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When Will Canada Get a Spaceport? When It Has More Things to Launch

That's what Canadian Space Agency president Sylvain Laporte had to say at the annual Canadian Space Summit last week.
An Antares rocket launch at the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport (MARS) at in Virginia. Image: NASA/Bill Ingalls

If Canada ever wants it's own spaceport, we'll have to start launching a lot more spacecraft.

Asked on Thursday about the possibility of building a Canadian owned and operated spaceport, Canadian Space Agency (CSA) president Sylvain Laporte said that, only when Canada begins sending "a certain volume of stuff" into space would savings offered by a homegrown spaceport make the project economically sensible.

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The exchange took place at this year's annual meeting of the Canadian Space Society in Vancouver, which looked to forecast the future of Canada's efforts in space. At present, all Canadian missions must pay for launches from foreign private or state-owned spaceports, while space agencies in the US, Russia, Europe, Japan, and elsewhere can all send at least unmanned missions into space from their own launch facilities.

Read more: The Failed Plan to Build a Commercial Spaceport in the Subarctic

Canada has no plans to build its own spaceport at present, and that's partly due to the high initial cost of investment. Virgin Galactic's recently constructed Spaceport America cost just over $200 million—two thirds of the CSA's base annual budget.

A spaceplane project from Swiss Space Systems could someday launch small, low altitude satellites out of North Bay, Ontario, but for now acquiring even that limited capacity is far from assured.

When asked whether future CSA funding will realistically make such aspirations possible, Laporte said we need to give the new Liberal government time to settle in and show where it really thinks space tech and space science rank among Canada's national priorities.

The global space industry is one of the few that has continued to grow steadily over the past 20 years, even through the global recession, and the CSA's president said that if space continues to increase in importance as it has, Canada could reach that crucial launch volume in just a few decades.

And, "it certainly would be fun," Laporte said.