Part 9 of The Empire Strikes Out - Canada's Defence & The Commonwealth Space Program

RADARSAT & the Consequences for Canada's Aircraft Industry

By Robert Godwin

The general confusion during the late 1950s about the merits of missile defence led to several questionable strategic decisions made by the Governments of Canada and the United Kingdom. 

The possibility of a third contestant in the Space Race, in the form of a Commonwealth space program, hinged on the sharing of technology and financing amongst the various invested nations, but more significantly on the political choices made regarding the future defensive postures of Canada, the United States and the United Kingdom.

One of the options being considered for the bus for Canada's proposed radar satellite was the British heavy geostationary platform L-Sat. SPAR Aerospace in Toronto, where Phil Lapp had been a director, had an agreement with British Aerospace to solicit orders for L-Sat in Canada.

Radarsat had originally been called Sursat (Surveillance Satellite) but the name had been changed out of concerns that it might upset the United States.[1]

The primary goal of the proposed satellite was to eliminate the need for thousands of costly aircraft flights required to monitor traffic through Canadian Arctic waters.
Clearly both the intent and the execution were primarily motivated by military concerns.

But both Lapp and Geoffrey Pardoe's companies could see benefits to sharing the costs and rewards with Britain since the satellite's orbit would cover vast swathes of territory also of interest to British oil and gas companies.

After considerable effort and some salesmanship it looked like Britain would shoulder several hundred million dollars of the cost but would also reap the benefits to the tune of a $197M contract and at least a thousand jobs. Data processing, sales and other tracking responsibilities would also provide rewards. Other contestants in the field to supply the bus were Rockwell, RCA, Lockheed, General Electronics and Matra.

In April 1988 Britain's Thatcher government officially pulled out from Radarsat while in the midst of a spat with the rest of Europe regarding future space expenditures. Instead Britain would consider funding the proposed International Space Station project.[2]....

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Robert Godwin.

Robert Godwin is the owner and founder of Apogee Space Books. He is also the Space Curator at the Canadian Air & Space Museum. 

He has written or edited over 100 books including the award winning series "The NASA Mission Reports" and appeared on dozens of radio and television programs in Canada, the USA and England as an expert not only on space exploration but also on music. 

His books have been discussed on CNN, the CBC, the BBC and CBS 60 Minutes. He produced the first ever virtual reality panoramas of the Apollo lunar surface photography and the first multi-camera angle movie of the Apollo 11 moonwalk. His latest book was written with the late Frederick I Ordway III and is called "2001 The Heritage and Legacy of the Space Odyssey" about the history of spaceflight at the movies.

Footnotes

1. Radarsat Study 1982 GTS Ltd
2. Montreal Gazette May 10 1988

Last Week: "The Diefenbaker Government Falls," in part eight of "The Empire Strikes Out - Canada's Defence & The Commonwealth Space Program."

To Start at the Beginning: Check out "The Beginning; How to Build a Space Program & the Canadian Astronautical Society," the first chapter of "The Empire Strikes Out - Canada's Defence & The Commonwealth Space Program."