The Moon Shots

BetaKit Most Ambitious

Launching Canada into space

NordSpace (Toronto, ON)

In August of this year, Rahul Goel will stand on the rocky cliffs of St. Lawrence, NL, watching a plume of fire rip across the sky.

If everything goes right, his company, NordSpace, will make history by orchestrating Canada’s first commercial rocket launch.

Canada was the fourth nation in the world to launch a satellite into space, helped pioneer aerospace engineering, and famously built the Canadarm. But for all its expertise, Canada has never launched a rocket from its own soil. Every satellite, every national security payload, every commercial launch is outsourced, mostly to the US.

Canada spends about $1.5 billion every year launching with SpaceX, Goel explains, money that should be invested in helping Canadian efforts take off.

“Our national sovereignty, our national defence, security, are all on the line,” he said. “When we have our own Apollo moment—when kids in Canada see a rocket launch from their own country—we can do anything.”

Goel grew up in Toronto’s Jane and Finch neighbourhood, building robots and dreaming of space. A first-generation immigrant, his parents came to Canada from India shortly before he was born. He remembers being viscerally disappointed as a child when he learned that his country had no real space launch program of its own.

Through NordSpace, he is working to change that.

In just two years, the NordSpace team has designed, built, and test-fired a liquid-fuelled rocket engine, something no private Canadian company has done at this scale. The company’s approach leans on precision 3D printing, aerospace-grade materials, and in-house propulsion engineering.

About 20 people work at the NordSpace headquarters in Markham. Many individuals across his companies have been friends with Goel since childhood, having met at William Lyon McKenzie Collegiate Institute, where they were all part of the MaCS Program, designed for young people with an interest in math, science, and technology.

The team receives a regular stream of fan mail from Canadian school kids who say that they want to grow up and be a part of the effort.

Finding people to finance the work has not come as easily.

Early on his space journey, Goel realized that few people were likely to bankroll his dreams.

So after graduating in 2016 with a degree in aerospace engineering and experience as a junior mechanical engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., he decided to do it himself.

Goel has bootstrapped two companies with the express intention of using their revenue to fund his sovereign space launch ambitions.

In addition to NordSpace, he runs a SaaS company, PheedLoop, and a genetic technology company called Genepika that uses DNA-based molecules for portable diagnostic tools.

Through those ventures, he has invested approximately $10 million into NordSpace, where he spends the majority of his time.

To say Goel is energized by his mission is an understatement of galactic scale. While he was standing up his other companies, he saved money by living in his car. While running NordSpace, he continues to pursue his PhD, working part-time with Professor Jonathan Kelly at the University of Toronto Institute for Aerospace Studies, within the Space Terrestrial Autonomous Robotic Systems (STARS) Lab. Both his parents have passed away, so he also spends time looking out for his two younger siblings, who are also engineers.

When it comes to getting Canada into the space race, Goel said the biggest obstacles aren’t financial or even technical.

It’s finding institutional partners similarly willing to shoot for the stars.

The NordSpace team is navigating through a regulatory maze with Transport Canada, tackling the heavy lifting required for a full-scale orbital-class mission. The Canadian government has offered encouragement but little else, according to Goel.

“It’s new to the Canadian government from a regulatory standpoint as well,” said Goel. “We’re working to get the first commercial space launch licence, even though we’re not going to orbit for this first flight, because it’s critical that we kick the tires and test the process.”

Meanwhile, other countries with smaller populations have already achieved velocity. Sweden, Portugal, and New Zealand have homegrown space industries, regularly launching payloads while Canada’s feet remain firmly planted on the ground.

NordSpace, however, has started its own countdown. Private capital moves faster than government grants, and a launchpad on Canadian soil would mean satellite operators no longer have to wait for permission.

Goel believes a successful full-scale launch from Newfoundland will be a turning point, not just for the startup, but for the country.

Earlier this year, he hosted a series of community consultations in Newfoundland, building buy-in for the project and explaining his desire to do something that creates a sense of pride for all Canadians.

“I hadn’t seen an ocean for I don’t know how long,” he said of his trip. “It’s the most beautiful place I’ve ever seen. And you’re standing there, imagining the future.”

Location, location, location

Canadian Space Mining Corporation (Toronto, ON)

Volta Space Technologies (Montréal, QC)

In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, Dan Sax had an existential crisis.

He had worked in real estate for 15 years, but looking back as the world shut down, he wasn’t sure what he had achieved.

“I worked on $4.5 billion in deals, and investors made money,” he said. “But I realized that I wanted to have an impact at a planetary scale.”

