Commercial Satellites
So, now another metric on this that we are doing well, in that we are a country that drives innovation with our programmatic spending, is the fact that on four out of five commercial satellites in the world, there are Canadian components. And that is probably one of the best metrics that we can give about our success and about how we are driving innovation.
The International Space Station
Now speaking of importance, let's look at ISS, the International Space Station. You know this is - perhaps the most important aspect of the ISS is the fact that 18 countries can work together on something that is so amazing. It's the most complex international project that has ever been conceived of and executed and it involved Canada, Russia, US and Japan and several countries from the European Space Agency.
So suddenly and perhaps unexpectedly Canada became a space-faring nation. Yet we are very different from the two rivals that were involved in space. We lacked the resources. We lacked the population and of course we lacked that air experience or at least it appeared we lacked the experience. And to a large extent the Soviet Union and the United States went to space because they could. But in our case, we went to space because we had to. And the reason for that is simple. Canada is the second-largest country in the world. We have the largest continuous coastline in the world. We are a country that's bounded by coast to coast to coast. It was very important to get vehicles into orbit so that we could monitor our vast territory. And in 1962 Canada was largely undeveloped. I mean it's still in a way true today. Places were hard to reach. It's sparsely populated. You know above 70 degrees we only have 5,000 people. And our climate is as challenging then - was as challenging then as it is today. So it's impossible to observe our territory and communicate effectively at ground level. We had to go into space and this puts our safety and security at risk. It makes it difficult to predict the weather or to monitor the movement of ships in our icy waters, those kinds of things that we can do today.
At the recent American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) meeting held in Vancouver, Canadian Space Agency (CSA) President Steve MacLean gave a talk titled International S&T (Science and Technology) Collaboration. MacLean did a good job of recounting Canada's entry into space and the many accomplishments Canada has. He also made a few pointed remarks. In this multi-part article we publish the transcript of MacLean's speech for everyone to read. But first a little background.