these games. I mean, Russia's had to do this, although they launched humans in Kazakhstan, but all of their sites are not particularly low latitude. And they, for example, use different standard orbits, because if you get high enough up,

you have trouble seeing the geostationary satellites that we further south use all the time that are out from the equator although they're way out from the equator so you have to get pretty high up so they come up with these orbits that have you spending most of your time over the high latitudes or there are other orbits that if you want to do mapping you do near polar, so you're not right over the poles, but nearly. And we do this at other planets all the time. Mars has a number of the polar things, so you can actually set up ones where you see

the ground at the same time every day, wherever you're passing over. So for example, Mars orbiters, there have been ones that were like 2 a.m. 2 p.m. so they when they fly they fly over each location at about local 2 a.m. and 2 p.m. and so if you're doing mapping that's really good or if you're doing thermal studies and you want to do that it's good so anyway orbits fun time and then of course there are the interplanetary orbits. Oh, quick charges. Which used to just slap a big rocket in a small spacecraft and then now we do these multiple, multiple gravity assists where you steal a little tiny bit of momentum from planets as you

go by them. So for example, Europa Clipper, which just launched recently, headed out to Europa and Jupiter system, does multiple flybys, including of Earth, so it comes back around and gets slingshotted, steals a little momentum however you want to look at it, and you can use smaller rockets or fly bigger spacecraft. In that case, they had a pretty darn big rocket, but they have a pretty darn big spacecraft going a long ways out there. So they're doing Mars and Earth flybys, that's pretty standard. But some in Galileo went into Venus, the Venus flyby is to get to Jupiter. And one of the most extreme is Ulysses did a Jupiter flyby to get over to the Sun.

If you want to hurt your brain, think about that one. It takes a lot of energy, a lot of propulsion to change inclination of your orbit. So you're flying around the equator of the Earth and you want to shift to flying around the poles. Changing it takes a fair amount of energy, but if you want to do that at a solar system scale and fly over the poles of the Sun it's right, I mean you it takes a lot of fuel or the equivalent and So that's why they actually came up with this creative way to use Jupiter to change to help them change Inclination and then they did the first looks

Over the poles of the Sun that we can't see from Earth. So yeah, that one's one of the many creative type orbits that interplanetary orbital dynamicists come up with. Yeah, that's clever. All right. So what is our random space fact this week? It is a random space bird! I was thinking, I was thinking about Europa Clipper and about J.U.S.E.

The European Space Agency mission that's headed out to the Jovian system as well. And you've probably thought to yourself, huh, I wonder how much when Jews focuses on Ganymede, how much more surface is there for it to look at than when Europa Clippers focus on Europa? How much more surface area? Well, it turns out there's almost three times more surface area, about 2.8 times the surface area on Ganymede as there is on Europa. Truly a random space fact creation. But even Ganymede or even Europa, there's a lot of stuff there that we only usually

see from orbit or in the case of Europa Clipper flybys. I'm never going to get bored of these images. Every time we have Juno send back another image of one of these moons, I lose my freaking mind. But now we're going to have Juice and Juno and Europa Clipper. No, it's awesome. It's so cool. I mean, when we had Mars, we've got stuff going all the time now.

We've had Mercury and Venus orbiters, and then when we had Galileo at Jupiter and Cassini at Saturn, it was just a feast for the eyes every few weeks when they'd fly by something. But we're so lucky. People used to have to wait for these things to come out in printed magazines, and now I could just look up the latest image from Mars. Cool images, and now we've got commercial spaceports. I don't even know what we're going to be talking about in 20 years, Bruce, but it's going to be crazy.

Bruce Dixon I have no idea. Sarah Bickford I don't know. But we'll record planetary radio in my robot body live from some kind of floating hotel above Mars. I can see it. Bruce Dixon Have fun with that. Sarah Bickford I will. Bruce Dixon All right, everybody, go out there, look up the night sky. And I don't want to say it, but I can't stop thinking about Sarah's robot body floating in what was it?

On a hotel floating around Mars. Thank you and good night. We've reached the end of this week's episode of Planetary Radio, but we'll be back next week with a look at the Exobiology Extant Life Surveyor, or EELS. It's a proposed technology that could one day help us investigate the ocean moons of our solar system. If you love the show, you can get Planetary Radio t-shirts at planetary.org. Along with lots of other cool spacey merchandise. Help others discover the passion, beauty, and joy of space science and exploration by leaving a review and a rating on platforms like

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Andrew Lucas is our audio editor. Josh Doyle composed our theme, which is arranged and performed by Peter Schlosser. And until next week, add Astra. ["Pomp and Circumstance"]