Industry committee  Thank you very much. We welcome the opportunity to speak to you today at this committee. I'm going to speak for 60 seconds because we have a presentation that I think you'll be very interested in. Canada has had a banner year this year. Bob Thirsk started his mission earlier i

Industry committee  One of the driving features of everything we do at the Canadian Space Agency is doing is to try to align it with the science and technology strategy. If you look at all the exploration work we're involved in with respect to robotics, we are the ones who are putting the station

Industry committee  The thing that needs to be worked on, just to be frank, is that the CSA has about one-third of the total budget that's spent on space in Canada. DND has almost one-third, and the other third is split between Environment Canada, NRCan, Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, and the Dep

Industry committee  Let me show you where exploration is; I think that's an important point to get across, especially to this committee. Five countries are partners in the international space station. There are 14, maybe 15, countries that have actually produced a major piece that has gone up and b

Industry committee  Let me answer this question. What you say about exploration is interesting. We could talk about this the whole day long. There are huge technical challenges. Inviting a country like China also raises significant challenges, one of them being to convince older world governments to

Industry committee  More like $35 million.

Industry committee  Let me take 60 seconds to talk about Guy Laliberté. It was a difficult decision for me. Were we going to support such a mission, considering we were using taxpayers' monies, or should we step back and let him do his own show? I decided we were going to support him but without spe

Industry committee  I think I'll let Koichi start and I'll comment.

Industry committee  It was the same with the White House commission. The first series of testimonies were related to the technology and the vision and the direction that we should perhaps take. Three months later I was called back to testify again, and the entire day was spent on how to involve Chin

Industry committee  What I said earlier was that in the face of government priorities, space should be an essential element of government infrastructure. This is the one sentence that is very important to get everybody to remember. If I take each government department, say Agriculture and Agri-Foo

Industry committee  We have a satellite up there right now that has the best optical instrument in the world. It is making those measurements, but we need to make it operational and put more of them up there. I can talk about just this for an hour.

Industry committee  This is a very difficult question to answer in a sound bite. It really requires a long discussion. I was up north just this summer, in the far north. We're planning to put up a ground station quite far up north, and I was up there for the first time. I think the conditions spea

Industry committee  When I came on board, I was mandated to come up with a plan with respect to where this country should go with respect to space. We are in a tough fiscal environment right now. In Budget 2009 we received $110 million. The purpose of that money is to bridge the gap between the ex

Industry committee  This is a difficult question to answer. Let me show you where the data are on the moon right now. From the Canadian perspective, the answer is simple. We don't have such a large lunar community; we do have a large academic Martian community. From a Canadian perspective, my deci

Industry committee  Bob, I'll let you go, but I'll start. The stomach shuts down when you first get to orbit. All your systems shut down a little bit, so the HCl that's secreting out of the inner lining of your stomach to digest your food doesn't quite work the way it did before you left. Because