Nova Scotia space company falls short of suborbital goal

Less than a week after Canadian space company Maritime Launch announced a successful suborbital rocket demonstration in Little Dover, N.S., CEO Stephen Matier said in an interview with The Signal that the rocket did not reach suborbit.

The rocket, dubbed Barracuda, was produced by T-Minus Engineering in the Netherlands and is meant to reach an altitude of around 120 kilometres.

Suborbital “refers to a flight trajectory that reaches outer space, typically above 100 kilometres altitude (known as the Kármán line),” wrote the Canadian Space Agency.

“For Maritime Launch, it was completely successful without a doubt,” Matier said in the interview. “For our colleagues at T-Minus Engineering … I think they hoped that it would actually reach the Kármán line, but it didn’t. And I think they’re looking back at their data, trying to figure out how high it went and why it didn’t.”

But Matier presented a different definition for suborbital: “The defining difference is orbital versus suborbital,” he said.

“If it’s orbital, clearly it’s not coming back down, right? It’s going to stay in orbit, until such a time that it degrades its orbit and burns up on re-entry … And that’s the defining difference. Technically … a bottle rocket is a suborbital vehicle in a very crude way.”

A suborbital launch is different than suborbital spaceflight, said Robin Metcalfe, director and associate professor in the division of natural science at York University, who noted that, “(The Barracuda launch) was an intended suborbital launch, meaning that the rocket was actually designed and given enough propellant and all that to actually get to that altitude.”

Metier said he did not know how high the rocket, launched from Maritime Launch’s spaceport near Canso, actually went. Barracuda landed in the ocean. The rocket is a single-stage, solid-fuel suborbital vehicle about four metres tall.

“Our team has just returned from Canada, and we will be analyzing the flight data in detail once they have recovered from the jet lag,” Roel Eerkens, co-founder of T-Minus Engineering, wrote The Signal in an email.

“But from my point of view,” said Matier, “it did everything it was supposed to do, and we learned a large amount, you know, a huge amount of information for future launches.”

“(The launch is) that preliminary step that shows that this is going to work, even if the launch was not completely successful … It’s really about team building,” he said.

He said there are plans for T-Minus Engineering to launch again in the spring.