A mild-mannered former NASA engineer is working to turn Canso, N.S., into the Cape Canaveral of the North. After nine years of effort, Stephen Matier may finally be ready for commercial lift-off.

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It may be a barren strip of scrubland, where only coyotes gather before crossing into good old Canso town, at the most northeasterly point of the least-populated county of Nova Scotia. But here, at 45.3223 north and 61.7076 west, not far from AJ’s Bar & Grill—where the lunch menu includes Thunder Crunch & Kettle Chips—the trajectory of an entire country is about to change.

Or so said a usually reserved mechanical engineer from New Mexico with the decidedly come-from-away-sounding name of Stephen Matier (pronounced Ma-teer). Today, the former NASA project manager and founder of Maritime Launch Services (MLS)—with a rocket launch facility underway in Canso (population: 800) and an office in Halifax—appears almost garrulous as he refers to the seven-acre parcel he is working to transform into ground zero for Canada’s first spaceport.

From here and very soon, he proclaimed, dozens of smallish commercial rockets (16-40 meters tall) from a dozen countries, will carry satellites into the great beyond. In Canso town, he predicts, aerospace engineers—recently arrived from Europe and the United States—and locals back from the sea will happily haggle over the price of lobster from their cars by the wharf. “Certainly, you’re going to see our clients’ rockets going by your windshield,” he said cheerily. “There’s going to be that level, that degree, of visibility… At least, there will be now.”

Why ‘now’, he noted, is thanks to a mission-critical decision by the Municipality of the District of Guysborough (MODG) council on January 22, 2025, allowing MLS to use its seven-acre plot as a launch-tracking facility. The move instantly opens the door to commercial clients seeking a top-notch facility from which to blast their satellite payloads into Low Earth Orbit (LEO), about 1,000 kilometres straight up.

That, in turn, puts MLS’s Spaceport Nova Scotia in contention for a “huge”, if not yet precisely determined, chunk of a global USD$650-billion market. “We’ll actually generate our first revenue this year,” he said. Just as soon as he finishes building the hangers, launchpads, storage rooms—the actual infrastructure.

For 16 years, Matier has navigated a maze of regulatory hurdles while facing opposition from some local residents worried about toxic exhaust, falling debris and plummeting property values. Then, last year, two years after the war in Ukraine disrupted a key supplier of satellite-launch rockets, he was forced to overhaul his entire strategy. Initially intending to blast its own payload-carrying rockets into space, MLS—with money only from its investors to keep it afloat— is now selling itself as an effective “airport” for others with their own rosters of satellite clients.

Almost as draining has been battling the pervasive ‘slack-jaw’ effect—the stunned disbelief that arises when you tell people you’re building a spaceport in a town where European fishermen settled 400 years ago, and not, say, in Cape Canaveral. “They look at you like you’re talking about The Jetsons or something.”

But now, Matier hopes, all that is finally, mercifully dissolving into the past, thanks to a routine municipal rezoning ordinance that simply recognizes that Spaceport Nova Scotia is… well, a real thing, after all.

Certainly, Bachar Elzein, founder and CEO of Reaction Dynamics—the Montreal-based manufacturer of the 18-meter Aurora orbital rocket, which can deliver payloads of between 50 and 150 kilograms—is ecstatic. As MLS’s first paying high-flying customer, the rezoning lets him proceed with what the two partners’ joint press release describes as the “first orbital launch of a Canadian vehicle from Canadian soil” as early as next year.

“We have close to half a billion dollars in memoranda of understanding and letters of interest [from potential clients],” Elzein said. “We’ve even started generating revenue from customers… The last thing I want to do is build a spaceport. Having Steve and his team handling that is a blessing.”

Of course, Matier said, “we really are part of the global confluence in the space economy… it is a real thing.” Still, he can’t resist a smile. Blessing? He shrugged: “If any of this were easy, it would have been done before.”

