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           By  Chuck Black Both the United States, with its " Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act of 2015 ," and the Grand Duchy of Luxemboug  are well known for recent legislation allowing their citizens and domestically based corporations to claim ownership over space based resources. Mars (on the left) has more than a little in common with the Australian outback (on the right) according to the December 4th, 2014 ABC News Australia post, " Mars V Australian Outback ." As outlined in the June 10th, 2018 VentureBeat post, " The best countries for tech companies: 2018 rankings ," the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) has named Australia, Singapore and Sweden as " the countries most prepared for technological change, and the most attractive places for tech companies to invest in the next five years ." It's a shame that Canada wasn't in the top ten rankings. Photo's c/o NASA and Jane Stapleton . Those laws are designed specifical...

           By Henry Stewart Maybe things are starting to look up for Canada's space industry. Sometime this month, Charlottesville NC based Honeywell International , will formally open its Space Division’s Greenhouse, a technology and space focused incubator in a facility originally owned by the old Cambridge ON based COM DEV International . Of course, the Honeywell Greenhouse has unofficially been opened for almost a year. It's been publically referenced as far back as the August 22nd, 2018 Space News post, " Small satellites are at the center of a space industry transformation " and many of its core staff have held their formal titles since June 2018. Before then, most worked for COM DEV and focused on doing pretty much what they had been doing since Honeywell brought the iconic Canadian space company and spun out its Cambridge ON based exactEarth smallsat subsidiary as a separate company in late 2015. But a formal announcement, as outlined in the J...

           By  Chuck Black Last January, no one would ever have thought that the big Canadian space story of 2018 would be the slow destruction of Westminster CO based Maxar Technologies ' market valuation on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) and its effect on Canada. Maxar stock peaked with a January 4th, 2018 high of $65.25 US ($88.97 CDN) per share, then bottomed out with a December 24th, 2018 low of $9.55 US ($13.02) per share. But while Maxar crashed and burned, a whole new generation of private sector, mostly Canadian owned and operated space focused firms quietly perfected their technology, slowly raised funds for expansion and painstakingly developed functional business plans. Here's an overview of some of the important stories this blog has covered over the last year. It's alliance with Dorval PQ based Bombardier Aerospace to turn Bombardier’s single-aisle C Series (now known as the Airbus A220) into a commercial success moved Ottobrunn Ger...

           By  Chuck Black It's worth noting that a great many academic, non-governmental and business organizations want the Federal government to give them bucketloads of new money for various projects and insist that this will revitalize the Canadian space industry. They are wrong. Totally and irrevocably wrong. Our current worldwide explosion of private sector space accomplishments has nothing whatsoever to do with simply shoveling new government money into traditionally structured programs. The problem is the structure of the program, not a lack of funding. The only real way to revitalize the Canadian space industry and make it competitive in the marketplace of ideas (not just as a component manufacturer) is to change the procurement methodologies of government departments such as the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) and update the Federal tax code to support innovative, Canadian based, private sector corporations. This is what the US and Luxembo...

Image c/o IISC .          By Henry Stewart The Isle of Man based  International Institute of Space Commerce  (IISC), established in 2007 as a cooperative venture between the  International Space University  (ISU) and the  Government of the Isle of Man , has released a listing of the " IISC Top 35 Under 35 Class of 2018 " space industry movers and shakers. As outlined in the July 25th, 2018 IISC press release, " State of the Industry Special Edition; IISC 35 Under 35 Class of 2018 ," the good news is that three Canadian's are included with the list. The bad news is that only one of those Canadians still lists Canada as the place where they live and/or work. The IISC list of top 35 under 35 included the following Canadian's: Beth Downer , the founder of Reaching Space Science , a Netherlands based space communications company who also works as a space science communicator at Leiden University , the oldest university in the Netherlands. Acc...