The Canadian Space Agency 2025–26 Departmental Plan is now available and shows that planned spending will hit a record level at $834M and next year could surpass it, before possibly falling again.
Although NASA’s budget could see an unprecedented cut and the Artemis program is facing changes, including the possible end of the Lunar Gateway, the Canadian Space Agency is sticking to its lunar ambitions. NASA’s budget is not final with Congress weighing options on how to save programs from the worst of the proposed White House cuts.
Departmental Plan – Planned spending
Planned spending for the current fiscal year is set at $834,080,831 of which $778,010,952 is allocated to Canada in Space, the its core responsibility.
The balance of the budget, $56,069,879, is allocated to internal services which includes full-time equivalent (FTE) staff. FTE’s will climb to 1044.3, a 9.3% increase over the previous year. The CSA states that “the variations from 2022-23 to 2027–28 are primarily due to an increase in personnel to support the implementation of expanded activities under the Canadian space program.” Most of those expanded activities are for its Moon program.
The CSA provided a “snapshot of some of the CSA’s upcoming plans,” listed below, which nothing we hadn’t know about.
- Development of Canada’s contribution to the Gateway space station, Canadarm3, will continue. The CSA will also prepare to receive Canada’s portion of the sample from the asteroid Bennu, which was brought to Earth on the OSIRIS-REx mission and will be made available to Canadian researchers.
- Two Canadian astronauts will continue to prepare for upcoming space missions. Joshua Kutryk is preparing to fly to the International Space Station (ISS), marking Canada’s fourth astronaut long-duration mission to the ISS. Jeremy Hansen continues his training as part of the Artemis II mission, the first crewed mission of the Artemis campaign.
- Building on the successful legacy of the RADARSAT Constellation Mission (RCM) and RADARSAT-2, the CSA will advance the RADARSAT+ initiative to ensure the future availability of Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) imagery data to government departments and public users. To assist with the monitoring of wildland fire events, the CSA will continue with the development of the WildFireSat mission.
- To fuel innovation and prosperity in Canada’s space industry, the Space Technology Development Program will fund company-led opportunities for the development of future technologies, while the smartEarth initiative will advance satellite data solutions to help solve key challenges on Earth. To prepare and inspire the next generation of space professionals, the CSA will support multiple opportunities, including the CubeSats Initiative in Canada for STEM (CUBICS), the stratospheric balloon campaign (STRATOS), and the Flights and Fieldwork for the Advancement of Science and Technology (FAST) initiative.
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