Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield, former commander of the International Space Station, spoke with the Financial Post last December about Canada’s place in space.
FP: How well has Canada historically done in terms of space exploration?
Hadfield: It’s definitely worth mentioning that we were the third nation in space and we’ve always gone into space cooperatively. We’ve never put ourselves into orbit. We’ve always decided that it makes more sense for Canada to explore and use space in a cooperative manner. That’s been a smart idea, starting with the Alouette satellite in the early ’60s. Alouette seems simple, but it developed some technologies that laid the whole groundwork for future programs.
Canada’s Anik satellite and the Telesat series in the early ’70s led the world in coast-to-coast telecommunications. We used international cooperation and our own technology to be able to communicate with each other well, which made a lot of sense. We’ve used that initial legacy because it worked well and served our purposes to guide us all the way along. The earth observation satellite Radarsat launched in 1995, a week before I did. Our launches were almost simultaneous.
We cooperate on all kinds of satellites for science and Earth observation, looking at the universe, looking for approaching asteroids and looking at the variability of stars. We’re cooperating on the James Webb Space Telescope and also the Canadian SciSat satellite to understand the Earth’s atmosphere. OSIRIS-REx is now choosing landing sites on asteroid Bennu. It’s a mission to collect and return a sample from an asteroid, and Canada’s been a part of the program.
There’s Canadian hardware on the surface of Mars. We were involved with the Phoenix robotic lander on Mars and other landers. Our cooperation is right across the whole solar system. That’s the groundwork and legacy for what we’ve been doing.
FP: How is Canada now in terms of funding space programs?
Hadfield: We’ve had reasonably stable funding for the Canadian space program throughout its 30-year history. Obviously, we have to decide each year how much money should we provide to every government department, including the Canadian Space Agency. The latest factual data shows how many people and how many jobs are in the space industry, and how much money it generates domestically and internationally. Those numbers are pretty convincing. It’s somewhere on the order of 10,000 space jobs directly and then another 10,000 or 12,000 additional jobs, so that’s 20,000 or more jobs in the industry and somewhere on the order of $2.5 billion contributed to the GDP. That’s pretty significant.
FP: Looking to the future, is there something you wish Canada was doing or something you’re excited about?
Hadfield: We go through these natural enough cycles. We have an election every four years or so. Every government has to look at the old government’s policies and decide what they want to keep and what to throw out. In the late ’70s and early ’80s, we debated whether we should be part of the Shuttle program or not. In the early ’90s, we came within a hair’s breadth of not being part of the International Space Station just because of the new government and everybody’s got priorities. We went through the same sort of deep discussions when the Space Shuttle program ended back in 2011.
It’s like after John Cabot made contact with Newfoundland in North America, England was humming and hawing. It took them 70 years to take further action. The government had problems at home and you had to answer the taxpayer and all the rest. There’s nothing new about it.
Looking at what’s coming next, the technology now is good enough, cheap enough and proven enough that we could go further. We could maybe start to turn Earth’s orbit over much more to actually profitable commercial ventures and not just have it the purview of national space programs. The next obvious logical step is the moon, which is three days away. Because the moon is perfectly upright in the solar system, the moon’s north and south poles always have sunlight, so you have eternal power. In the craters, the best we can tell by our remote sensing is that there’s on the order of 400 billion litres of water on the moon. That’s pretty interesting that there’s unlimited power, essentially, and to some degree almost unlimited water. It’s going to be really hard, but I sort of see it like Antarctica in 1911, where we just barely got there. It was right at the hairy edge of what we could do, and yet now thousands of people live in Antarctica. Almost 100 live at the South Pole now, including Canadians.
Note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Financial Post
