National Defence Committee on Oct. 29th, 2024

[Arad Gharagozli]

Again, I'm speaking for a company the size of Galaxia. We were established about five years ago.

It's not so much that it's frustrating. It's just that methods of procurement are fairly outdated. Look at similar types of procurement processes down in the United States. They have a very specific process in place to deal with new space companies outside of normal procurement processes.

In that sense, I think we need to modernize those processes to make sure we can respond to projects where it's not necessarily taking two years just to go through a contracting phase. For example, an end-to-end project of three years from awarding until deployment to space could be faster.

[Don Stewart, Conservative, Toronto—St. Paul's, ON]

Do you think that's something that's specific to software, or space assets or...? I'm just thinking that in your industry, the replacement cycle, the evolution of the products must be so fast—we heard this on another committee earlier—that by the time you get something out the door, it may be redundant or need to be upgraded, etc.

Is that, for you, as a business...? It kind of runs down into wasted time and energy if things can be sped up from a two-year process to a year and a half, even by that much.

[Arad Gharagozli]

Again, for a company our size, time is of the essence. It's very difficult for a new space company to last about a year or a year and a half, to go through a contracting phase and to keep its talents and skills in place.

[Don Stewart, Conservative, Toronto—St. Paul's, ON]

What kind of intelligence is it that you gather with your software in nanosatellites?

[Arad Gharagozli]

We manufacture spacecrafts with software capabilities. Our spacecrafts are capable of autonomously scanning for any sort of anomaly.

As I mentioned, we have some applications in critical infrastructure, gas line monitoring and things like that. However, in defence, we have many maritime, land-based and air-based systems.

[Don Stewart, Conservative, Toronto—St. Paul's, ON]

Specifically in a military application, can you give us an example?

[Arad Gharagozli]

For instance, we can look over a vast area of land and look for any sort of construction that is happening over a continent.

[Don Stewart, Conservative, Toronto—St. Paul's, ON]

Do you contract your services out to foreign nations?

[Arad Gharagozli]

Not now; not yet.

[Don Stewart, Conservative, Toronto—St. Paul's, ON]

Okay.

What actually classifies as a nanosatellite? What size of vehicle are we talking about?

[Arad Gharagozli]

It's the standard of spacecrafts that are usually under 25 kilograms. It can go anywhere from one kilo to 25 kilos. It's just the size and weight of them that classifies them as nanosatellites.

[Don Stewart, Conservative, Toronto—St. Paul's, ON]

Do they launch on missions with other payload?

[Arad Gharagozli]

Usually, yes. Because of their size, they are usually launched as a secondary payload on, let's say, the Falcon 9 mission. It's called a “rideshare mission”, so they go up as a rideshare mission.

[Don Stewart, Conservative, Toronto—St. Paul's, ON]

Is that all being launched from the United States at the moment?

[Arad Gharagozli]

There are several launch vehicles that do that. A lot of our launches happen through SpaceX.

[Don Stewart, Conservative, Toronto—St. Paul's, ON]

We talked earlier about having guardrails on our applications and about how we're thinking about military and civilian applications for space assets.

I wanted to ask you this. If our adversaries, like Russia and China, have no guardrails in the way we would have guardrails, do you think it makes sense for us to restrict our applications, to put us at a disadvantage versus our adversaries?

[Arad Gharagozli]

That's a tough question.

We see that with their launch vehicle capabilities as well, the type of fuel that is being used, the type of re-orbiting methods and protocols that are used. For example, for China, I would say that there is less oversight on that. It really hinders the progress once you have these kinds of guardrails in place. Yes, it does slow down the progress.

[Don Stewart, Conservative, Toronto—St. Paul's, ON]

Do they have similar assets in space to what your company is producing?

[Arad Gharagozli]

I'm not aware of anything specific.

[Don Stewart, Conservative, Toronto—St. Paul's, ON]

Is your company producing something truly unique?

[Arad Gharagozli]

No. I'm just not personally aware of that system existing.

[Don Stewart, Conservative, Toronto—St. Paul's, ON]

Okay.

Do you think that, in space, the biggest risk we have right now is space to ground, ground to space, or space to space, in terms of the risks that we have to our military or civilian spacecrafts?

[Arad Gharagozli]

Is that on the offensive side or in terms of the passive risk?

[Don Stewart, Conservative, Toronto—St. Paul's, ON]

That's on the offensive side.

[Arad Gharagozli]

Well, on the offensive side, I would say probably ground to space and space to space are the largest.