National Defence Committee on Oct. 29th, 2024

[The Chair, Liberal, John McKay]

Thank you, Mr. Sauvé.

You have a minute and a half, Ms. Mathyssen.

[Lindsay Mathyssen, NDP, London—Fanshawe, ON]

To continue to build off what Madame Lalonde was talking about in terms of the international bodies and the understanding of what space has been, there is a great concern in terms of the weaponization of space, absolutely.

I certainly am concerned about the commercialization of space, so as an academic, and connecting that research, can you talk about what the Canadian government needs to do through potentially the international bodies, whatever we set up, to protect the idea that space is peaceful but to allow room for the academic research side of things.

[Arad Gharagozli]

As I mentioned, like it or not, we will have some defence capabilities and operations happening in space, but the majority of that is on the commercial side. What happens is that a very small segment of that commercial side is dedicated to the academic sector.

Again, I will circle back to the fact that space is expensive. If we want to see innovation and if we want to see growth in Canada, we need to invest back into the academic sector as well to make sure they have enough funding and there is enough research going around that can propel the cutting-edge technologies we were talking about when it comes to quantum communication, synthetic aperture radar and communication systems, and things like that.

[Lindsay Mathyssen, NDP, London—Fanshawe, ON]

Do you think we do a good job balancing that?

[The Chair, Liberal, John McKay]

Thank you, Ms. Mathyssen.

Mr. Bezan, you have four minutes.

[James Bezan, Conservative, Selkirk—Interlake—Eastman, MB]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you to our witnesses.

To go back to the nanosatellites, you're miniaturizing everything, and definitely technology is advancing. What's the lifespan of a nanosatellite, knowing that you'll have a smaller battery and everything else that will limit life expectancy?

[Arad Gharagozli]

Most nanosatellites can survive the low-earth orbit, which is about 500 kilometres to 600 kilometres, for three to four years, but it's usually less than that. It depends on whether the spacecraft comes back to earth to de-orbit. If it stays up there, again, you're dealing with the very harsh environment of space, primarily the radiation environment, so two to three years is a fair assumption.

However, in terms of the approach that we are taking and that a lot of other new space companies are taking to this, the rate at which the technology is evolving here on earth doesn't really justify us launching a satellite that will stay up there for 20 years. We are still doing that, but again, even with your phone, when you compare that with your phone of two years ago, you can see it's much faster. You have better cameras and things like that.

You have the exact same thing in space. If you can reduce the cost of your spacecraft so that you can launch more frequently and have better capabilities more frequently.... Some companies have that approach.

[James Bezan, Conservative, Selkirk—Interlake—Eastman, MB]

[Technical difficulty—Editor] the BlackBerry's not going to work anymore?

[Arad Gharagozli]

They tried that. It didn't work.

[James Bezan, Conservative, Selkirk—Interlake—Eastman, MB]

Do they just stay up there as space junk, then, or do you actually have them burn up in the atmosphere?

[Arad Gharagozli]

We have a mandate to bring those back, or at least we have procedures and protocols in place to ensure that they will come back and not generate space junk. A lot of low-earth orbit spacecraft do come back just because of their relativity to earth. Being closer, the gravity force is stronger on them, so they do come back over time. Usually it's somewhere between five and 10 years. It could be a bit longer.

Some spacecraft have forced de-orbiting mechanisms in place so that you can bring them back immediately. A lot of newer missions, especially going out of the U.S., Canada and Europe, do have very robust plans in place to ensure that we don't create more space junk.

[James Bezan, Conservative, Selkirk—Interlake—Eastman, MB]

If you look at this in terms of what our adversaries would do, how would they make use of a nanosatellite against Canada?

[Arad Gharagozli]

I would say that it's a very similar situation. When it comes to nanosatellites, again, as the technology evolves, we can pack more technologies into smaller form factors. We can still detect a lot of these objects in low-earth orbit using Doppler radars or other types of SSAs that we have or that our allies have.

Again, the boundaries of space are really not there. You can really go over any country you want. You can pretty much observe whatever you want. It's just our responsibility to keep it clean and make sure we play safe.

[James Bezan, Conservative, Selkirk—Interlake—Eastman, MB]

Even with a nanosatellite being as small as it is, then, you can still pack on the optics you need in order to do satellite surveillance, reconnaissance and intelligence-gathering.

[Arad Gharagozli]

I would say so.

[James Bezan, Conservative, Selkirk—Interlake—Eastman, MB]

Okay.

Would you agree with that, Mr. Kolacz?

[Richard Kolacz]

There are physical limitations on the aperture side. It's physics. The optical resolution of the radar resolution you can get diminishes with size of the aperture that you have, so you certainly can't get submeter or multi-centimetre resolution. You can't pick up signals information. There's a limitation. Of course, one way is to simply have a lot of them. You can overwhelm defences, whatever those defence systems are, much like we see in the use of drones in Ukraine and Russia at the moment.

There is a physical limitation to the aperture size that you can put on a small platform. It has a limitation, but you can then use those for detecting 80% of what you want to detect and use the very large-aperture, larger satellites, such as RADARSAT, to detect much, much smaller devices.

[James Bezan, Conservative, Selkirk—Interlake—Eastman, MB]

Are we done?

[The Chair, Liberal, John McKay]

Yes.

I have one final question. How does my ship disappear from your system, Mr. Kolacz?

[Richard Kolacz]

Well, it won't. What you will do, first of all, is turn off your transponder, which sends a flag to us immediately that you're doing something suspicious. Now we can task a radar, optical or unclassified RF SIGINT satellite to pick up any of the transmissions and look for you via radar—night or day, through clouds—or optically.

You will never disappear.

[The Chair, Liberal, John McKay]

That's a shame. That's also interesting.

What if I'm a Russian submarine?

[Richard Kolacz]

If you go under the water, that's a different story.

[The Chair, Liberal, John McKay]

At some point, you would lose them, but all submarines have to come up for air at one point or another.

[Richard Kolacz]

No, the nuclear submarines don't have to come up for air, but there are other things to look for that go beyond this discussion.

[The Chair, Liberal, John McKay]

This is, in some respects, a foolproof system—at any point, any government can find any ship, in any place.