Stephen Matier, president and chief executive of Maritime Launch Services Inc., said the investment by MDA Space Ltd. is a ‘momentum builder’ for his company.DARREN CALABRESE/The Globe and Mail
As Canada edges closer to domestic capacity for launching satellites, one of the country’s largest aerospace companies has announced it is buying into the effort.
On Monday, Brampton, Ont.-based MDA Space Ltd. MDA-T announced it will make a $10-million equity investment in Maritime Launch Services Inc. MAXQ-NE, at a price of $0.223 per share. MLS, a commercial aerospace company headquartered in Halifax, is developing a spaceport, or launch site, for satellite delivery services.
The move comes just 10 days after MLS secured a $10-million loan from Export Development Canada to facilitate the construction of the company’s spaceport near Canso, N.S., about 325 kilometres northeast of the provincial capital.
Altogether, the capital infusion will boost MLS’s goal of lofting satellites into orbit from Canada’s Atlantic Coast as it vies for a place in a growing but competitive global market.
“It’s a complete momentum builder,” Stephen Matier, the company’s president and chief executive, told The Globe and Mail in an interview. “This really validates for us what we’ve been working on all these years. At the end of the day it’s about getting a sovereign launch capability.”
Ready for launch: The man behind the push to build Spaceport Nova Scotia
Canada became the third nation after the United States and the Soviet Union to have a satellite orbit Earth in 1962, but that satellite flew on a U.S. rocket. To date, no satellite has ever been launched from Canada, and suborbital rocket flights for research purposes ended in 1998.
More recently, with the advent of private spaceflight led by Space X and the promise of space-based broadband communications, a handful of aerospace startups have aimed to create launch facilities in Canada.
Mr. Matier gained his expertise as a contractor for NASA and then as a consultant in the private space sector in New Mexico. He founded MLS in 2016 when he realized that Nova Scotia’s location, far to the east of most of North America, is well positioned for launching satellites with highly inclined orbits that can provide global coverage.
The company went public in 2022 and began construction at a site where it has secured a 40-year lease with the province. Plans were set back when Russia’s invasion of Ukraine effectively cut off access to the rockets it was planning to use, built by a company in Dnipro, Ukraine, about 480 kilometres southeast of Kyiv.
“At the end of the day we had to shift our model because of the supply chain breakdown,” Mr. Matier said.
Since then, the company has focused on providing its clients with a launch site and a place to set up ground stations to link with satellites already in orbit.
Later this month, Dutch company T-Minus Engineering BV is currently scheduled to attempt a suborbital launch test at the Canso location. If the test succeeds it will mark the first time this century that a rocket launched in Canada reaches space.
MDA spokesperson Amy MacLeod said the company’s investment in MLS comes at a time of increasing demand for sovereign launch capabilities in Canada – demand on which the company could one day capitalize.
“We expect to become an operational partner at Space Nova Scotia which would allow us to support the development and future operations of the spaceport while also strengthening Canada space value chain,” she said in an e-mail.
Kevin Bryan is an associate professor of strategic management at the University of Toronto and chief economist at U of T’s Creative Destruction Lab, which supports science-based startups. He said MDA’s investment reflects a growing focus on Canadian space sovereignty. However, he said he was skeptical of the potential for domestic companies in a global industry dominated by Space X and expanding in India and China.
“It’s just a very tough, very international market,” he said.
MDA’s stock dropped 25 per cent on Sept. 8 after U.S. telecom EchoStar cancelled its $1.8-billion satellite manufacturing contract with the company, and slid 15 per cent last Thursday after media reports suggested it could be at risk of losing another contract worth $1.1-billion if American telecom Globalstar sells itself to Elon Musk’s SpaceX.
MDA’s shares on the Toronto Stock Exchange are down 3 per cent since the beginning of the year, but up 14 per cent from the same time last year.