On some brilliant summer day, in the not-too-distant future, you might find me rusticating on the back deck of my ancestral home, which overlooks Chedabucto Bay on the far eastern shore of Guysborough County, Nova Scotia.
There, I will hoist a late-afternoon drink, cast my eyes toward the town of Canso and count down to what my wife and I will have dubbed ‘the greatest show on earth’. 10-9-8-7-6-5-4-3-2-1. “Honey, be quick,” I will bark. “You’re going to miss it, again.”
My beloved will rush from the kitchen, a glass of wine in hand, and settle into a lawn chair – one of several we’ve dubbed ‘pods’. There, above the rolling hills of Tor Bay, about 100 kilometers due north, a rocket carrying orbital satellites – and even, perhaps, the odd, impossibly wealthy cosmic tourist – will rise into the firmament.
Welcome to the new space race, Nova Scotia-style. According to a CBC report last week, “Nova Scotia is familiar with launching ships, but never quite like this. The province could soon be the site of a $148-million rocket spaceport that will be used to launch commercial satellites into space as early as 2020. On Tuesday, Maritime Launch Services confirmed plans to build the facility near Canso and begin construction within one year.
“The Halifax-based company, which is a joint venture of three U.S.-based firms, hopes to launch eight rockets annually by 2022. The facility would launch rockets with 3,350-kg payloads on a due south trajectory at a cost of $60 million.
The site would include a launch pad and a processing building, as well as a control centre positioned about three kilometres away. The total cost to establish the spaceport, launch the first rocket and promote the facility will be $304 million, said John Isella, CEO of Maritime Launch Services.”
Naturally, this is not the first time stargazing capitalists have turned their attention to this part of Canada’s East Coast as the next home of the putative ‘great frontier’. Some years ago, NASA seriously considered northern Cape Breton as an ancillary location for one of its launch pads into the great wide open. Then again, in 2016, tens-of-thousands of well-heeled Americans seriously considered the Canadian Maritimes as their final hope for escape from the looming threat of the Donald Trump administration. So, if nothing else, there is some sort of synchronicity to all of this – if only for writers of science fiction and dystopian political novels.
Still, I digress. Should a spaceport find its way to the craggy, windswept shores of Stan Rogers’s country, I will do what any good Guysborough boy would: check my property and ascertain how, exactly, I can cash in.
Shall I turn my large, rural home into an Air B&B, catering exclusively to Swiss, German and Saudi techno-junkies? Shall I buy a fleet of limos with which to ‘uber’ my customers to their various look-off points?
Shall I transform my property – all 90 acres of it – into a version of Burning Man, where electronic music aficionados, unreconstructed hippies from bygone epochs and creatively mad artistes set fire to effigies of social inequity timed perfectly with the launch codes of distant rockets?
Or shall I sell the whole shebang to the highest bidder under the solid-fuel-burning arrows arching into the summer sky?
On some brilliant summer day, in the not-too-distant future, you might find me finishing my drink as I watch a spear of human ambition penetrate the clouds. My wife will have handed me the morning mail.
“What’s this?” I will query.
She will reply: “It’s the new property tax assessment”.
The Bruce Scribes 