Ottawa's green light for the $500-million, next-generation Radarsat Constellation project is a boon for MacDonald Dettwiler and Associates Ltd.
Cash for the mission, $397-million of it in new money for the underfunded Canadian Space Agency, was announced in this month's federal budget. The deal to start major work on the project, expected to launch in 2014, will likely come soon as the space agency details the precise plans.
MDA, based in Richmond, B.C., built the earlier Radarsat-1 and Radarsat-2 satellites and conducted the primary preparatory work for Constellation (a $40-million project that included subcontractors Magellan Aerospace Corp.'s Bristol Aerospace Ltd. division and Com Dev International Ltd.).
Constellation will involve at least three small satellites orbiting 600 kilometres above the Earth, providing a detailed daily picture of all of Canada, as well as most of the planet. For MDA, the project is set to become another win for its once-struggling space division. In 2008, MDA tried to sell the division for $1.3-billion to a U.S. company, but the move was blocked by the federal government on national security grounds.
The space division now accounts for about 40 per cent of MDA's annual $1-billion in revenue; the rest comes from its software side, which focuses on the real-estate industry. The company's year-end results will be released Thursday.
In the past three months, the space division has won contracts worth more than $500-million for satellite deals with Russia and Ukraine. Now MDA is poised to line up more work for its engineers with the Constellation project. "We're ready to start building," chief executive officer Daniel Friedmann told investors and analysts last October.
Most of the Constellation work will take place from 2012 to 2014, after MDA's deals with Russia and Ukraine wind down, so the timing would be perfect for the company, said analyst Steven Li of Raymond James.
"You don't get to a point where there's a big gap to fill," he said.
As with earlier satellite systems Radarsat-1 and Radarsat-2, a fundamental role of Constellation will be to assert Canadian sovereignty from space. The space agency, on its website, said Canadian security of the Arctic will be "dramatically enhanced" by Constellation, which will provide four satellite passes a day over the far North and several daily passes over the Northwest Passage.
Constellation's low-orbit satellites will also focus on disaster management and environmental tracking, such as ice monitoring and oil-spill detection.
They will monitor oceans as far as 1,200 nautical miles (2,200 kilometres) from Canadian shores (and be able to spot 25-metre-long vessels in four-metre-high waves) and be able to relay information in 15 minutes to Canadian ground-based stations connected with the military.
Constellation will be owned by the federal government, as is Radarsat-1. Radarsat-2 is owned by MDA, which is why Ottawa blocked the company's plan to sell its space division to Minnesota-based Alliant Techsystems Inc.