Into the wild blue yonder

That was also the conclusion 60 years ago when, in 1967, the so-called Chapman Report—eponymously named for the senior federal government physicist who wrote it —recommended that Canada spend its money and smarts on developing new satellite technology, and leave the expensive and messy business of launching rockets to the American government. As a result, the nation gave the world Alouette, ISIS, Anik, Radarsat and the Canadarm, but no place north of the 49th parallel from which to blast them into space.

After NASA shut down its space shuttle program in 2011 and handed over access to LEO to the private sector, things began to change. Suddenly, companies like SpaceX, Boeing and Northrop Grumman ramped up, developing rockets to satisfy their growing appetites for commercial adventure. The entire world was now a potential launching pad.

Matier had a front-row seat to all of this. Having started his career at NASA’s White Sands Test Facility in New Mexico in 1989, he’d worked on the safety aspects of the shuttle, testing rocket engines and propulsion systems. “We were trying to break them on the ground so they didn’t break in space,” he recalls of his work there. “As a kid, I grew up seeing the facility as a glimmer out in the desert. I had no idea I’d be working there one day.”

By 2016, he was a well-known consultant specializing in launch project coordination, construction management and operations setup when the Ukrainian aerospace company, Yuzhnoye State Design Office, asked him to identify a location in North America suitable for a commercial spaceport. After looking over a dozen potential sites in Manitoba, California, Hawaii, Virginia, Alaska and Mexico, he chose Canso. “It had everything, including safety buffers for nearby populations, access to good [launch] angles, and proximity to infrastructure, such as deep-sea ports and transportation networks,” he said. “It was a slam dunk.”

Before making his decision official, he organized an open house at the Canso fire hall in January 2017 to gauge local interest and answer questions. “We learned a lot about the community and how they were living,” he said. “We brought in wildlife biologists, scientists, engineers… I wasn’t going to do this in anybody’s backyard if they didn’t want it.”

Municipal officials were warm to it. “We look forward to this project and encourage its expeditious review and approval,” MODG Warden Vernon Pitts stated on behalf of council in a publicly available letter to Nova Scotia environment minister Margaret Miller in 2019. “[It] has the potential to provide significant benefits to a region that’s been greatly impacted by the collapse of the cod fishery.”

Lurching towards liftoff

Matier insists the project also enjoyed “overwhelming” public support. But the degree to which residents and their local council representatives could visualize it was an open question. What would this look like? How would it operate? How safe would it be? Since the Chapman Report, there  a Department of the Environment and Climate Change in 2019, he said, “they suddenly told us we had to do 65 bird studies before we could break ground.”

The company forged ahead, seizing opportunities to demonstrate the spaceport’s potential. In 2023, it hosted a rocketry group from York University, marking what Matier describes as the spaceport’s first sub-orbital flight. The students were granted access to a rocket integration hangar, a small-scale launchpad, tracking and monitoring systems, and workspaces for post-launch analysis and troubleshooting.

Not all residents were enthusiastic. Marie Lumsden, a member of the Action Against Canso Spaceport citizen’s group, continues to worry about the effects on human health, the environment, the fishing industry and property values. Citing her objections recently in an email, she even questioned the venture’s viability. “The federal government has no regulation to launch anything beyond a high-powered student rocket,” she noted, “[and] they want to rezone a piece of private land for another company to do business?”

Still, Matier continues to assert that most people in the area remain solidly behind the spaceport. Harking back to that first open house, he said his critics “stood outside and yelled at participants instead of coming in to learn what we were doing…. I’ve not seen anything documenting broad support against us.”

By the spring of last year, though, he had bigger problems. The two-year-long war in Ukraine had effectively made mincemeat of his original business plan. Sitting on 335 acres of leased Crown land in addition to the seven-acre private parcel, MLS’s Canso site layout envisioned as many as four custom-built launch pads with propellant storage and loading systems; facilities for vehicle and payload processing, including clean room environments, tools and test equipment; and a launch control centre with tailored computing, communications, and visualization capabilities. All of which would have been designated to support its own rockets, manufactured by Yuzhnoye. That prospect now seemed unlikely.

