Maritime Launch plans new satellite processing centre
CANSO — As plans “firm up” to host two rocket launches this summer, Maritime Launch Systems (MLS) has qualified for up to $7.5 million from the province to help it build a satellite control centre in this seaside community, says company founder and CEO Steve Matier.
The funding from the Capital Investment Tax Credit (CITC) program will reimburse MLS for 25 per cent of approximately $30 million in “infrastructure costs” on the facility, where satellites will be “tested, checked out and qualified” before they’re blasted into orbit, he told The Journal in an email last week.
“When satellites come into the launch site, some are ready to go straight into the payload bay on the rocket inside the spaceport and may bypass this facility,” he said. “[But] most missions will have some satellites that will need the satellite processing facility [to] provide the test, checkout and qualification services.”
The funding follows a similar formula to MLS’s successful CITC application last year for $13.2 million in reimbursements for the estimated $53-million cost of building a rocket assembly hanger. Since then, the company has paused plans to send its missiles into space and, instead, adopted an airport model of operations.
“We can’t get the rockets out of Ukraine,” Matier explained to The Journal in May, citing supply problems caused by the war with Russia. “Now... launch vehicle developers [will] build their own and work with their own satellite clients. We [will] allow them to launch by leasing to them a subset of our facilities to which we provide services, such as control centre, payload processing, facility gases, air-space coordination [and] Nav Canada Transport.”
The new satellite processing facility “planned for outside the spaceport boundary” suits that model and will employ “between 10 and 15 engineers and technicians full time,” he said. As for the hanger, he noted, “The redesign is underway since we transitioned to the lease model. We expect to begin phased work again in the near future.”
Last July, MLS hosted a university student demonstration flight from its pad on the 335-acre site it leases from provincial government. Later that year, Matier told The Journal that plans were on track to follow up with two more suborbital launches for new commercial clients this summer and, even a “small orbital launch” by the end of 2024. Last week, he said: “The launch plans are being finalized and we’ll share [the dates] when [they] firm up.”
MLS – which is vying to become Canada’s first commercial spaceport – has faced criticism from some Canso-area residents, who have both worried about the environmental effects of a functioning launch centre in their community and expressed skepticism about the credibility of some of the company’s “forward-looking” statements since winning provincial environmental assessment approval in 2019.
“There is no rocket [and] there is no revenue,” Marie Lumsden, a local opponent told The Journal in an email last October. “[That’s because] they are in big financial trouble... Take a look at their SEDAR reports [annual filings to Canadian securities regulators].”
According to MLS’s management discussion and analysis (MD&A) for the nine months ending September 30, 2023, “net and comprehensive losses for the year ended Dec. 31, 2022, were $7,450,698 ($0.02 per share), compared with $4,317,406 ($0.06 per share) for the year ended Dec. 31, 2021, and $563,790 ($0.01 per share) for the year ended Dec. 31, 2020.”
In May, Matier told The Journal that his investors were “being wonderfully patient,” but conceded: “At the end of the day they want [a return].”
He added: “One thing that’s very attractive to them – and to the investors that we are speaking to now – is the province’s reimbursement program. It’s actually a terrible name for the thing. It’s not tax credits based on revenue and future revenue. It’s actually [about] submitting the invoices for the work that we’ve completed and [being] reimbursed for up to 25 per cent of the infrastructure costs on an annual basis... Investors really like that idea.”
Last week, an MLS press release stated: “Maritime Launch Services is committed to delivering excellence and enabling the success of its clients in the commercial space sector. This new [CITC] approval is another significant milestone for Maritime Launch and signifies Nova Scotia's continued role as a key player in the growth of Canada’s space economy.”
According to the province’s Finance and Treasury Board’s website, the CITC is a “refundable corporate tax credit that can be claimed for capital costs directly related to acquiring qualified property for use in Nova Scotia as part of an approved project. With certain exceptions, [it] is available to eligible corporations in the manufacturing, processing, fishing, farming, logging, storing grain, and harvesting peat sectors.”
Alec Bruce, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter, Guysborough Journal
