Later today, St. Francis Xavier University will sign a memorandum of understanding with Maritime Launch Services. For a company with some disreputable partners, and which is still searching high and low for investors to bankroll its proposed spaceport in Canso, to be hooking up with a reputable Canadian university looks like quite a PR coup...
Ukrainian corruption and the Canso spaceport
Morning File, Tuesday, November 12, 2019
November subscription drive I was going to write a long thing this morning in support of our subscription drive, but got pulled away trying to make sense of the Ukrainian space industry. So I’ll keep it short. We need your money. Thanks. News 1. Waiting for Fitch “Bob Dylan didn’t need a weatherman to know […]
Maritime Launch Services and its private/public servants
One government bureaucrat sent a nasty email to a CBC reporter. Others had rude things to say about the Halifax Examiner. And Stephen McNeil met with MLS and it Ukrainian "partners" even though they aren't registered as lobbyists.
It’s not the first time I’ve waded through many hundreds of pages of correspondence released by a government under a FOIPOP (Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy) request, but it is the first time that reading the correspondence made me feel slightly queasy, like a voyeur witnessing unhealthy relationships developing between uncritical and subservient […]
The cruise ship industry disses the Yarmouth ferry
Morning File, Monday, August 19, 2019
News 1. Health care photo ops “So last week, 10 out of 37 hospital emergency departments in Nova Scotia were closed for at least some part of the week,” writes Stephen Kimber: While our healthcare crises multiply, our leaders stage photo opportunities that resemble trying to slap Band-Aids on the backsides of rampaging elephants. Whatever […]
Halifax CAO Jacques Dubé is raising money for charity; this is a problem
Morning File, Tuesday, August 6, 2019
News 1. Spaceport “I hadn’t even made it into Canso when I happened upon the first person willing and eager to speak her mind on the proposed spaceport that Maritime Launch Services wants to construct in the picturesque community at the very end of Highway 16,” writes Joan Baxter: In a charming restaurant a few […]
Opposition to Canso spaceport grows
“The government of Nova Scotia and the government of Canada are partnering with a dubious, nearly-bankrupt Ukrainian company using Cold-war technology," says Michael Byers, an expert in space law.
I hadn’t even made it into Canso when I happened upon the first person willing and eager to speak her mind on the proposed spaceport that Maritime Launch Services wants to construct in the picturesque community at the very end of Highway 16, an area that boasts spectacular coastline, one ocean-side provincial park and another […]
A mega development on Lake Banook shows that the Centre Plan is a cruel joke
Morning File, Wednesday, April 10, 2019
News 1. Mercury, Canso Chemicals, Northern Pulp Mill Facilities associated with Northern Pulp Mill’s proposed effluent pipe are immediately adjacent to a mercury-contaminated toxic waste site left over from the Canso Chemicals operation. Joan Baxter explains: The Canso Chemicals plant opened in 1970, and for the next 22 years used large amounts of mercury to […]