Focused Today on the Boring Business of Making a Living

With all the interesting space focused stories coming out of NASA, the CSA and the private sector over the last little while (including the recent release of the Augustine Committee Summary Report with it's description of the US human spaceflight program as being on "an unsustainable trajectory," the Wednesday announcement of a signed agreement between NASA Administrator Charles Bolden and CSA President Steve Maclean providing for a framework for cooperative civil space activities which formalizes the exiting "ad-hoc" mechanisms between the organizations and Guy Laliberte's upcoming trip to the International Space Station) its useful to sit back and note that most of the people who are engaged in space focused activities are doing it, at least in part, to make a living.



This includes the Augustine Committee, the NASA administrator, the CSA president and most of the other people commented upon or noted in this blog. Of course these people probably like their jobs and perhaps perceive of their positions as being somewhat of a higher calling than most of the rest of the potential jobs available but they certainly still need to put food on the table and keep a roof over their head.

With that in mind, here are a couple of recent reports illustrating the success that Canadian space focused firms have been having lately as they struggle to be fiscally responsible and provide a sustainable return on investment for their stakeholders:

• Canadian space subsystem manufacturer COM DEV just announced "Q3 Revenue Soars 19% to 61.5M. Profits up almost 1M" according to this Canadian Press article dated September 3rd.
• The space systems subsidiary of McDonald Dettwiler and Associates (MDA) has had a run of good luck over the last 18 months since the Canadian government torpedoed a planned sale to Alliant Techsystems Inc. (ATK). Successes include recently announced contracts with Boeing to refurbish communications systems on the ISS, the Canadian government to design the successors to the Radarsat-2, and with  EADS Astrium for the Alphasat I-XL mission. According to this article in Satellite PR News, MDA has nearly doubled it's earnings over last years figures.
  
• Canadian satellite provider Telesat "reports $187 million profit in second quarter" according to an article published in Network World Industry Watch. This contrasts well when compared with last years $822 million loss during the same period.
  

These revenue increases seem to be a general trend across the industry and perhaps bode well for those of us who are merely looking to make a decent living, much like most of the people profiled in this blog.