Brigadier-General Christopher Horner was the opening keynote speaker at the Canadian Space Launch Conference.
Horner emphasized the critical importance of Canada developing a sovereign and resilient space capability including launch, and that the space domain has become a part of Canada’s critical national infrastructure.
While advocating for the peaceful and responsible use of space, he highlighted the growing threat from adversaries placing weapons and threats in space, necessitating a shift towards space control capabilities.
Horner then outlined a national space value chain with eight key stages, noting Canada’s current deficiency in launch. He stressed that developing this capability is crucial for national security, sovereignty, and economic prosperity, positioning Canada to “leapfrog” some allies and unlock a significant future space economy.
He also acknowledged that their are challenges, including regulatory frameworks and procurement reform.
Watch Brigadier-General Horner’s keynote
Transcript of Brigadier-General Christopher Horner keynote
General Horner – What an epic venue, right to be able to be here and see the birthplace of aviation, where we talk about how we move forward as a country into space, and we’ve gone to space, and we’ve been in space, but we’re going to go back, and I think we’re going to go back with a vengeance. Am I allowed to say vengeance? Probably not. So.
Thanks, folks. Thanks for being here. Thanks for being part of this, and thanks to Rahul and the team for putting this on. It is an incredibly important event at an incredibly important time for Canada. And as you know, we had an election last night. I don’t know if anybody was tracking that part, and because it was an election period, had to be very careful about being able to be out in public as an official from the Government of Canada and what I was allowed to say. And they they asked that my speech be prepped in advance and approved. And so I didn’t write one. Instead, I scribbled on my notes here. So I got my policy advisor to try to read it. He said he couldn’t. So I took that as we’re good and we’re moving on.
So one of the reasons Rahul asked me to be here is based on, I think, a story I told at space bound last summer. I loved rockets as a kid. And if you’ve heard this story, bear with me. It’s only a couple minutes. And I loved rockets because of their power and what they meant and what they represented. And as a 12 year old, I was dabbling in what I would call rock tree, and in doing that, I accidentally lit my neighbour’s house on fire, and I’ll explain why. It’s because I, again, as a 12 year old, was given model rockets with not a lot of parental supervision, which is, I love my parents, and I’m so glad they gave me that type of oversight. And I found my dad’s collection of fireworks, and I thought, fireworks are cool. Rockets Are Cool. I bet if you haul it out the inside of all of these fireworks and put them in a rocket and launched it, you could produce a pretty high altitude show. And so I did that, and it went about 15, 20, feet in the air. I didn’t know a lot about physics or math at that point, and it’s sort of lobbed gently and nicely fireball over the fence onto my neighbor’s back porch and yard and exploded in an spectacular display of amazement as I ducked for cover and watched the back of the house catch fire, and the police came and explained to me that that’s not really what we do with rockets. And so being in, you know, an interested kid in rockets, I was told I wouldn’t do that anymore, and instead, I found the next thing I did was find a pretty long black piece of plumbing pipe, and decided if you built a rocket inside of that, and then you carried it to the park and you shot it from your shoulder again as a 12 year old, that also gets people’s attention.
So it’s no wonder I didn’t become a rocket scientist, and instead I joined the military and blew things up for a living. But here we are, and so why? Why am I here? And why did Doral ask me to talk? Is probably not about arson and how to burn your neighbour’s house down, but as we look to the future from a space perspective and what it means to be a sovereign nation, there’s two things I want to talk about.
First thing is the mission focus areas for defence in space, and then the space life cycle or value chain that I think was talked about, and why it’s important to me as a practitioner of warfare, and how we think through that from an economics perspective in Canada. So first, let’s talk about mission focus areas. Traditionally, I would expect that you think that I do the detection of threats to Canada be that maritime approaches, aerospace approaches, and space and the space domain, which is true, we do that and then deter our adversaries from conducting things that would not align with our beliefs, not align with the way we want to conduct ourselves as a nation, maybe put threats on our sovereignty, and then, if necessary, and only if necessary, defend against those threats that are coming at us.
