this post was submitted on 24 Jun 2025
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24
Rahul Goel wants to give Canada its Apollo moment | betakit.com (betakit.com)
submitted 2 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
21 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

"In August of this year, Rahul Goel will stand on the rocky cliffs of St. Lawrence, NL, watching a plume of fire rip across the sky.

If everything goes right, his company, NordSpace, will make history by orchestrating Canada’s first commercial rocket launch.

Canada was the fourth nation in the world to launch a satellite into space, helped pioneer aerospace engineering, and famously built the Canadarm. But for all its expertise, Canada has never launched a rocket from its own soil. Every satellite, every national security payload, every commercial launch is outsourced, mostly to the US."

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[–] [email protected] -3 points 1 day ago (12 children)

Yay another fucking private company that will lobby politicians and eventually push its owner to a Musk level position and can abuse government grants and tax breaks instead of investing in Canadian public services.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago (2 children)

You are really good at taking the good and the bad, but throwing away the good so you only have the bad.

These guys have given us no reason to believe that they will be anything like Musk. There are hundreds and thousands of private companies that operate within the law and/or ethically in general. Other people have already given you many reasons why being able to do our own domestic (albeit private) rocket launches is extremely beneficial. Such as doing our own starlink instead of using Musks'.

I'm pretty anti-capitalist and a Musk-hater as they come too, but I feel you are just speaking from a place of anger, not reason. Even if it were the government doing this, space infrastructure development is just as important for Canadian citizens as more dental coverage and overhauling public transit.

[–] [email protected] -5 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

And you have no foresight.

You don’t want Starlink but want to replace it with another private company instead of it being government funded and controlled….

These private companies are literally blasting countless environmental toxins with each failed rocket. That kind of environmental impact should be government regulated and not left to some tech bro to experiment with.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 day ago

I agree that having the government do it would be ideal, though a government could fumble it just as bad or worse than any private company. I'll take a flawed domestic starlink/rocket launches over none at all. Especially if the alternative means relying on America/Musk even more.

I don't know about the toxins from launches, but I think it must be a drop in the bucket compared to air travel, cars, and dirty electricty generation. If that is what it takes to get us space infrastructure, I'd call that the cost of doing business. I also have faith that there can be reasonable way to mitigate the damage such as choice of where they are launched and further developing the technology. Much of the tech has gone largely unchanged from the moon landing era, afaik.

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