Canada Is Building a Surveillance Network in Space |
Deep in the forests of Algonquin Provincial Park, a few hours north of Toronto, sits a metal monster. Like the iron giant of British poet Ted Hughes’s fable, it, too, has come back to life, reassembled. Hughes’s creation saves the planet. What’s this one’s mission?
Our iron giant is a deep space radio telescope, with an antenna dish measuring forty-six metres across, the largest instrument of its kind in Canada. Starting in the 1960s, the Algonquin Radio Observatory performed a number of cutting-edge scientific projects, including joining the search for extraterrestrial intelligence’s early efforts, in the 1970s and 1980s, to find signatures of alien life—spectrum emissions from water molecules, artificial transmitter signals. No luck.
Then the ARO fell on hard times—budget cutbacks, advances in telescope technology, aged and failing equipment. Canada’s iron giant was mothballed by its operator, the National Research Council, in 1987. There it sat, silent, rusting, for two decades.
The radio telescope was leased to a scientist and entrepreneur, Brendan Quine, in 2007. Quine had come to Canada after his PhD at Oxford and helped establish a space engineering program at Toronto’s York University. To pursue more experimental and commercially ambitious projects, he co-founded Thoth Technology in 2001 and later spun off an affiliate, ThothX.
Thoth, Quine reminded me, was an Egyptian deity of wisdom. X? Elon Musk, of course. Musk has built his rocket enterprise, SpaceX, and his social media company, ex-Twitter, now X, into world-leading enterprises. Quine has similar ambitions—what he half-jokingly calls his “world domination plan.”
But first he had to resurrect the iron giant. He fixed the broken windows of the control station, installed new electronics, and secured the perimeter against bears. Then he had to give the instrument a new purpose. What Quine ultimately hit on speaks to our threatened times, severe geopolitical tensions, and our accelerating dependence on space platforms for critical services, including telecommunications and navigation.
Using ARO, ThothX can detect one-metre-long objects in orbit at a distance of 100,000 kilometres—about a quarter of the way to the moon. And it can do it in any weather, day or night, at a fraction of the cost of traditional systems. In military nomenclature, the objective is “space domain awareness.” SDA goes beyond tracking satellites; it’s the work of figuring out what’s out there, what it’s for, and whether it poses a threat. The threats are many: space debris, potential collisions between satellites, or deliberate attacks by hostile nations. As long ago as 2011, the Pentagon and the United States director of national intelligence laid down a warning. “Space,” they said, “is becoming increasingly congested, contested and competitive.” Fifteen years later, the alarm has grown.
To understand why, it helps to remember that the heavens were once divided between two powers: the US and the Soviet Union. But geopolitics is never static. The People’s Republic of China is now the third-ranking space power and likely to challenge US military and scientific dominance. Post–Cold War, many more nations became spacefaring. At the turn of the twenty-first century, they numbered fourteen. The ranks have since swelled to ninety-one. The top ten all have fifty or more satellites circling the planet. Canada makes the list at number nine.
The competition isn’t just confined to nations. The private sector has also raced into space. Starlink alone has launched an estimated 9,357 satellites to build “mega-constellations” that deliver telecommunications services to the planet. It has plans for as many as 42,000. Multiply that by rival networks from China and Europe. Yet there is no binding international law requiring operators to disclose the location of their spacecraft, and most do not carry beacons or other tracking devices. The result is a rapidly crowded domain, packed with infrastructure whose precise movements aren’t always known.
It’s into this teeming sky that ThothX peers. The iron giant has been given brothers, too: spread across the globe, using radar beams to ping........