That's a great question, Mr. Chair.
I would characterize them as not necessarily barriers, but things that we're working on and things that we need to make sure that we better understand.
Space domain awareness would be a classic example. It's understanding what's going on in orbit and understanding what our adversaries and other companies are up to.
The domain is getting increasingly congested. There are far more actors in space than there used to be. It's not just nation-states that have the ability to do this now, but a significant number of commercial actors are out there. There's a lot of activity. It's about understanding what's going on and being able to prevent collisions or potential impacts out there. Space domain awareness is probably one of the larger challenges we're dealing with at the moment.
We maintain this awareness through a number of fronts. We have Canada's satellite, Sapphire, which contributes to the space surveillance network in the U.S. Sapphire contributes to the larger database, and then we get all sorts of great information in terms of global awareness of what's going on.
We're also part of an organization called joint commercial operations, which is almost like crowdfunding space domain awareness. It leverages a number of satellite observation stations on the globe, as well as radars, whether they be from academia, commercial companies or industry. All of those companies subscribe to the central database. They put all of their information in there—it's unclassified—and basically we collate all of that as one of the partnering nations. We're able to use that information to better understand what's going on in the domain as well.
It is a challenge, and certainly I don't think we'll ever say that we have too much ability to understand what's going on in the domain. From a Canadian perspective, it's these international efforts and collaboration that allow us to maintain a shared awareness.