Nano2Sol by Marc Boucher

It’s been almost two months since Alliant Techsystems (ATK) announced they would acquire MacDonald Dettwiler and Associates (MDA) space division. In that span there’s been a lot of discussion in Ottawa about the ramifications of the deal and in particular the access to data from Radarsat2 which was just launched this past December 14th.

There’s even been talk of having the federal government not approving the deal and just yesterday the NDP, one of the opposition parties in parliament, threatened to seek legal action to stop the deal.

Industry Minister Jim Prentice extended the deadline to give the government more time to discuss the issue and hear from all sides. But when that extension expires April 21, Ottawa will allow the sale to go through. There’s no precedent for Ottawa to block the sale of a public corporation to another corporation. And the legal recourse is not strong either. And while the deal should be allowed to proceed, I think it should be modified so that Radarsat2 is not included in the sale to ATK and that the Canadian government should take control of Radarsat2 and pay MDA its portion of the costs it incurred to build it.

After taking control of Radarsat2, the government should issue a request for proposals for a Canadian company to run its operations. After all, Canadian taxpayers paid over $400 million to have Radarsat2 built while MDA’s investment was $80 million U.S.. And while MDA president Daniel Friedman told the House of Commons industry committee that Ottawa will have access to the data as stipulated in its contract, once the license is handed over to ATK the U.S. government could invoke national security at any time as a reason not to provide Canada with the data or gain access to data from the satellite that it would not have had access to if it was still Canadian controlled.

Radarsat2 is a significant national security space asset and as such it is in Canada’s interest to protect it and the investment the Canadian taxpayers made. No other nation would allow such an asset to be turned over to a foreign power, even one who is your best friend and neighbor.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 7th, 2008 at 4:49 pm and is filed under Canada in Space. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.