Spar hopes to establish a long-term strategic alliance with China Aerospace Corporation(CASC) toward the next century. This was reiterated by J. C. Mackay, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Spar Space Systems, when he met April 4 with Bai Baier, Vice President of CASC.
During the meeting Spar briefed their Chinese counterparts on the status of Radarsat-1, launched last November aboard Delta-2 rocket: the satellite, with Synthetic Aperture Radar(SAR) as its principal instrument, has just finished its commissioning phase and been declared operational by its user, the Canadian Space Agency (CSA). The quality of the images it generates exceeds their specifications with the highest resolution of 7 meters, 3 meters sharper than designed. At present Spar is preparing to start building Radarsat-2, slated for launch in 2002, which, according to Spar's analysis, shares many similarities with the Chinese Radarsat to be constructed in the near future. Unlike its predecessor, Radarsat-2 is going to be privately owned and operated by a to-be-established company with Spar being one of the largest shareholders. With the experience of Radarsat-1, if Spar and CASC could join hands in building the two Radarsats for each country, cost and risks would be substantially reduced, and once operational, the two satellites could work as back-up in orbit and generate data much faster. This also would be one of the selling-points for the images. In addition, the Export Development Corporation of the Canadian Government is willing to support by granting favorable loans to this project.
Bai welcomed the proposal and responded that the advantages CASC enjoys are satellite bus and launch vehicle, while Spar is strong in payload; therefore, the two companies may well complement each other. Right now China is considering to select a partner to build the Chinese Radarsat to be used mainly for disaster-mitigation purposes, but the whole program cannot start until the Government approves it. And Spar is certainly among one of the most important candidates.
Spar added that though the base-line choice lies with the American rocket, this does not exclude the possibility of employing Long March launcher to lift Radarsat-2 because its privately-owned nature. Spar also has studied with the Great Wall Corp. the possibility of launching a small science satellite as piggyback between 1998 and 2000.