Canada has committed C$15 million to a Montréal project by Xona Space Systems Canada, Inc., backing domestic satellite production as it seeks more resilient navigation and timing services.
Industry Minister Mélanie Joly announced the Strategic Response Fund support Oct. 20. The government put the project’s cost at C$64.8 million and forecast about 126 skilled jobs. The funding will support a planned center for space systems development, manufacturing and mission operations.
The center is intended to add manufacturing, mission control and testing capacity for Pulsar, Xona’s planned navigation service. Pulsar is designed to provide positioning and timing data from low Earth orbit alongside established systems such as GPS and Galileo. The government said the facility would help Xona expand Pulsar and bring the service to market.
Canada’s Positioning, Navigation and Timing Resilience Framework sets out the policy concern behind such projects. It identifies jamming and spoofing of satellite signals, along with reliance on navigation systems operated outside Canada, as vulnerabilities. The framework identifies dual-use space-based navigation and better Arctic coverage as areas of focus.
Canada’s Defence Industrial Strategy describes unpredictable demand as an obstacle to domestic defense investment and identifies the Strategic Response Fund as a way to support strategic sectors. The government says the Xona project has both commercial and national security applications.
Xona outlined its Montréal expansion Oct. 7, saying it would add 35,000 square feet of manufacturing and mission operations space. The company opened an office in the city in 2024 and said the expanded site would complement spacecraft production in Burlingame, California.
Six Xona spacecraft were listed on SpaceX’s Bandwagon-5 mission manifest. The mission launched from Florida Oct. 20 at 7:04 a.m. EDT (11:04 UTC), and Spaceflight Now reported that all customer payloads were deployed. Xona says it aims to increase production capacity in Burlingame by the end of 2027.