“We held on as long as we could to stay with them and still are with them,” Matier said today. “But [though] we can’t get the rockets out of Ukraine, there’s still such huge demand for satellites going into orbit that there’s all these [other] rockets in development that don’t have a home. The bottleneck is really the spaceport, and that’s what we’re addressing.”

Countdown to commercialization

What makes the airport model attractive, he said, is its familiarity. Just as Stanfield International leases space and provides fuel, hospitality, lights, power and personnel to Air Canada and WestJet, MLS will provide control center services, payload processing, facility gases, airspace and Nav Canada Transport coordination to any number of the world’s more than 100 commercial rocket launching companies. He added: “In a couple of years, we’ll look at expanding to include additional launchers. And that’s when we think the Ukrainian rocket will be back in the story.”

So far, the pivot seems to be working. Last fall, Matier signed a 10-year contract to host a ground satellite tracking and data collection station for Italian tech firm Leaf Space, which is betting that the company’s simplified business model will attract legions of ambitious rocketeers. Technically, Matier said, “Leaf will be our first piece of revenue-generating business.” He won’t say how much, apart from: “It’s nice.”

Meanwhile, the regulatory environment continues to evolve as authorities begin to realize that they may, indeed, be writing the rules of a brand-new industry in Canada. In collaboration with MLS, Transport Canada has created an entirely new regulatory framework for launch operations. The new Canada-U.S. Technology Safeguard Agreement—again, spearheaded by MLS—will facilitate the secure import and launch of U.S.-manufactured rockets and satellites in this country. MLS also stands to receive approximately $26 million in conditional terms sheets and refundable corporate tax credits from the federal and provincial governments to continue building and expanding its facilities.

None of which has silenced the critics, of course. With net and comprehensive losses for the six months ending June 30, 2024 of $2,193,680, compared with losses of $2,525,551 in the year-earlier period, MLS has “no source of operating cash flow,” according to the notes to the company’s unaudited financial statements. “Operations have been funded from the issuance of share capital and convertible debentures and the exercise of warrants…The ability to continue as a going concern is dependent upon the ability to obtain financing.”

Over the past nine years, Matier openly admits, MLS has lived or died entirely at the discretion of its investors who he declines to identify but who he describes as both “generous” and “serious” about the business. He also said their patience is not limitless. It’s time, he agreed, to generate actual revenue. Time may be running out in other ways, as well.

According to recent news reports, Canadian aerospace organization NordSpace has submitted a proposal to the Town of St. Lawrence on the Burin Peninsula of Newfoundland and Labrador to build what’s it’s calling Spaceport Canada.

For the first time, he may have real competition. According to recent news reports, Canadian aerospace organization NordSpace has submitted a proposal to the Town of St. Lawrence on the Burin Peninsula of Newfoundland and Labrador to build what’s it’s calling Spaceport Canada. If it gets the greenlight from municipal officials, the public and regulators, it said it’ll be ready to launch 16-metre commercial rockets later this year.

Is Matier worried?

“We wish Nordspace success as they advance their venture,” he said measuredly. “The global space economy is experiencing significant growth… As with any rapidly expanding market, increased competition is a natural outcome.”

For MLS, Leaf Space is a start. So is Reaction Dynamics. Said Elzein: “Steve and I are trying not just to build our respective companies, but the whole ecosystem. We’re the only G7 country that doesn’t have launch capabilities. There are going to be 2,000 jobs created by launching Canadian satellites. We can invent those jobs here in Canada.”

For Matier, the entire journey has been, in many ways, an act of invention. “I’ve been in this industry for three-and-a-half decades…The spaceport of the future is not Kennedy Space Center with launch control centers with massive screens and dozens of people… The spaceport of the future is much more compact, much more responsive to the needs of the launcher itself. There was a launch vehicle several years ago that launched out of Alaska, and its launch control was done from a laptop from a Starbucks in California.”

What’s so strange, then, about one on a strip of scrubland at the continent’s edge where, some day soon, it won’t just be coyotes yipping and yowling at a rocket’s red glare?

Editor’s Note: Alec Bruce also covers MLS for the weekly Guysborough Journal as its Local Journalism Initiative Reporter.