The reformed real estate mogul is now the CEO of the Canadian Space Mining Corporation, which plans to put a nuclear reactor on the Moon before the end of the decade.

The work is informed by a deep understanding of what’s necessary for ambitious real estate development. It was created in response to NASA’s Artemis program, a $93-billion US effort to reestablish a human presence on the Moon.

Sax realized that reliable energy would be a “gating factor” to the Artemis mission, as most infrastructure cannot withstand the Moon’s extreme temperature variance.

His solution? Canada’s SLOWPOKE-2 microreactor, historically used for research purposes, redesigned and commercialized by CSMC to provide extraplanetary power for lunar operations.

Sax plans to send his company’s reactor to the Moon as soon as 2029, where it will touch down with impact at a planetary scale.

In Montréal, Volta Space Technologies is tackling the same issue with a light touch. The company is developing a satellite network that will use lasers to transmit energy from the sun across hundreds of kilometres of the lunar surface, powering space missions that last years, even in permanent darkness.

Volta has already demonstrated long-range energy transmission on Earth, and the company is led by CEO Justin Zipkin, who worked for American launch firm Rocket Lab and Canadian rocket maker Reaction Dynamics.

With this pedigree, customers were already lined up as Volta emerged from stealth last year. The company has awards, contracts, and grants from major space agencies in Canada, Europe, and the US. It also hopes to provide power to underserved areas on Earth, leaving it poised to make a difference at home and offworld.

Making the universe feel alive

GRAM (El Segundo, CA)

How does humanity become intergalactic?

At 21, Ulys Sorok believes that answering this question is his life’s mission. He is driven by the idea that humans should go to other planets not to survive, but to explore.

Through his company, Galactic Resource Advancement Mechanism Technologies (GRAM), Sorok is developing self-replicating robots that can prepare faraway celestial bodies for humanity’s arrival.

Closely resembling insectoids and intended to replace humans as the base unit of labour, self-replicating robots would extract resources and build infrastructure and industrial capabilities on other planets, without external support. The robots will then launch themselves continually outward, leaving a trail of inhabitable colonies in their galactic wake.

“I want the universe to feel alive,” Sorok said. “Ambition is not just a driver in tech, but also a driver of history, right?”

A University of Waterloo engineering dropout, Sorok did a brief stint as a research engineer at Carleton University’s CEntre for SElf-Replication, led by Dr. Alex Ellery, one of the world’s foremost experts on self-replication. He then launched GRAM with a prototype built in a week, and a similarly expedited pre-seed fundraise.

GRAM is now based in a warehouse in El Segundo, CA, a neighbourhood near LAX where Howard Hughes established the early aerospace industry and Elon Musk founded SpaceX in 2002, shortly before Sorok was born.

STAR GAZERS

Orbital efforts from across Canada.

Telesat (Ottawa, ON)

The company’s upcoming Lightspeed satellite constellation promises fast, Canadian-made broadband for rural communities and the military. At a time when Canada’s economic sovereignty is paramount, Telesat offers a viable alternative to SpaceX’s Starlink and Amazon’s Project Kuiper.

Dr. Susan Skone (Calgary, AB)

Skone’s University of Calgary spinoff, SDQ Solutions Canada, was recently accepted into the DIANA Challenge, which develops deep tech for critical security challenges. A former ship’s navigator in the Canadian Armed Forces, Skone specializes in anti-spoofing technology, which stops anyone hacking our satellites.

Kepler Communications (Toronto, ON)

Do you need access to space data in real time? Governments do. Kepler is on a mission to deliver modern internet connectivity in space. The Kepler Network will initially service low Earth orbit and plans to provide connectivity services to private space missions.

MDA Space (Brampton, ON)

Developing the third version of its most famous product, the Canadarm3 will support missions aboard NASA’s Moon-orbiting Gateway Station. The new arm is highly autonomous and will support not just assembly and maintenance, but some of the farthest-ever spacewalks.

Reaction Dynamics (Longueil, QC)

Creating a hybrid propulsion rocket it hopes will offer quicker, lower-cost, and more durable satellite deployments. Reaction’s Aurora rocket represents a rare Canadian-made counterpart to small-payload rockets from foreign rivals like SpaceX and Rocket Lab.

Wyvern (Edmonton, AB)

Do we see ourselves clearly? Wyvern delivers “hyperspectral” satellite imagery: spectrum-level detail that provides a more comprehensive picture of Earth from space, promising to impact fields ranging from agriculture and forestry through to energy and national defence.

Feature image courtesy Stocksy.