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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.
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.
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