Canada has taken steps to establish its first military space launch center, declaring that “our security, our prosperity, and our sovereignty will increasingly extend beyond our atmosphere.”
The nation’s Department of National Defence (DND) will lease a launchpad at a private spaceport in Nova Scotia, according to an announcement March 16, 2026, by Minister of National Defence David J. McGuinty.
Spaceport Nova Scotia is under construction as a dual-use launch center for commercial and government business. Developer Maritime Launch Services Inc. (MLS) is soliciting customers globally by offering relief from a growing launch bottleneck while “advancing Canada’s national resilience and broader space, defence, and security objectives,” the company said in a news release.
Said McGuinty, “With this step, we are not only advancing our capabilities here on Earth — we are reaffirming our place among the spacefaring nations shaping the future beyond it.” The spaceport will support operations of the DND, the Canadian Armed Forces and the wider government of Canada.
Canada has two spaceports, both private ventures, in early development — Spaceport Nova Scotia and the Atlantic Spaceport Complex in Newfoundland and Labrador, the nation’s northeastern province. MLS, based in Halifax, Nova Scotia, has reached a 10-year, $146 million launch deal with the DND. NordSpace, based in Markham, Ontario, broke ground in August 2025 on its launch complex.
MLS already has hosted several suborbital spaceflights, while NordSpace hopes to carry out the first launch from its new complex this year, according to a March 17, 2026, report in the industry news website Payload. With their high-latitude locations, the two spaceports offer direct, over-the-ocean trajectories for launching Earth observation and surveillance satellites into polar and sun-synchronous orbits.
Meantime, Canada is providing $6 million each in development funds to three new rocket systems — NordSpace’s Tundra; Canada Rocket Co.’s R-1; and Aurora-8 from Reaction Dynamics, an investor in MLS. The funding is part of $76.7 million initiative called Launch the North, designed to orbit Canadian payloads from Canadian soil by 2028.
Launch the North will support Canada’s pledge to join the new NATO Starlift initiative, McGuinty said. The nation would become the 15th NATO member collaborating in Starlift, established in October 2024 to strengthen the alliance’s ability to access space quickly and reliably, NATO said at its website. Current Starlift participants are Belgium, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Türkiye, the United Kingdom and the United States.
Canada already is working with a separate NATO space initiative, Northlink, leveraging commercial and government capabilities to develop a secure, resilient and reliable Arctic satellite communications capability. Northlink’s 13 member states are Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and the U.S.
The Payload report pointed out that Canada’s investment in space is modest compared with what leading spacefaring nations spend, but it also noted the country is pursuing niche capabilities for maximum impact. This includes the Canadarm robotic manipulators that perform assembly and other roles on the International Space Station and flew aboard U.S. space shuttle missions.
Until now, Canadian space interests have relied upon launch providers from outside the country. These include U.S. company SpaceX, which has orbited the next-generation fleet of Canada’s largest satellite company, Telesat Corp., and the three Earth observation satellites of the Canadian Space Agency’s Radarsat Constellation Mission. SpaceX also is scheduled to launch a small satellite for NordSpace in mid-2026.
In addition, the Indian Space Research Association (ISRO) has conducted 10 launches for Canada, according to the ISRO website, including the Sapphire mission in 2013 — Canada’s first dedicated, operational military satellite. Sapphire tracks manmade objects in medium Earth orbit and contributes to the U.S. Space Surveillance Network. All told, Canada had 75 operational satellites as of April 8, 2026, according to the U.S. Space Force website space-track.org.
Canada entered the Space Age in September 1962 with the launch from California of the Alouette I satellite, the first spacecraft built by a country outside the U.S. or the Soviet Union. Designed to study the ionosphere for three years, Alouette remained operational for a decade before it was shut off in 1972. The satellite was launched before deorbiting protocols were adopted globally so it remains in orbit.