And it’s important to know that as I talk through this again, guy in a uniform space war fighter doesn’t really want war in space, wants to avoid that, wants to stop at the detect and deter phase. So I don’t want you to think that I’m here, you know, absolutely waving the flag and saying that the Outer Space Treaty of 1967 isn’t important. It’s incredibly important. And what we want to do is preclude those kind of activities in space. But, frankly, I can’t say we’ve done a great job at that. There are adversaries around the world who continue to put weapons in space, or threats to space, which threaten the critical infrastructure of this nation, and as that critical infrastructure is threatened, and Canadians rely upon space like they never have before, with a sense of, I think, naivety, if I can go down that road that we don’t truly understand, how much our economy, our sovereignty, our logistics, supply chains, our banking cores, how we function as a society, what you download or stream on Netflix, all of those things are tied through the space domain. So everything in the space domain, in my opinion, becomes critical national infrastructure, and it supports other elements of critical national infrastructure.
So when we talk about the defending phase, it’s really important for me that you know our defense policy from 19 or, sorry, from 2017, Strong, Secure and Engaged gave us an ability to do, defend and protect and gave us that ability to look after the critical infrastructure of Canada, and we do that four ways. One is from space domain awareness, and that is really understanding what is going on in space. It is beyond situational awareness. It’s beyond that.
So some people will talk about SSA, or space situational awareness. It’s important. But Domain Awareness also incorporates elements of intelligence and ability to act and operate in the domain to control and run away bravely, if necessary, to protect assets or do other types of operations, to allow us to maintain sort of a coherence as to what’s going on in space. We do a lot of space based intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance, and that’s a lot of Earth observation by another name, and that is allowing us to understand what threats are out there terrestrially and how we monitor that from space.
We have a lot of Satcom as a missionary. We have a long history in this country of being satellite communications capable and using that to our advantage, to project power forward, to enable our joint force, but also having to protect the joint force, or by giving them command and control from a distance. And the last thing is space control, and this is a pretty new mission area, but space control is fundamentally based around the ability to operate, dominate and control the domain. Now sounds scary. Sounds like crazy person on stage wants to military space. Got it. We do domain control in the maritime domain. We do it in the aerospace domain, when we do it in the land domain. And we’re just starting to have these conversations now around Hey, our adversaries are doing some pretty squirrely things on orbit, and we should have the capabilities and ability, capabilities, sorry, and ability to take action, offensive or defensive to do that. And we’re going to need to shape some language as we provide advice to government over the next little while about what does that mean from a Canadian perspective. No, that doesn’t mean blowing things up in space.
We enjoy the responsible use of space, but we want to be able to deter an adversary from subjugating us, from economic distort, extortion, from threats to our sovereignty. We need to do that by gaining some control of the domain. And so let me transition from less scary, or sorry, more scary to less scary. Space control requires a couple things, but one of the things that’s important and why you’re here, is resilience, and what launch gives you as a nation is resilience. So this isn’t about putting weapons in space. It’s to be able to put something back into space if an adversary takes it out of play. It’s an ability to tactically deploy a space capability to enable the joint force for a specific period in time and space, and then de orbit that capability so we’re not creating additional space debris. It’s an ability to do things like in orbit, servicing and maintenance or rendezvous proximity operations. It depends on what parlance you want to use, so that when we have satellites that are no longer required, we can de orbit them properly, or we can maintain and extend the life of capabilities that are on orbit. But to do that, you have to understand the value chain as a nation. And to do that, you have to understand how resilience plays into or, sorry, how launch plays into that resilience piece.
And so when I think of the value chain for the space economy for this country, there’s probably different ways to look at it, but for me, there’s eight pieces of it, and we’re good at lots of them, but not all of them, right? So it starts with the conceive phase, where we conceive of the things that we will need as a country. And I’m surrounded here by incredibly bright humans who are conceiving and designing incredible things. And I look around the room, and I’ve spoken with quite a few. You this morning about where you are in the conceive phase, or to the second phase, which is the design phase, right? We’ve you’ve conceived of an idea of, how do we fix this? And we’ve now designed a capability, and then we’ve got to build that capability out. And that’s number three build. And then number four is launch it, because a space capability doesn’t do a lot of good if it’s not in space. I think that’s probably why you’re here, right? So, so we’re kind of missing number four, and traditionally, we’ve used other countries to launch our military capabilities into space in 2025 I would argue that we’re going to have a really hard time doing that with our future military capabilities.
