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           By  Chuck Black After almost a year of slowly dropping power output which increasingly limited the type and amount of observations it could perform, the long serving  Microvariability and Oscillation of Stars (MOST) space telescope was finally decommissioned in March 2019 by it's current owners, the Mississauga ON based  Microsat Systems Canada Inc.  (MSCI). An April 13th, 2015 screenshot of the UBC webpage for the MOST space telescope, which lists the partners who contributed to the ongoing success of the mission (including UBC) and some of it more recent discoveries (the UBC web page has since been taken down). As outlined in the April 13th, 2015 post, " The MOST Space Telescope Joins the Private Sector ," the CSA, which had operated MOST since it was launched on June 30th, 2003, withdrew funding for the program on September 9th 2014 as a cost cutting measure. MOST was then purchased from the CSA by MSCI, which contin...

           By  Brian Orlotti On April 5th, Los Angeles CA based Relativity Space , a manufacturer of 3D-printed rockets, announced that it has signed its first commercial contract with Telesat , the Ottawa-based commsat operator and pillar of Canada’s space sector. The agreement is a major coup for the young American NewSpace firm and a sad reminder of Canada’s willingness to support foreign space industries at the expense of its own plentiful and skilled homegrown talent. As outlined in the April 5th, 2019 Space News post, " Relativity signs contract with Telesat for launching LEO constellation ," the contract covers the launch of an unspecified number of Telesat LEO satellites on Relativity launch vehicles, starting no earlier than 2021. The companies declined to disclose the terms of the contract. Relativity Space was founded in 2015 by former Blue Origin and SpaceX engineers Tim Ellis and Jordan Noone. Ellis and Noone both felt that their employers...

           By  Chuck Black Seattle WA based Amazon.com has joined the list of companies planning to build large constellations of hundreds or thousands of low Earth orbiting satellites able to provide broadband internet connectivity to rural areas not currently being served. As outlined in the April 4th, 2019 Geekwire post, " Amazon to offer broadband access from orbit with 3,236-satellite ‘Project Kuiper’ constellation ," Amazon hasn’t disclosed who would build the satellites or when they would be launched and hasn’t yet filed with the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) for US market access for the system. But it has provided a name for the new constellation. As outlined in the Geekwire post: The effort, code-named Project Kuiper, follows up on last September’s mysterious reports that Amazon was planning a “big, audacious space project” involving satellites and space-based systems. The Seattle-based company is likely to spend billions o...

           By Henry Stewart The 2018 State of the Canadian Space Secto r, the latest in a series of annual compilations of Canada's space capabilities produced by the economic analysis and research team at the Canadian Space Agency (CSA), is now online. Although it was released on Thursday April 4th, 2019, it's officially a 2018 report using data collected in 2017. The latest report continues to note a long-term pattern of declining domestic sales of Canadian space focused products while international sales of the sames products increase. The front cover of the PDF version of the 2018 State of the Canadian Space Sector Report. Graphic c/o CSA . As outlined in the executive summary of the report: In 2017, the space sector contributed $2.3Bln CDN to Canada's GDP and supported a total of 21,828 jobs. Total revenues in the Canadian space sector reached $5.6Bln CDN for 2017. This is a slight increase over 2015 ($5.3Bln CDN) and 2016 ($5.5Bln CDN).  The Can...

           By  Chuck Black After a month of anticipation, we still don't know much about the new $150Mln  Canadian Space Agency (CSA) Lunar Exploration Accelerator Program (LEAP), which is intended to assist small, space focused businesses and distract from the larger 1.95Bln CDN the government has pledged to support the US led Lunar Gateway . There seems to be no Federal government website set up to explain the program and formal inquiries to the CSA from this blog have, so far at least, not led to any " on the record " clarifications. Off the record, " knowledgeable sources " have indicated that the program is " not budget dependent " which could mean that funding is not available this year, or it could mean that the funding will be pulled from other Federal programs and isn't really new funding. We don't really know. Those " knowledgeable sources " have also indicated that the CSA will issue a request for information (RFI) to beg...

           By  Brian Orlotti Three researchers, two of them Canadian, have won the 2019  Turing Award , generally considered to to be the world's top computer science award, for their work in developing machine learning and neural networks. From left, Yann LeCun, Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio. Photo c/o Facebook, via Associated Press; Aaron Vincent Elkaim for The New York Times; Chad Buchanan/Getty Image s. Université de Montréal professor Yoshua Bengio, University of Toronto professor emeritus Geoffrey Hinton and  New York University professor Yann LeCun will each share the 2019 award. The three have close ties and are perhaps best known for their work outside of academia. Bengio also acts as and scientific director of Mila , Quebec's artificial intelligence institute  Hinton is a vice-president and engineer fellow at Menlo Park CA based Google , and the chief scientific advisor at the Toronto ON based Vector Institute ...