On the ground in Etobicoke, the scene is a 7,500-square-foot manufacturing facility with a nine-month-old company inside it, and the claim printed on the door is a big one: a Canadian-built rocket in orbit by 2032, and launch business eventually taken from Elon Musk’s SpaceX. Canada Rocket Company, which opened its doors in January, has raised $22.5 million, broken ground on a rocket-engine test site of 12,000 square feet in London, Ontario, and is hunting for a factory floor of 500,000 square feet where construction could start next year. The chief executive, Hugh Kolias, is a Calgary-born Queen’s University mechanical engineering graduate who spent years in finance and sold a property management software company in 2022; his co-founder, David Tenny, put in about a decade at SpaceX itself.
The machine on paper is a medium-lift vehicle burning methane and liquid oxygen, the methalox combination, meant to carry payloads of 12,500 kilograms into sun synchronous orbit, since upsized to 12 tonnes, 12,600 kilograms in the same report, a vehicle the company calls three times larger than any yet proposed in Canada. The opening is real: SpaceX’s Falcon 9 has long carried the medium-lift market, and the company has stopped taking its bookings past 2028 as it pivots to Starship. Kolias wants the five-to-ten-year title of “medium-lift provider of choice,” The money began with a $6.2 million seed round and now leans Canadian, with the Business Development Bank of Canada plus Ripple Ventures and Panache Ventures aboard. “There’s been a ton of investor interest at home and abroad specifically because of the global shortage. Everyone sees it coming,” Kolias told the Financial Post, describing the moment as a “space super cycle” in his words.
Follow the public money and the story changes pitch. The company has collected $8.3 million through the Department of National Defence’s Launch the North competition, per the Toronto Star, about $14 million more from private investors, and matching $8.3 million grants went to peers NordSpace and Reaction Dynamics under what the Post describes as a $105 million multi-year sovereign launch program, while TeslaNorth cites a $182.6 million federal commitment to sovereign launch capability. Kolias is blunt about the dependency: without that federal commitment, “there would be no reason for launches to happen in Canada.” The context stings: no Canadian rocket has ever reached orbit from the country’s own soil, and this company has yet to fly anything.
What Kolias asks for next is not grants but customers. “The private market is looking to the government for the demand signal and the appetite for something this ambitious to be built. Investors are also looking for public capital to de-risk a binary outcome: either you get to orbit or you don’t,” he said. “If you look at what NASA did with SpaceX, they ultimately provided them with enough contracts upfront to help fund their development,” The team is growing the same way, from two people in January to 25 by July, including nine Canadians repatriated from SpaceX, Blue Origin and Europe’s ArianeGroup, with Ottawa clearing hiring hurdles along the way. On supply chains, he wants homegrown firms critical to national security moved to the front of Canadian manufacturers’ queues, the way a U.S. Defence Production Act program would: “That would be a big unblock, especially as we go down the later stages,” he said.
The reality check is sitting in the history books. SpaceX, founded in 2002, failed its first three Falcon 1 launches before reaching orbit on the fourth try in September 2008, close to out of cash, with roughly $100 million of Musk’s own money burned and NASA’s $278 million Commercial Orbital Transportation Services agreement, later $396 million, plus a $1.6 billion space station cargo contract in December 2008, keeping the lights on; the Dragon capsule reached the station in 2012, a booster landed in 2015, astronauts flew in 2020, and the company is now catching Starship upper stages. Kolias’s own arithmetic concedes the scale: at least US$500 million, 300 to 500 engineers and technicians, eight to ten years. Politics, meanwhile, are pushing his way, with Prime Minister Mark Carney saying Canada will move away from Starlink.
By nightfall the bet comes down to sizing. “We’re looking at the global gap (whereas) our peers are more focused on sovereignty,” he said. “We’re laser focused on sizing our vehicle to capture that global market, instead of thinking small and trying to match it to where Canada is.” Kolias said, drawing the line against rivals focused on sovereignty, and his floor for relevance is high: “Anything below 6,000 to 7,000 kilograms to orbit … isn’t large enough to justify an investment or to address the sovereign part of the equation. If you’re investing $500 million over a 10-year-timeframe, the return on investment or the end revenues and market have to be massive,” he said. In Etobicoke the question is not ambition but fire: engines on a London, Ontario test stand, a factory found, and a country that has never watched its own rocket climb deciding whether to buy the tickets.
Sources
- Canadian Startup With $22.5M and No Launches Wants to Take On SpaceX | TeslaNorth.com
- Toronto space-tech startup making rockets to rival SpaceX's
