Garry Lindberg on Canadian interest in outer space

Uploaded on November 12, 2021

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Garry Lindberg on Canadian interest in outer space

2021-11-12 - Garry Lindberg, Former Project Manager of Canadarm Program, Former CSA Vice-President of Research and Applications discusses Canada’s interest in space. (Credit: Canadian Space Agency)

Garry Lindberg: Well I think Canada has always been interested in space. I think our geography means we have to be interested in space. We have the North, and we have the aurora borealis and its influence on our communications.

We have the need to communicate across Canada. So I think it was natural for us always to be interested – looking at space. And so we have so many space firsts for such a small country.

I wasn’t involved with the Alouette ISIS program or the telecommunications programs, but they made absolute sense. And I think we’ve been clever as well in using space, not just as something we need to understand but also just something we can exploit.

So I think we’ve developed a small but very capable industry. We’ve been reasonably selective about the niches we tackle. So we haven’t tried to be everything to everybody but where we have been active, we’ve been pretty excellent.

And that in turn has led us to having good industrial capability and has led to both spin-offs and export sales.

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