The geopolitical situation isn’t what it was 10, 15, 20 years ago. It’s not what it was 10 months ago. And as we look at that as a nation, one of the things that we have to consider is, how do we generate that sovereign or nationally separable capability to allow us to fulfill that step in the value chain? Because then you get to launch, and you launch from a sovereign site with sovereign capabilities, and put sovereign assets to defend and protect the citizens of this country, and I think that’s important. And then once something’s in space, you gotta operate it. And I think we’ve got a long history of that. There’s a few organizations and companies across this country who’ve done that for a long time. And then we talk about maintaining right? It’s not just TT&C (Telemetry, Tracking, and Command) and station keeping. It is, can I refuel? Can I maneuver without regret? Can I de orbit on demand, to clean up space a little bit? Those are three things I think about a lot as I look at future space operations from a military perspective, it is really expensive to build high end capability to go into space. It is less expensive to create a box full of fuel and go up and figure out how to refuel that. It’s there’s, again, I’m not the rocket scientist that proved that in the early story, there’s some significant physics and math involved in that, and I applaud you for working on that problem. But it is certainly cheaper than trying to develop an entire new bespoke national capability, or national technical needs. And so we need to think through that maintenance piece. And maybe that maintenance piece is on demand, and maybe that is part of that resilience where, hey, I have a failing satellite, and I can launch something quickly to go fix it.
Notice I said the word launch something quickly and not have to wait in line in an already overburdened launch schedule in another part of this continent to put something into space. So I am concerned about that. And then we talk about the the repair or recover or re orbit. We talked about that. And then the last piece is learn. And how do what do we learn from that value chain to get us back to the conceive phase, to build that cycle again? And so, you know, I think we’re missing two or three things out of that, but one of the fundamental things I think we’re missing as a nation is an ability to be responsive in launching which gives us resilience as a nation, and that resilience piece is incredibly important, and I can’t I can’t stress it enough, the work that you are all working on to create space ports or launch vehicles or TT&C ground infrastructure, or the science behind how do we do space control operations by a different name, is what’s going to set Canada apart in the future.
We have had an incredible history as a space faring nation. We have developed technology for 40, going on 50 years that has enabled us to have communications across this country and put sub orbital rockets up for decades. And we’re in a position now, I would argue, to be back there and not like back with 1970s technology. There’s a few people in the room who I’ve operated with in uniform who flew 1960s and 70s technologies. Hey, Colin, I’d really like to not fly 1960s and 70s technology tomorrow, but the leading edge work that is being done right now in the Canadian Space ecosystem is actually enabling us to leapfrog some of our allies and partners globally, and I think that continued investment in the space sector will allow us to accelerate that forward.
There are lots of folks that are going to talk to you today about different aspects of policy or regulation. Or investment and what that means, and what that has meant from different partner nations. What I can tell you is that we are truly at a launch point for the future of Canada, and I’m incredibly, incredibly honoured to be here, to be part of this conversation, because as I go back to, you know, being that kid who accidentally lit his neighbor’s house on fire, the excitement of watching a rocket launch from this country will bring me back the capability that will deliver as a nation will increase our sovereignty, our security and our economic prosperity, and I fundamentally believe that, and so it is a daunting task.
There was once a time when when Canada didn’t have airports and we didn’t have airplanes, and we decided, hey, this is a big country, we should probably be able to move people easier than the train. Some crazy people built these airplane things that you get in and you fly and it’s faster, and you land on these strips of grass that they call airports or aerodromes. We are there. We are 100 years ago, and moving that forward now in space, we’re on the precipice of spaceport capability. We’re on the precipice of sovereign ITAR free launch capability, and we are at the precipice of unlocking a 40 or $50 billion space economy over the next 50 years. And I fundamentally believe that. And so I know I have, there’s a clock ticking down, and I think that’s my remaining time. And so I’m conscious of that, either that or we should all run away in 13 minutes. But I did. I know Rahul wanted me to leave a little bit of time for questions. And so with 13 minutes to go, I just want to say one thing, and then I’ll turn to questions. None of this is possible for the future of this nation without your work.
And the struggle part is hard. The struggle part is because we are creating things from whole cloth that we’ve never done before as a nation. The struggle will be hard from understanding and breaking through regulatory frameworks. And I know my Transport Canada friends are here somewhere. They are doing the lion’s share that they are right there. They are doing epic work to accelerate that. There are engineering students who I’ve met who are creating capabilities that we never conceived of before that will be the next generations of engineers and leaders. And so where are the engineering students who are here? There’s like a half dozen of you, amazing. Keep doing the hard work, failed engineer, failed rocket scientist, crazy lunatic, space warfighter. It all works out in the end, and with that, everything you do is important. This is going to be really big for this country, and I can feel it, and I love it, and I love what you do. So thank you for doing what you do, and I’m happy to take your questions.
